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My first ARAM in a week - and I won't be going back

Ultimate Veigar··15 votes·1,103 views

So after boycotting Mark/Dash for a week, I decided to go back to the murder bridge and see how things were going. The queue was just as short as always, which I was hoping it would be a bit longer with the amount of backlash that has been on the forums.

My team: Anivia Zyra XinZhaosummoner 32 Nidaleesummoner 32 Caitlyn Their team: Chogathsummoner 32 Cassiopeia Zedsummoner 32 Xerath Sorakasummoner 32

Two people on my team chose Mark, and 3 on the other. I was hoping for 0/0, but this still seemed a lot better than 5/5.

The poke war began and lasted until the first tower was destroyed at 20:36........ TWENTY MINUTES of poke war, or as I like to call it "Nidalee dashing into the team every minute or so dying" while zed and chogath snowballed into my squishy team feasting like wolves. I believe Cho'gath said something along the lines of, "LOL Now I can just dive in and eat whoever I want!"

So instead of any sort of strategic fight, we had twenty minutes of poke, with Soraka and Nidalee healing their teams, followed by my squishy team getting destroyed by this new "gap closer" that has been given to anyone and everyone, including a high damage assassin Zed and a tank who does an insane amount of true damage with his ult Chogath, mind you both of these champions also have a fair amount of poke.

Each side has** poke** here, each side has cc, each side has heals, each side has a tank, and each side has AP and** AD damage**.

I strongly believe this match would have been MUCH more fair if Mark/Dash was not involved.

And to make matters worse, when I voiced my opinion about not liking the ability and how the match was going because of it I was told "Then don't use it" (which I wasn't) and I was told "Chill out, it's just an ARAM" and "If you want to win, go play normals"

These are the two biggest issues with the people who are "for" the ability. They think they have a strong argument with the fact that it does not have to be used, and the others do not take aram seriously at all.

I used to play ARAM everyday with my friends. I had a lot of fun with this mode, and now that part of our friendship has been taken away. The mode is absolutely nothing like what it used to be, and if you think it is then you didn't play aram enough before.

I am NOT an ARAM smurf, I have played on one account since 2011 when ARAM did not even exist. I have a lot of fun on my pokey champs as well as melee champs such as Amumu Blitzcrank Braum Fizz Garen Jax Katarina Leona Nunu Rumble Taric

All I ask is that you remove this ability and put it into it's own mode within the ARAM category. I agree that there are a lot of people who love the ability, but there are just as many of us who hate it. ARAM has turned into one of your "featured game modes" and is going to die in popularity fast with this new addition.

14 Comments

Strawberrycocoa8 votes

So you would have enjoyed the game more if Cho and Xin had been unable to get to you or your allies?

What about THEM? Do you think they would have enjoyed being of zero use to the match for twenty minutes because ARAM chose bad champs for them to play?

Mark/Dash exists because Howling Abyss has almost zero approach vectors for champions that don't have blinks and dashes. The spell was put in to make getting slotted into a slow or immobile champion not completely horribly awful, which it basically was before.

Also you have to consider that ARAM does not allow you much freedom in picking who you play. Mark/Dash means you aren't forced to just sit and suffer if you get RNGd onto a slow moving champion. Which is made extra aggravating when you start looking at all the ARAM smurfs (and yes I did see that you are not one, I am commenting in general) who have accounts solely devoted to insuring they ALWAYS get a viable champion in ARAM and cheat the system.

TL;DR: The spell's place in ARAM needs to be considered from both players perspectives, because ARAM by it's nature screws over slow champions.

It Hertz When IP4 votes

Cho actually had a decent time in Aram before the mark/Dash spell, he just had to build more CDR/AP and less tank and acted as a CC/poke guy.

Cindikle2 votes

Mark/Dash favors mobility and CC as it is. It didn't help slow champions. Because the faster ones will still preform better.

MiriaJiyuu1 votes

They always performed well, shaking a Zed is a nightmare enough, now it's worse.

