Welcome to The Grand Reckoning!
See the Dev article for Arena - The Grand Reckoning.
Arena Fame
For this release of Arena, we're introducing the brand new Arena "Fame" system as the primary way to progress through your Arena experience. You'll generally gain Fame depending on how you place in any individual game, but in addition to just playing and winning there will also be a set of three missions you can accomplish per champion that will drastically accelerate your Fame leveling experience.
You can earn fame from the following methods:
- 10 Fame each round played (20% bonus if you play with friends)
- 50 Fame the first time you play a champion
- 150 Fame the first time you win with a champion (Finish in the Top 4)
- 200 Fame first time you finish in 1st place with a champion
- 30 Fame if you use the "Bravery" button. (Lock-in a random champion).
- 10 Fame if you play a "Crowd Favorite" champion
Fame Rewards:
- Level 1 - 100 Fame: Overflow (Silver Augment) added to the pool
- Level 2 - 1400 Fame: Hattrick (Gold Augment) added to the pool
- Level 3 - 2900 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
- Level 4 - 4900 Fame: Slow and Steady (Gold Augment) added to pool
- Level 5 - 7400 Fame: 1 Reroll
- Level 6 - 10400 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
- Level 7 - 14400 Fame: And My Axe (Gold Augment) added to pool
- Level 8 - 19400 Fame: Transmute: Chaos (Prismatic Augment) added to pool
- Level 9 - 28400 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
- Beyond level 9 - Fame will increment infinitely, and will show off in your Arena lobbies to your friends
We're experimenting with other ways of progression for engaged Arena players, as we were seeing that a large portion of the Arena audience wasn't excited by Ranked, and in some cases were actively put off from the mode by the seriousness a rank provides. We're exploring the best version of Arena metasystems to support Arena feeling worth your time and fun to play.
Bravery and Crowd Favorite
For those of you brave enough we've added a new way to play Arena. We're looking to reward players for branching out and trying champions in the Arena for the first time, while also hopefully encouraging some meta diversity, so in Champion Select you'll see two new options now.
- Bravery grants a bonus stat anvil and two bonus rerolls, and all you need to do is be brave enough to roll the dice for a random champion. Your champion will not be revealed to anyone until the loading screen.
- Crowd Favorite is an option for those of you looking to expand your champion pool but aren't feeling up to the challenge of going full bravery. During Champion Select you'll see 2-5 random champions (based on how many champions you own) with an anvil icon on the portrait. Selecting one of these will grant you a bonus stat anvil.
Guest of Honor
Each game of Arena will feature a group of famous Noxians or Reckoners (aka champions), that will show up during different event rounds as "Guests of Honor." Every player in the lobby will then be able to vote on the Guests that have shown up and then the system will randomly roll a player and the guest they stand behind. The winning Guest will introduce a new rule that will be in place for the rest of the game.
This is a cameo replacement. The cameo system brought some much needed round to round variance to Arena but had some pretty substantial costs to game feel and fairness. While some cameos were quite popular like Sett and we do think there was a path forward with cameos, we're looking to find other systems that bring the same benefits but feel more fair and are more interesting and enjoyable to interact with. We tried a fairly wide range of Guests of Honor to see what kinds of guests were most fun to players, and what kinds of mechanics felt beyond acceptable. We'd like to see what things you all find most fun in this system as we work toward an ever better Arena.
We'll be releasing the Guest of Honor roster over 2 waves but here's the first wave you can expect to see!
- Darius: Each team takes 50 damage, whenever a team is eliminated the remaining team heals 5 HP
- Rell: Reduce the price of Prismatic Anvils by 1000 gold
- Vladimir: Everyone receives a bonus matching Augment
- Swain: Collect Ravens during combat. The number of Ravens you collect determines the tier of your future augment offerings.
- Kled: When your combat ends, gain a spell that can be cast to disrupt any ongoing combats
- Xin Zhao: When your team's health is reduced below 60 gain a Gold Stat Anvil. The first time you're at risk of elimination gain a Prismatic Stat Anvil.
- Briar: Round damage is increased by 5. Winning a round while at risk of elimination heals 15 Team Health
- Mordekaiser: During combat, a random player on each team enters the death realm
- Mel: Four additional Hexgates are enabled in each combat
- Talon: A combatant on each team deals 20% increased damage but grants 250 gold when slain
- Sion: The Ring of Fire spawns 15 seconds sooner and then rapidly constricts while slowly drifting around each arena
- Samira: Striking your opponent first empowers you with two juices, increased to 4 while hot streaking
- Elise: Revives are replaced with Elise wrapping players in cocoons that their ally must break
- Riven: Riven is unique and can appear in either voting phase. No rules change.
- Trundle: Legendary items are locked, and Legendary Anvils remain unavailable
Map Update
Maps are a core part of the Arena experience, and we've long thought that they need to be a bit more interesting than baseline terrain. We'd pushed pretty hard in a new direction with Koi Pond in a way that was clearly too frustrating for players. We do think maps have a lot of room in Arena to be a special part of the game experience and so we're continuing to explore new spaces while reining in some of the high end frustration that a new map experience might provide.
Koi Pond is seeing an update to add pathways from island to island so you can't be trapped by the lilypad, which should help a lot in the sharp cases where it felt like the map decided the game. We're confident this version of the map should still feel unique and interesting to fight on while not feeling as fight-ending for certain comps or plain frustrating to play on.
We're also adding a new map with a new interactable: pillars! These are pillars that you can attack to knock over and create walls to block pathways. If you hit an enemy with them they deal tons of damage. We're aiming to open up what maps can do when playing Arena and explore mechanics League doesn't see elsewhere, but we'll be watching this closely to make sure it's working in a fun way. Let us know how it feels!
Arachnophobia
For Elise's Guest of Honor, we made two versions: one with clear spider iconography (and well… legit spiders in one too many dimensions) and one with all of that removed for folks who would prefer the amount of insect legs to remain at a minimum. This can be toggled via the "Hide Eye Candy" setting. We'd like a proper arachnophobia filter, but for now this is the best we can do.
For more specific details as to what happens on each side of the setting:
- If toggled on, no spiders will appear anywhere. Elise will not show herself when a player gets cocooned.
- If toggled off, a big Elise in her spider form will fall from the sky and cocoon any player when they die. Her vote cone area will also feature many little spiders skittering around on the ground.
Arena QoL Changes:
- You can now (finally) progress Champion Mastery as part of your Arena experience
- 25 new augments: 20 new augments + 5 returning curse augments
- Tons of augment and item changes
- When you select a random stat anvil you'll now see a message displaying which stat you received
- Rerolls: Changed from bulk rerolls (1 reroll rerolls all 3 options) to individual rerolls (each slot has its own reroll)
Please let us know if you have any feedback about the mode or if you experience any bugs! See you in The Grand Reckoning!
