At first, I was really excited about the new revive mechanic being added to Arena, and all of the new augments, but with their current implementation, it has made for some of the most unfun gameplay available in League.

There are three main things I think currently wrong with Arena on PBE, and they’re all pretty interconnected. That being said, I’ll address each one one by one.

First: The Revive Mechanic

If you haven’t played PBE Arena or seen any gameplay, the way the mechanic works is thus: when your teammate dies, a circle appears where they died. After a short delay, standing on that circle will begin the revive process. After a few seconds of continuously standing in the circle, your teammate will revive with reduced health.

There are a few issues with this implementation.

First and foremost, there is no way to interrupt the revive, outside of pushing or pulling the alive teammate away from the circle, or killing them. So, if you decide to play two champions who don’t have a way of CC’ing the alive teammate off of the decently sized circle, or their teammate died against a wall, or etc., the revive is almost guaranteed to go off. Especially because:

The second issue of the revive mechanic is that the delay between the teammate dying, and the time in which it takes to actually revive them, are far too short. Even the squishiest of champions with the proper cc, heal, etc. can guarantee to get the revive off once it is available, and the delay before it is available is short enough that they won’t need to live for too long. There is essentially no risk in going for the revive. So after one team blows all of their combos and ultimates, they get punished for killing first, allowing the enemies teammate to come back and very easily flip the match.

But let’s say the other team just has too much damage, you’re too squishy, there’s no way you could get the revive off, even with how easy it is.

This brings us to the next issue of the current Arena:

The Tank Meta

It is incredibly meta right now to take one damage carry and one tank, or even two tanks, so that if your carry dies, the tank can stand on the revive circle with 0 consequences. They can soak up tons of damage without having to fret at all.

Even with the new items introduced to try and combat tanks, it never seems to be enough, and that is largely in part to a few incredibly overpowered augments that can allow tanks to heal a ton, gain a ton of health, revive without the revive mechanic, and etc.

This carries over into the final big issue with Arena’s current implementation:

Passive Damage and Augments

Many of the new augments such as Laser Eyes (shoots a constant laser in the direction you are facing) allow for the aforementioned tanks to not only soak up a ton of damage, but DO plenty of passive, uninteractive damage to their foes.

There are plenty of other augments which provide damage just for existing, for doing the bare minimum, which allows tanks to build as tanky as they want and still do damage. Which sure, tanks should be allowed to do damage without having to sacrifice some of their tankiness, but to this degree?

This is not to mention the amount of augments which gives tanks and squishies alike tons of survivability, revives (with GA still existing in the mode), damage reduction, and other stats which add up to take away from what the mode was meant to be.

Conclusion

Arena is meant to be the fast paced, outplay, nonstop fighting, fun mode. With everything above, it makes for a mode where instead of trying to fight and outplay your opponents, you see who can merely exist and survive the longest. Who can be the tankiest, who can play around the incredibly easy revives, who can heal the most, who can make it so that you don’t have to really play the game, you just have to exist for long enough to see the victory screen at the end. So far in PBE, I have had multiple matches where the tanks literally stop moving to do passive damage and laugh as the hyper carries barely tickle them.

I love this mode. I want to have fun in this mode. I love the changes they made to make enchanters viable, I love the anti-tank items (even though they are currently ineffective against just how tanky and healthy you can get), I really like some of the new augments. But they are all overshined by unfun, afk level strats and a poorly thought out revive mechanic.

I know its just PBE and many of these things are likely to change, but it’s just got me really concerned for the future of this mode.

Thoughts?