Why is Hammer banned but oppressive monsters like Chromie, Stitches, and Azmodan not?
It’s honestly ridiculous and stupid and they even pretend to balance it at all for how one-sided matches can be anyway.
Edit: For the record before anyone chimes in, I’m not calling to ban the three heroes above. My philosophy is and always has been that ARAM isn’t supposed to be balanced at all. All Random All Mid is chaos; that’s the point.
Or at the very least, have bans that make sense. Just about every infinite stacking talent and globe talent is broken in ARAM, which is part of the fun.
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Chromie and azmodan have been banned in aram in previous iterations. When they had reworks that shifted their numbers, they were added back to the mode. While they have range, their relative damage potential, especially for sieging is limited.
Some of the concerns people express are based on levels and spell combinations that are comparable to other heroes, however, it’s easier to blame single-shots like Azmo as being a ‘big deal’ because it’s just one number.
Hammer, on the other hand, deals numbers that exceed 2 - 3 other hero pick combineds in her structural opportunity. In strategic gameplay, there’s other options for dealing with her, but in a small single-laned map, multiple hammer picks is significantly more oppressive to deal with with limited hero selections.
Similar player reports from years ago have also expressed that it isn’t fun to play with hammer due to the dynamics her range has on the gameplay.
Select quests can seem outstanding, but most comparisons make in aram to hammer are thresholds below her performance.
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Chromie isn’t great at sieging pre-18 but Azmo? That’s a siege queen honey.
Because globe has a very large radius on a very narrow map, and sometimes it’s difficult to see the graphic with all the ground clutter in one spot. It’s also by far the safest ability in game to use.
It’s not a big deal in other modes because they’re not narrow 1-lane maps. This also makes it effortless to stack Gluttony, and that “one big number” can shave off 80% of the health of a squishier hero (including certain healers like WM).
Anyway bring back Hammer or delete Azmo. It’s nonsense to have Azmo in but Hammer removed.
The capacity for you to ignore the reasons given doesn’t make your demand more compelling.
It’d be nice if you were more literate before spouting that is “nonsense” when you toss sense out of what little effort you put into this.
What makes azmo decent at siege is his summons; Q shots are otherwise terrible at it and take considerably longer than other mages to sweep lanes, let alone take structures. A decent azmo can end the game well before the quest is done because Q is superficial for the early game.
Hammer is a threat the whole time, and not when people decide to start paying attention to crit tickers.
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As someone who does remember when Hammer was banned, I do very much remember that Hammer was a polarizing figure within ARAM. If she was on the team, you would win hard or lose hard. If there are no counters on the enemy team, there’s really not much you can do against a hammer in the back line.
A Chromie or Ming on the enemy team, however, was absolutely devastating to Hammer and she became largely useless. Even Stitches was a very large threat against her.
Even so, I would still argue against saying Chromie, Azmo, and Stitches are just as oppressive. In ARAM, I don’t have to try hard to get top damage as Chromie. Azmodan does require build up, but by end game he is absolutely oppressive. Stitches… is just stupid because of his globe talent at level one that makes him not only fast but nigh unkillable.
For me again, it’s just not gonna be possible to get rid of all unfun win states. There’s always going to be an unbalanced team and smurf trolls who make the system unfun.
The more they ban (Heros and Abilities) the less fun the mode becomes. After they ban those 3, what is next? People will keep complaining that certain heros or abilities are unfair, eventually everything gets banned.
You can find something ban-able with almost every hero because someone out there doesn’t understand how the hero works or how they might counter play it. Teamate quality is typically the determining factor in counter play, but that is almost incontrollable as you have people playing with different experience and skill lvl.
Match making could use more development, but that is for another topic.
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Hammer has a bigger, harder to ignore impact and presence on a single laned map than Azmo and Chromie.
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This. If you think current Chromie and Azmodan are oppressive in ARAM, you have not played when they were truly busted for a single lane map (Azmo with his old +50% speed orb and Taste for Blood quest, Chromie with infinitely scaling Sand Blast damage and gigantic Dragon’s Breath nukes).
They are a nuisance at best in their current form, no longer oppressive.
Hammer deserves her ban. She isn’t fit for a single lane map especially if the game rolls the other team melee heroes that have zero way of getting at her if she has a pocket healer.
Such a game quickly becomes Hammer bulldozing her way to the enemy core from ultra long distance while the enemy sits in the fountain waiting for the game to end. It’s not fun.
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