Overall though I've played a few games now and I like that I can get handed a tanky melee champ and not get screwed over. Mind you I'm not someone who dashes on every snowball, but my ARAM MMR is high enough that this still hasn't been something I see consistently

Seven Macaw7 votes

I just want to add my voice to all of the others pointing out how the mark/dash snowball has broken ARAM, a mode that didn't need fixing. Some champions were bad in ARAM. That was inevitable. Well-played melee champions were already fundamental to winning in ARAM. It was not that ranged champions were destroying melee champions; it was that good team composition and solid play were rewarded. Please, Riot, remove the snowball!

Pucking Purrfect6 votes

After Mark/Dash spell Aram mode went full retard tbh. I'm not saying Mark/Dash spell made Aram unfun. The problem is now we get melee champs more than ever before. Not to mention 4-5 melee fighter/tank champs vs 4-5 ranged/squishy champs games. Something is wrong...

NoMonku3 votes

I see it as old ARAM is dead and this is want RIOT wants it to be. It was an easy fix that while not fixing all the problems, helped a few. The only thing I really dislike about the spell is that it is basically Flash now. You HAVE to take it because of how good it is and for almost ALL champions you are gimping yourself by not taking it. Every game I play everyone has mark with the only exception being a good poke champion not taking it. Also this spell changed the pace of ARAM, making it more fighting based since you can engage any time you land Mark. While it wasn't how ARAM was played before, they sort of made this shift on SR awhile back, so I can see why this got put in. It also upset the "meta" you could say because it encouraged a lot of people to stick with tanky champions that were ALREADY good, but they would RR for the chance to get a poker instead.

Juggernaut6282 votes

So you had an ally Nidalee and an enemy Nidalee that Nidalee was healing them AND feeding them?

Angry Monster2 votes

Its murder bridge, not stand around and zone bridge. Get with the fighting.

Kholdstare131 votes

QQ, meta shifted.

The fact is that the winrate curve is much flatter than before. There may be new OPs, but they are fewer and less overbearing than the old ones. Adapt, build smart, and deal with the change.

I always took summoner 3 even before this change (summoner 4 is for noobs), but now it's 20x more mandatory. You must take summoner 3. It has switched from a primarily offensive tool to a counteroffensive tool. It is the perfect counter to dash dives that lets your team secure an easy kill. It was always strong against dive before, but now dive is 20x more prevalent since everyone has access to it.

Cindikle4 votes

Meta didn't even shift.

Go to LoLKing and look at the top win/loss rates over the past day/week/month.

Not much actually changed. Sure there are champions who have changed, but the ones that were actually full on bad and the ones that were too good haven't budged much.

Mark/Dash favors reliable CC and mobility. This isn't new.

This change made champions it favors more frustrating to play verses. It didn't actually change the balance or meta hardly at all. It just made things more frustrating.

AtheosisX2 votes

{quoted}

QQ, meta shifted.

The fact is that the winrate curve is much flatter than before. There may be new OPs, but they are fewer and less overbearing than the old ones. Adapt, build smart, and deal with the change.

I always took summoner 3 even before this change (summoner 4 is for noobs), but now it's 20x more mandatory. You must take summoner 3. It has switched from a primarily offensive tool to a counteroffensive tool. It is the perfect counter to dash dives that lets your team secure an easy kill. It was always strong against dive before, but now dive is 20x more prevalent since everyone has access to it.

The point is that ARAM isn't ARAM anymore. Why can't you people get that through your heads? It's not about the spell, it's about how drastically the spell affects a long-standing game mode and how much it changes it. People who are defending this spell know nothing about ARAM or simply didn't like it before. And I'm pretty sure that the people at Riot who are behind adding the spell fall into that category. They had already illustrated that they really didn't get the mode with their addition of rerolls (the real reason for the absurd poke heavy team comps by the way), and this just makes it really clear that Riot does not get the concept of ARAM at all.

Kholdstare131 votes

{quoted}

The point is that ARAM isn't ARAM anymore. Why can't you people get that through your heads? It's not about the spell, it's about how drastically the spell affects a long-standing game mode and how much it changes it. People who are defending this spell know nothing about ARAM or simply didn't like it before. And I'm pretty sure that the people at Riot who are behind adding the spell fall into that category. They had already illustrated that they really didn't get the mode with their addition of rerolls (the real reason for the absurd poke heavy team comps by the way), and this just makes it really clear that Riot does not get the concept of ARAM at all.

