/dev: Augmentmaxxing ARAM: Mayhem

Hey fellow gamers! Like we talked about in today’s Dev Update, tons of you have been loving ARAM: Mayhem and we have some pretty sweet changes releasing with Season 2 Act 2 in Patch 26.12.

Traits

First up, let's talk about changes to Traits!

We want to keep Mayhem feeling fresh and exciting, with rotating and evolving systems and content that help differentiate each major update. In this past season we introduced Traits, but with our next update we will be phasing Traits out to make room for other fun systems which we'll touch on later in this article. Traits were successful in many ways, but we also learned a lot and we will be applying those learnings to our next update.

When designing Traits, we wanted a system that would: (1) feel fresh, (2) add additional depth to selecting Augments, (3) help you find rare and exciting combinations of Augments, and (4) help folks who didn’t fully understand Augments put together strong combinations.

Some unexpected outcomes we saw as a result of the Trait system were:

• Homogenized Builds: Different Augment choices resulted in the same “experiential fantasy,” which is a fancy term for how we describe a champion’s gameplay aspirations. For example, taking any Augment in the “Firecracker” Trait set often resulted in a very similar experiential fantasy: expressing power by firing a bunch of firecrackers at the enemy.
• Homogenized Game Experience: In any given game, because there were so many different Augments available to achieve “bombard them with firecrackers,” we saw overall game variance go down, as it would be fairly likely that at least one of the ten players in the game would roll and select one of the Firecracker Trait Augments. This led to games feeling a bit too similar to one another when we intend for every game of Mayhem to feel like a blank canvas to innovate your builds and playstyles.
• Traits Outshined Champions: The Trait system was at a level of power and impact that it often felt like you were picking an Augment for the Trait effect and not to augment your champion. We describe Mayhem as a “champion-first” mode, meaning that Augments should serve to enhance the feel of playing your specific champion rather than being a means to achieve a universally-strong Trait effect.
• Individually Underwhelming Augments: Due to a significant amount of power being locked behind Trait effects, it led to individual Augment selections to feel less exciting and impactful on their own. At its core, Augments are a big part of Mayhem’s, well, mayhem, and we want each Augment selection to feel rewarding rather than weak due to their lack of a Trait or underwhelming individual effects.

We know how many of you love some of these Traits, so we’re reintroducing some of them as standalone Augments. For example, we know a lot of you really love the powerful late-game scaling potential of the Stackasaurus Trait, though it can be frustrating when you get one Augment but not the second required to complete the Trait bonus. Now, Stackasaurus is a standalone Augment that will immediately unlock your stack-scaling potential.

On the Mayhem team, one of our goals is to continually experiment with fun and interactive new systems with purposeful improvements to gameplay. We learned a ton through our first seasonal mechanic, and we’re keen to take those learnings and keep ARAM: Mayhem feeling fresh through new ones.With each update, we want Mayhem to strike the balance of feeling fresh without new mechanics feeling forced or needlessly complex. You can expect us to continue exploring new systems and we value your feedback immensely as we look into new directions and possibilities!

Augments

And, of course, what’s a Mayhem update without more Augments. This update, our primary goal was to hone in on the kinds of Augments that enhance champion fantasy.

What we’ve learned is that Augments that provide the same effect across the board, like Bounce of the Poro King for example, are really fun, but can start to get stale over time as they don’t interact in exciting new ways with different champions. Those types of Augments aren’t going away, but we want more of our Augments to directly enhance your champion fantasy.

We also believe that some Augments should feel like they’re worth building around. Many of Mayhem’s most fun games are when your build starts to come together with a real identity. Up to this point, many of our Augments haven’t pushed toward that, so we’re doubling down on Augments that give real structure to your game plan and build this season. Rather than being locked in on a certain path, we want each of your games to feel meaningfully different from the last, even if you’re on the same champ.

