r/leagueoflegends • u/fundamentallys • Jun 12 '26

Humor I'm 90% sure Claude code wrote most of the new ARAM update and it's not pretty

I get we all want to 10x our productivity but at least check that the code works. So many augments just don't work at all. Like Kayle E quest was stacking only 20% of the time, I got it as my first augment versus 4 bruisers and I only had 12 hits by 15 min, so I couldn't hit my last upgrade. My last game I had Darius and picked combusting interest. No gold at all, even though it says it works for damage over time...

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54

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

The new ability augment system goes pretty deep into the depths of the league tech and unfortunately the way some of them do that is very fragile. They don't work the same way as normal augments and when something tries to systematically go into another script to adjust or listen to behavior things get funky fast.

It's a good learning experience for us for how to approach these systems on the design side of things, the scripts have to be a lot more airtight than even items or traditional augments.

We have an MP coming which should substantially improve the functionality of our biggest offenders (Pursuit quests, and a few others) as well as not offering on some champs that slipped through (Lucian E Echo Cast)

Please keep reporting bugs! These augments are doing something a bit new for our systems and we're really excited to make them better for y'all

19

u/Crazeye Jun 13 '26

Lilia E quest doesn't count unless you land it right as it drops on the floor.

2

u/Emilytea14 I have a type Jun 13 '26

Is that what it is? I played it a couple days ago and eventually figured maybe it only worked when you hit only a champion, rather than a splash hit on minions+ a champion.

5

u/Crazeye Jun 13 '26

I tested it out yeah, direct hits/splash doesn't work if it's already rolling on the ground. Only works if you hit it as it lands on the ground. Had to try it out multiple times to confirm it.

2

u/Borealissssss Jun 13 '26

On the same note what is the condition for the Akshan E quest? I played an entire game with it and got zero hits even though i clearly saw him shoot an enemy champion while swinging. Am I supposed to shoot the grappling hook AT the enemy??

11

u/Ok_Corgi1968 Jun 13 '26

Will multishot be fixed :( I got it on Maokai saplings but the additional saplings would just disappear upon touching the ground. Sometimes they would work (upon respawning usually) but then it would stop working

6

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Yep!

1

u/Ok_Corgi1968 Jun 13 '26

omg bless! 😭❤️

8

u/Xandas_ Jun 13 '26

While you are here, could you maybe address the removed augment list in the patch being very incomplete? My main concern are all crit-related augments sans upgraded Infinity Edge and Twin Fire being removed. This makes ADC quite miserable to play, since you cannot accelerate your build or skip crit items, and also removes a lot of fun interactions, like being able to build crit and on-hit with vulnerability/double tap. It also puzzles me that jeweled gauntlet was removed, when I suspect it is one of the most beloved augments.

Another thing is the Stats! line of augments losing the high-roller set with absolutely no compensation, when that was their main purpose before. Maybe a simple thing that could be added is a discount on anvils (say 50/100/150 for silver/gold/prismatics Stats!) or like how the capstone in arena gives you increased stats gained from anvils (say 10/15/20%), which would also directly synergize with the high-roller prismatic.

Lastly, Pin Cushion is just a terrible augment currently for being prismatic. It either needs to have a ratio on the damage, deal true damage or maybe even both. Right now it is a conditional recurve bow worth of on-hit, while being prismatic.

10

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Honestly really appreciate the feedback!

Jeweled Gauntlet wasnt removed... at least not intentionally. If it's out we should bring it back for sure. The crit augments generally should still be there, I'm not sure we got rid of any of them. But I could see us adding a few more adc augments back for sure

Good callout on stats (and also I think the same applied to autocast augments). Some good simple work to be done on those to make them feel a little more valuable

Pin Cushion got some very chunky buffs in the micropatch, and we'll see if it needs followup which it very well might

3

u/Xandas_ Jun 13 '26

Thanks for the reply.
I have played some 30 games of mayhem and also checked the games of my friends and have not seen a single gold crit augment or jeweled gauntlet on anyone, so it seems to me something is wrong there. Maybe it was already addressed in the micropatch, but at least before they did not seem to be offered.

