The Bilgewater ARAM event brought a slew of new changes for the game mode, but now that the event has wrapped up, Riot Games has reverted many of the changes—even some of the most popular changes across the League of Legends community. In today’s developer update, Riot listed what changes have stayed and why many of the fan-favorites have been removed from the game mode moving forward.
Easily the most popular of the ARAM changes, champion bans have been removed from the game mode to prevent targeting toward a specific group of champions. Poke mages like Brand, Lux, and Veigar were often perma-banned, and as Riot explains, the bans brought a decrease in champion diversity and removed the “chill” environment that ARAM provided casual players.
Related: The League community wants ARAM bans to return
Instead, the League developer will maintain its balance changes introduced with the event to help counteract the natural strength of poke mages. Additionally, Riot plans on keeping the built-in poke reduction, which reduces damage from long-range enemies that’s over 1,000 units away by 15 percent.
While some of the experimental items, like Mariner’s Vengeance and Ghostwalkers, introduced a unique and fun playstyle to Butcher’s Bridge, Riot removed the items to protect the long-term health of ARAM. The items need clarification and improvement to avoid “odd interactions” between certain champions before they can return to the game mode.
Similarly, Backtrack served as a new way to engage in a fight and quickly get back out. Many champions took advantage of this, however, and champions like Kog’Maw and Brand held the highest winrate with the summoner spell. Riot decided to drop the spell from the game mode but may reintroduce it with corrections for ranged champions.
With the release of the Bilgewater event, Riot introduced a few additional changes to minion spawns as a way to shorten the time on games that extended past 25 minutes. The changes worked a little too well, however, and the League developer has since reduced minion speed past 15 minutes and removed tower strength both in the early and late game.