So, that’s how we arrived at this being the perfect time for us to take a big stab at expanding the kinds of Augments we can offer. We’re especially focused on making them feel like they’re enhancing your core champion fantasies, so take them for a spin and let us know how they feel!

Ability Augments

First, let’s take a look at an entirely new class of Augments: Ability Augments!

We looked at the most requested Augments across the Mayhem community and found a great deal of interest in ones that impact a single ability or gameplay pattern of a given champion. Bread And Butter, which grants 100 ability haste to a champion’s Q ability, is a perfect example of an Augment that you all have enjoyed as a way to modify your champion’s abilities. We wanted to take that concept, but crank up the mayhem factor a bit. 

Ability Augments are those that significantly enhance a single ability for a champion, providing the opportunity for a gameplay experience completely different from that of the champion originally.

Take Multishot, one of our new Ability Augments. On ability cast, you’ll fire additional spell bolts at up to two enemies in front of you. If you get this on Lux’s Q, you can snare the entire enemy team in one Light Binding!

Or Chain Reaction: If you manage to knock up an enemy champion and they collide with another enemy champion, both get knocked up and take damage, or if they collide with terrain they’re knocked up for EVEN longer and take EVEN more damage. 

We’re exploring a fairly wide range of what we can do here, and we’re excited to continue exploring this design space.

Quest Augments

The other kind of Augment we’re focusing on is Quest Augments. We have a few already, like Quest: Steel Your Heart and Quest: Urf’s Champion, and we’re adding more to the mix to provide rewards that feel meaningful for different champions. 

One of our new Quest Augments is Quest: Tooth Fairy. With this Augment, dealing a chunk of damage within a short window to an enemy champion will cause them to drop a tooth, granting Lethality and Magic Pen for every tooth you’ve extracted. Take this one and send your worst enemies to the dentist! 

Another of these is Quest: Support Main, for all you people of culture out there. Heal or Shield your allies to complete this quest and you’ll start granting your teammates additional Health Regen as a percentage of the value of your Heal or Shield on them. Who needs Warmog’s in a game where you have a trusty support main by your side?

But Those Don’t Seem Balanced?!

Now, some of you may look at these and say “Hey, these aren’t particularly balanced!” And we would agree! On that note, we want to have a quick heart-to-heart with you all about our balance philosophy. 

First and foremost, our goal is to keep ARAM: Mayhem a place that’s always fun and fresh, and with that, we want certain conditions to be able to line up to lead to a fun experience. We view game balance and tuning as a means to achieve a fun experience, rather than a strict state to maintain.

However, we still want the game to feel fair at a high level. Here are the core tenets that we check against in order to maintain a fair game:

• Every champion should feel as though they have a strong build to aim for.
• No champion should feel as though they always achieve a strong build.
• Strong builds shouldn’t be the sole determinant in achieving victory (you having a strong build won’t instantly win the game for you, and the enemy having a strong build won’t instantly lose you the game.

We want to go about achieving a fun and fresh experience in a few different ways. First, we’ll be rotating out Augments that break this experience more often. For example, if we find that melee champs are hard to find success with because enemies are too fast, we’ll take a look at the amount of movespeed being offered by Augments and may tweak or remove one here or there. 

Another tool at our disposal is adding new Augments, that way we can support classes of champions that feel underserved by the current Augment offering. We’ll also do numbers adjustments when deemed necessary, especially to help bring up the bottom end of worse-performing Augments. There may be cases where numbers are a bit too high, like how Grandma’s Chili Oil healed too much, but we generally want to avoid nerfing numbers so we don’t end up in a cycle of “strongest thing gets nerfed” every time.

Future Mayhem 

For those antsy about whether they’ll get to continue wreaking mayhem in the future, rest assured. Even beyond this update, we’re already talking about future content for this year and next.

Thank you so much for playing Mayhem everyone. We love making this game for you and alongside you. It’s a pleasure to work with such a great community on a game we all love. Looking forward to making the most Mayhem ever!