ARAM is getting reworked alongside a new Bilgewater event

ARAM has always been a fan favorite mode, but that hasn’t stopped it from being a little clunky from time to time. Re-roll frustrations and jerks that troll on ARAM-only accounts have helped ruin some good times in League’s most “fun first” mode. Well, Riot is here to fix some of these past problems with a new update to ARAM that they detailed in a Nexus post.

We’ve all had moments where we re-rolled a terrible champion only to get something so much worse. That won’t be nearly as much of a problem, as ARAM is getting it’s own champion bench. When players re-roll, their old champions will be thrown onto the bench, where anyone can pick them up. This insures that your team comp can never actually get worse from where you started.

Riot Games

There are also tons of other great quality of life changes coming to ARAM. Players will start with more XP and won’t be able to leave the fountain for the first 15 seconds. The rate that players accrue champion mastery and re-roll points is also getting upped in ARAM, making getting tokens a lot easier for players with all the champs.

The most exciting update almost certainly has to be to the free to play rotation. In order to stop ARAM only accounts that just buy a single, toxic ARAM champ (looking at you, Zilean), the free to play rotation for ARAM games will be three full weeks worth of the normal rotation. For those of you who don’t love math, that’s 42 champions available to roll into at all times. This is really exciting for players who don’t have all the champions to play with and use ARAM as a testing ground.

When Pyke releases, ARAM will also be getting its own Bilgewater event, where Pyke will remain in the free-to-play rotation for the entire time. This will mark the return of Butcher’s Bridge, the very cool ARAM map that we haven’t seen for a few years now. There are also tons of new items coming alongside the event.

Riot Games

• Ghostwalkers are boots that let you walk through walls
• Spectral Cutlass lets you place a point on the ground that you’ll teleport back to after a delay
• Bloodletter’s Veil grants a Banshee’s Veil shield to champions after they use an ability

There are of course some more detailed changes to health packs as well as some existing runes and items in the Nexus post.

These changes will go a long way to making ARAM a more fun and accessible mode to all kinds of players. Who knows, maybe these special Bilgewater items will even stick around once the event is over.