It could only be thought of as “mandatory” if your opponents are out-pushing you. Unfortunately there’s no concrete way of knowing if that will be the case by level 10, unless they are heavy on pve heroes.
But it is true that perhaps the most annoying thing about this game is how much influence PvE has over the outcome. This is why I prefer ARAM, myself.
But ARAM has also the problem that it favors AOE effects that team that get better aoe comp usually wins. That’s not really much different to other modes, where makro is relevant.
it is wildly different, to me. Because PvE is boring whereas blowing up a whole team with an aoe effect is fun. It’s all a game so there’s no hope for avoiding some modicum of mindlessness, but if the entire challenge is to avoid a wombo while also trying to lure your opponents into one (and when standoffs occur outpoking or outflanking them), that’s more interesting to me personally than just spamming mercs and ignoring half the objectives because winning team fights is inefficient until 16 or so - which half the games are pretty much decided by anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally understand you and ARAM is surely fun, but what I tried to say that every mode has it’s flaws. Ranked/QM favors makro, while ARAM favors aoe effects. A Mephisto or Zul’jin in ARAM is comparable to Ragnaros in QM/Ranked.
QM/Ranked isn’t just about mercs, but about combining makro and mikro and who can combine it more fluently and can make better rotations and also can pilot their hero better usually wins. Sure ARAM is more teamfight heavy, but since all are on the same lane it favors aoe effects and other non-aoe heroes are weaker automatically.
I hope you’re not one of those people who basically ignores pve in ARAM though 
. Not ‘lane pressure’, but tanking, dmg soaking minion wave does is quite significant. Not to mention xp and globes, which heals for 9%/7% per pickup. It irks me when some players totally abandon minion waves or attacking structures : /
fighting over lane space to pick up xp globes, fighting over health globes, fighting over merc camps… this is all pvp to me. One of the main reasons mercs work in normal maps is because you can get them and then abandon the lane. If your opponents ignore it it could very well push down an entire fort. But on ARAM maps your opponents can not ignore mercs. They have to fight around them or just give up. What in normal maps was once called “jungle fighting” doesn’t make any sense in ARAM because there isn’t even much space for it, anyway. In so many words, the pvp and pve in ARAM is intertwined. You can’t easily do one without incidentally doing the other. At least in my experience…
Stealing camps on “normal maps” is as important as in aram, even more so as you already said that camps can potencially destroy enemy structure, if ignored. On ARAM you can’t ignore it, because you’re literally on the same lane as your opponent.
QM or ranked don’t have normal maps, but just maps for a different equal mode.
Ragnaros was released as a melee assassin. He was moved to bruiser later.
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/64908459.jpg
I would never pick that.
You’d be surprised how massively picking the wrong lane can impact the game. I often see people automatically target a lane that have enemy mercs on them. Even when it would passively destroy a structure that’s already low on another lane.
I am not actually and I know what you mean, but it doesn’t change the fact that LW compared to S.S. is a no-brainer, even though there are less optimal plays.
A missed S.S let you waste your mana without any impact, but even a bad wave has still some use.
Me neither. His trait is already hard to use as very conditional ability binded to structure places, but making it heroic would be even more conditional than S.S. lol