When your opinion matches that of the butthurt smurfs upset because their accounts with only poke-spam unlocked are suddenly invalidated, don't expect to get far with it.

ARAM is absolutely still ARAM, and the point remains. ARAM is about the ability to take what you're given and make the most of it. That hasn't changed. All that has is the environment in which you do it. Ranged poke, particularly kiting poke, is suddenly less dominant, while melee now has the ability to engage through it. It doesn't change the random nature, it doesn't change the spirit of the game, all it changes is the relative power curve of the champions in it.

Rerolls, if anything, were made to combat poke heavy comps. Smurfs are going to have their smurf accounts and dodge anything sub-optimal. Rerolls at least give legit players a fraction of a chance to keep away from the lowest end of the champion pool. since they're guaranteed to go against the smurfs no matter what they themselves have. It's not ARAM, certainly, but it's meant to combat the poke and rampant dodging Proving Grounds had (it failed that part). It was a balancing step in the right direction, just too small of a step. Still, claiming that it worked the WRONG way further places you with the smurfs upset because their free wins are being taken away.

Of course this is not the end, and probably shouldn't have been the beginning either. The best thing to do is to open the full champion pool. Completely invalidate smurfs. I was certain they were going to do this when skin boosts were announced, but somehow they didn't. Why? How does that make sense? The selling point of skin boost type items is to allow players to deck out a champion they don't own. Free week champions aren't exactly going to hit it big there. The other big change that needs to be made is increased dodge penalty. Count it as a loss against the dodger's elo, and make dodge timers only count down while the dodger is logged in. No more account hopping to wait out timers, and no smurfy freelo by dodging anything that's not the most optimal possible stomp team.

In the absence of this, tho, summoner 32 is a good solution. It hits smurfs hard, while legit players are unaffected. All it does is change up the playstyle a bit and rebalance the pool. A neutral change to the game while being a massive positive in anti-smurf is still a heavy overall positive.

AtheosisX1 votes

{quoted}

When your opinion matches that of the butthurt smurfs upset because their accounts with only poke-spam unlocked are suddenly invalidated, don't expect to get far with it.

ARAM is absolutely still ARAM, and the point remains. ARAM is about the ability to take what you're given and make the most of it. That hasn't changed. All that has is the environment in which you do it. Ranged poke, particularly kiting poke, is suddenly less dominant, while melee now has the ability to engage through it. It doesn't change the random nature, it doesn't change the spirit of the game, all it changes is the relative power curve of the champions in it.

Rerolls, if anything, were made to combat poke heavy comps. Smurfs are going to have their smurf accounts and dodge anything sub-optimal. Rerolls at least give legit players a fraction of a chance to keep away from the lowest end of the champion pool. since they're guaranteed to go against the smurfs no matter what they themselves have. It's not ARAM, certainly, but it's meant to combat the poke and rampant dodging Proving Grounds had (it failed that part). It was a balancing step in the right direction, just too small of a step. Still, claiming that it worked the WRONG way further places you with the smurfs upset because their free wins are being taken away.

Of course this is not the end, and probably shouldn't have been the beginning either. The best thing to do is to open the full champion pool. Completely invalidate smurfs. I was certain they were going to do this when skin boosts were announced, but somehow they didn't. Why? How does that make sense? The selling point of skin boost type items is to allow players to deck out a champion they don't own. Free week champions aren't exactly going to hit it big there. The other big change that needs to be made is increased dodge penalty. Count it as a loss against the dodger's elo, and make dodge timers only count down while the dodger is logged in. No more account hopping to wait out timers, and no smurfy freelo by dodging anything that's not the most optimal possible stomp team.

In the absence of this, tho, summoner 32 is a good solution. It hits smurfs hard, while legit players are unaffected. All it does is change up the playstyle a bit and rebalance the pool. A neutral change to the game while being a massive positive in anti-smurf is still a heavy overall positive.

I agree with the full champion pool being opened up. Everything else you just said though is nonsense. This spell does nothing to balance ARAM, it just shifts it into a different area and makes it worse. Have you faced teams with multiple AOE nukes with this spell yet? It make god poke teams look like a walk in the park.

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