In Snow Battle Arurf, the older the champion, the better

Ultra Rapid Fire, or URF, of any kind is easily the most hyped up game mode of each year. For a while now, Riot has been trying out a few different varieties of it. Some on Howling Abyss, some where you all play the same champ and some where champ select is random. This year, we have random URF on Summoner's Rift with a twist: winter themed champs only. But in a mode like Snow Battle ARURF, the older the champ you get, the better.

Have you ever played against a full AP Nunu? How about any Irelia? Maybe Jax? Pray you don't have the misfortune. Complaining about the balance of a featured game mode, especially one like URF, is pretty stupid. However, that doesn't necessarily make some of the older characters any less frustrating to play against.

This year, ARURF is actually a good bit of fun, especially if you just have twenty minutes to kill and can't really play a full game. The frustration seeps in when your team gets some AD Carries and the enemy gets Nunu, Irelia, etc. Now, that may happen to you as well, and you might get to stomp an enemy team into the dirt, but at the end of the day, someone is always frustrated.

The problem arises mostly with old champs, characters that were designed years ago and basically haven’t even been touched. Again, champions like Nunu, Irelia and Jax. To suggest that those three champs need a rework isn’t really the hottest take of the century. These characters are focused on interesting, thematic abilities, not counter play.

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When everyone has no cooldowns and can run around like a mad man, it’s kinda hard to get bogged down by the math and science of League. But champions like Nunu can ruin that fun if they build a certain way, and that sucks. Nunu’s snowball has 90 percent AP scaling and his ult has 250 percent. Why? Because he’s a release champion that needs help.

It’s OK for him to be like that in solo queue because getting fed enough to do full AP Nunu in a real game is almost impossible. But ARURF is already a curated experience. The pool of champions is only so deep because of the holiday theme. The game mode can be fun, but it can also be ruined pretty quickly by problems that could have been avoided by simply removing him from the ARURF pool.

Maybe I’m being hypercritical. Maybe I’m being crusty in the wake of the already stressful holidays. Maybe I should stop trying to win and just try to have fun. But I’ll be damned if playing against an URF Irelia isn’t both impressive and infuriating. I just wanted to play ARURF Ziggs without getting Blade-Danced into infinity, is that too much to ask?

Who are your favorite champs to play in ARURF this year? Who do you hate most?

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