Tonnes of new details about the upcoming League of Legends Brawl game mode have been revealed by Riot Games employees in a recent Reddit AMA. They also revealed some funny stories, including a glitch which allowed Ksante to one shot champions by ulting them off the small Bandle City map.
Brawl will see two teams of five pick their preferred champions then battle it out in a fast-paced 10-minute match to repeatedly kill each other and try to delete the opposing team’s shared health bar to win the game.
One concern some of the community had was how late-game carries like Kassadin and champions that need time to collect stacks like Nasus, Veigar, and Smolder will work in such a short mode. However, there seemingly isn’t anything to worry about according to Riot software engineer Fogcloud: “This mode does have built in balancing similar to ARAM, Nexus Blitz, and other modes, which should make scaling factors much less impactful on characters, but characters with inherent scaling curves in their kit (eg. Veigar or Nasus) will still need to stack up a bit before they can really go to town.”
Riot QA Engingeer added to that answering a separate question focussed on the pacing of the mode: “Passive XP and gold is heavily adjusted to accelerate all players throughout the game. It was important to make sure players get to experience all or most of their champion’s power fantasy even in this relatively short game mode. In testing most players were getting to 5ish items by the end of an average game which felt about right, but of course tuning is subject to change and we’ll be watching and listening to how players feel when they get their hands on it.”
Design lead AzuBK also confirmed that some champions may get Brawl-specific buffs or nerfs: “We designed the mode to be closer to Summoner’s Rift gameplay than ARAM (being able to recall and heal makes a huge difference), so we expect fewer extreme balance outliers. We do plan to balance similarly to ARAM, and we’re considering which champions are clearly powerful enough to pre-emptively balance.”
Will League of Legends Brawl be a permanent mode?
For now, Brawl will be a rotating mode in LoL available for six weeks/three patches up until Patch 25.13, according to Modes Lead Cadmus.
However, Cadmus went on to mention Riot are hopeful of it sticking around to help newer players: “One thing to keep in mind is that we really hope this helps us solve some long term bets – whether it’s for new or returning players find this to be a safer place for joining League, or maybe for players of vastly different skill sizes to finally find a queue where they can enjoy themselves despite the skill differences. We’ll keep an eye out on how it performs relative to those outcomes that we’d love for League to have a better answer for.”
A lot of the Rioter’s answers similarly focused on encouraging new players as AzuBK stated: “It’s critical that new players can understand why learning the game is worthwhile and experience a sample of that first-hand.
“ARAM actually does a pretty good job on both of these, but the inability to pick a champion undermines new players’ ability to find their fave and have a familiar foundation going into each game. We believe that an ARAM-adjacent mode like this with free champion pick, stronger acceleration (you WILL get to play a strong version of your champ) and a lower-stakes vibe can be more successful for new players.”
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
