TL;DR:
Make duplicate hero abilities stack, reduce Murky’s death timer, add core shielding but reduced hp, reduce the comeback/underdog experience multipliers somewhat.
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I love ARAM! It’s a silly fun mode that isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. Buuut there are some things that bother me, that I’d like to see changed. I’d like to know what the community thinks about these as well.
- Weird hero interactions with duplicate heroes.
I don’t really like how some heroes interact when you have multiple of the same hero on a team. For example, only one Nazeebo can get a stack of his trait per minion. So if you have two Nazeebos, the chance of getting many stacks is greatly reduced. I think both Nazeebos should get the stacks if they both have poison on the minion.
Another example: with two Kael’thas, only one living bomb can be on an enemy target at a time. This greatly reduces the effectiveness of the second KT IMO. I think both KT’s should be able to have a living bomb on the same target.
If you have two Jaina’s on your team, however, they both benefit from chill damage no matter who chilled the target. This makes two Jainas more effective together than two individual Jaina’s would be. I’m not sure how I feel about this interaction.
Two Lucio’s can’t heal one target at the same time, making one of the lucio’s kind of pointless. Whoever is healing more of the two gets to heal, the other has zero effect. I mean you can time your amp it ups to increase the time that is up on a single target but it still directly nerfs double Lucio healing. I mean, this is like if Lucio couldn’t heal a target that had a Stukov pustule on them or something. I definitely think this should change.
There are probably a zillion more examples. I just think that hero effects should stack by default, instead of the hodgepodge weirdness we currently have. When hero effects don’t stack, it makes having duplicate heroes less effective than they’d be individually, which seems wrong to me.
- Murky
Murky Sucks in ARAM, for obvious reasons. But I think he’s handicapped more than he should be by the death timers in ARAM. At level 1, a normal hero death timer is shorter than Murky’s death timer (assuming his egg isn’t destroyed)! The death timer for a normal hero is five seconds, while Murky’s death timer sits at eight seconds all game - the same as a standard game. Somewhere between levels 1-7ish the death timers meet, and then Murky’s becomes shorter.
It only makes sense to reduce Murky’s death timer by a similar proportion to the death timer reduction for other heroes. So in a standard game the hero death timer at level one is 15 seconds, but in ARAM it’s 5 seconds - 1/3 the amount. I propose Murky’s death timer be reduced by a similar amount; at level one he would respawn in 2-3 seconds instead of 8, and then scale in the same way as normal heroes’ death timers.
- Core shielding
I know this has been brought up before but so I won’t add too much here. So many ARAM games end with people flying, porting, digging, or otherwise bypassing a team to hit the core and backdoor. If one team defends their core but it sits at 20% hp, it puts them in an impossible situation between defending and pushing. I find this extremely unfun and against the spirit of ARAM. I’d love to see some regenerating shields on the core in exchange for less hp on the core so the games don’t last forever.
- Comeback Experience
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I personally think the exp comeback multipliers are too generous for ARAM. Being unable to hearth and heal combined with constant fighting generally leads to a lot of deaths on both sides, unless one team is absolutely dominating another. The generous comeback experience makes sense for a standard game where it is so easy to snowball through map objective dominance, etc. But in ARAM, I find it exceedingly frustrating and common that despite having e.g. 2 times the number of player kills the hero experience is often equal or very close to equal due to the comeback experience (depending on when the kills happened, of course). I feel like this makes the opening several minutes of an ARAM match feel very pointless, although getting to 10 first can mean killing a fort or something. I also think it makes late-game heroes even more powerful, since there is a very good chance you will be close to even exp in the late game even if your team is losing players much more often.
For reference, if the enemy team is e.g. 2 levels ahead, they will get ~30% less exp per kill and your team will get ~30% more exp per kill. At 4 levels ahead it’s +100%/-95%. I think it should be scaled down somewhat for ARAM matches to make early game heroes more playable.