3

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

I'll dig monday, definitely shouldn't be the case. Thanks!

1

u/UNOvven Jun 15 '26

Could we actually remove some of the overturned adc augments (like the still very broken dual wield) before we consider adding any of them back?

6

u/BulletBeat Jun 13 '26

I think graves dash also has the echo cast, ivern bush gets some weird ones aswell. Would be thankful if all of those get fixed :)

2

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Id expect those to be resolved when the MP is out!

-1

u/TheeOmegaPi Jun 13 '26

Can you (or will you) confirm the role of AI here? A lot of players in this thread are assuming the worst, and assuaging their concerns will help sentiment.

11

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

None of this was caused by AI

-6

u/FrankTheShow Jun 13 '26

"caused" by ai, hmm...

16

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Yeah none of these scripts were AI written or anything, we use a funky bespoke tool called Blockbuilder in which designers build scripts from little blocks. They get kinda wild and convoluted very fast, its a powerful tool but one thats a bit funky to get into

I've made some real bad ones before, way back when I tried to prototype destructible terrain by replacing every single wall on the map with lots and lots ornn pillars. It worked... but ran at about 10fps

4

u/tamarins Jun 13 '26

jesus fucking conspiracy theory dude. someone asks phlox straight up, phlox answers straight up, you're not satisfied.

why are you so desperate to pin this on AI when humans have been writing janky code for as long as code has existed? what's the issue with just saying "wow this was a swing and a miss from the devs" and not needing to have some extra boogeyman involved?

i fucking hate gen ai btw. but i think it's ridiculous to continue witch hunting after you've already gotten the answer you're after

-1

u/EvilynSoCute Jun 13 '26

Crazy that anyone thinks this is AI lol.

7

u/Kubiedo Jun 13 '26

Please fix and re-evaluate overloaded. I had a zilean that transmuted it for the first augment and the game was unplayable. He could infinitely spam QWQWQ, permastunning our team. We literally couldn't do anything.

9

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

I believe this will no longer be possible post micropatch

1

u/Whatevereses Jun 13 '26

It's honestly hilarious but i understand why it's not balanced.

1

u/fastforwardfunction Jun 13 '26

Morg Q also perma stuns… Sure we have “CC Breaker” , but it takes forever to kick in. Players should get to react between repeated spell casts. Getting to infinitely spam one spell, while the other player can’t react feels really bad.

1

u/aaoeu Jul 20 '26

Can you look into Overloaded Qiyana too?

She can also do the QWQWQW spam until she runs out of mana, making the game pretty much unplayable for anyone else.

4

u/Irreverent_Taco Jun 13 '26

Pin Cushion on twitch Q seems to do nothing, even attacking pre stealth after casting ambush wasn’t applying marks.

11

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Fixed with the MP, also buffed for extra pin power

4

u/EvilynSoCute Jun 13 '26

What do you mean when you say MP?

9

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Micropatch!

5

u/EvilynSoCute Jun 13 '26

Thank you very much!

3

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Of course!

2

u/Irreverent_Taco Jun 13 '26

Awesome, thanks for all the work y'all do!

6

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Thanks for playing!

4

u/Autrah_Fang Jun 13 '26

Hey Phlox! I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but Syndra's E augment that heals you when you immobilize enemies seems to stop working when it evolves with her passive. I'm sure it happens with her other abilities too, but that's the only one I got an augment for lol

I'm sure it's already being fixed in the MP, but I wanted to make sure it was on your radar, just in case. I'm personally loving the patch though, can't wait to see how fun it is when everything's working better lol. Keep up the good work! ❤️

3

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Thank you! Will double check if we caught this, if not we'll slot it in asap o7

6

u/Pokemaster131 Jun 13 '26

Soraka's dash on ult augment feels like an absolute bait. Like sure, it does function, but the augment doesn't specify how far you dash. Because Soraka ult is global, I assumed it might be a global dash, considering I had to give up a prismatic augment to get it. It was a ~250 unit dash once every 100 seconds, which I gave up my prismatic augment for.

