Curse Augments in LoL Arena have been disabled for the holidays

League of Legends saw the reintroduction of the enormously popular Arena mode on Dec. 7 with Patch 13.24 a day before. Players are once again enjoying deathmatch gameplay, but Riot is disabling one type of Augment for the Christmas break.

On Dec. 14, Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, the lead gameplay designer for League, announced on X that the team is disabling Curses in the Arena for the holidays. While he acknowledged they are regularly picked on certain champions, he gave two valid reasons why Riot decided to go in this direction.

“Curses are proving to be popular, fun options. They allow champs to high roll strategically and play for late game in an intuitive and satisfying way. It’s the type of augment that we think has potential long term,” Leung-Harrison explained. But, it wasn’t enough to keep Curse Augments over the holiday break.

The developer believes Curses are too powerful on a few specific champions. But, at the same time, on average they have the lowest placements, meaning they’re just a bit too unbalanced. “Ideally we’d want these ones to be a little more broad [in terms of popularity],” he wrote.

On top of that, Phroxzon dove into the details of Curses mechanics, especially how they aim to stall out fights in order to maximize stacks. While it proves to be a strong strategy on champions that pick these type of Augments, Riot doesn’t like this type of gameplay “too much.”

There are five Augments with Curse effects, and these are Dark Blessing, Deathtouch, Desecrator, Doomsayer, and Plaguebearer. The effect allows players to gain stacks by attacking enemies, and these stacks have different effects. For example, Plaguebearer allows you to gain a permanent one bonus health every second for each stack inflicted on targets.

Those who have played Arena since Dec. 7 might have realized some champions rely on these effects too much. Luckily, with dozens of other Augments in the mode, in the end, we shouldn’t feel the impact of disabling Curses too much during our holiday games.