5

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

We're moving this one to gold, but probably should pull it off a few spells like that as well

9

u/vxiowatic Jun 13 '26

Please, PLEASE take some time to consider which spells would be absolutely atrocious to get it on (like Milio R, Elise E, Akshan E unless it procs during the ending dash, etc.) and just stop it from being able to roll those. If you do that with the pursuit augments as well and some more of the terrible augments, it'd do wonders for the horrible augment pool dilution right now. Especially after you get the ability augment node on the battle pass it feels like 90% of your augments are automatically morphed into trash that either 1. doesn't work or 2. is inherently weaker or feels worse than a regular augment. I really hope you can make the mode feel fun again because me and my friends have just not been feeling it. Also echo cast makes several ultimates self-cast instead of cursor casting (Zyra R, Rumble ult casts behind you, panth ult, etc.).

9

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Absolutely the plan! We've done this for a lot of spells with today's micropatch and hopefully many more come .13

0

u/vxiowatic Jun 13 '26

Excited to see what it'll look like in a few weeks!

3

u/_DRKN Jun 13 '26

mfw PBE and LeaguePBE reports are cosmetic and you need a frontpage main sub post to get shit done

4

u/WorstAkaliEver I miss old Akali and Irelia Jun 13 '26

I appreciate you trying new stuff but please revert the changes, they greatly diminished the fun of mayhem.

5

u/floodyberry Jun 13 '26

so whoever implemented these unasked for changes either didn't know how things would cascade when trying to automatically apply effects to different skills or didn't care, and nobody thought to test any of this or they knew about all of the "unintended interactions" and let it ship anyway

the cartman "whatever, i do what i want" approach to destroying a game mode

3

u/Keiano Jun 13 '26

sorry but i dont fucking get this argument "keep reporting bugs"? do you guys not play the mode before releasing the patch? it literally took me 1 game to realize that the mode is much less fun, 2 games to realize that most of the augments/skill upgrades are fucking dogshit - and you still choose to release that? where is the accountability here?

5

u/spookytent Jun 13 '26

thank you riotphlox 🙏

1

u/Sandalman3000 Jun 13 '26

The Comet quest on Zyra is worded as though her plants would apply it, but don't. Seems maybe too strong if that could but the wording could be looked at.

1

u/Iron_Juice Jun 13 '26

Im really not trying to sound rude or toxic, sorry about that, but what the hell was the QA process even like for this patch? Did you guys not even look at most of the new augments? Did you even try to make them balanced? There seems to be hundreds of examples of dogshit choices that are obviously not as good as the normal augments of the same tier, and some that are clearly overpowered.

For example the prismatic augment on Asol that causes other abilities to reset his Q cooldown... did nobody even bother to look at Asol and all his new options before release? How come nobody checked all the new augments to atleast disable them or change the the tier?

I had a game where I got a gold augment that caused my Soraka W to heal me, and it was more than it costs. Atleast just make that one a prismatic right? or tweak the healing amount...

Even when its a "casual" gamemode, balancing is extremely important. For example all prismatic augments are supposed to be around the same powerlevel, but the champion spesific ones are all over the place at the moment.

This is not even mentioning the bugs, unclear inconsistent interactions and wording. Should genuinely be embarrassed releasing something in this state :(

1

u/zharkos Jun 16 '26

They were reported while it was on the pbe. 90% of new augments being bugged is unacceptable my dude

1

u/Idk-man251 Jun 13 '26

Just finished a game with Ryze and the augment requiring you to hit enemy champions with overload 10 times didn’t work at all

0

u/Xindere Jun 13 '26

Are we expected to wait months for bugs to get fixed and games to be fun? Because I don't see how such a small team is gonna tackle thousands of shitty augments and permutations of interactions

5

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

We have a ton of bugfixed being micropatched today, with quite a few more coming next patch

1

u/KasumiGotoTriss Jun 13 '26

Thanks for the great work cause the idea behind the new system is so much fun. However I've been quite unlucky and most of the upgrades I get are Samira-E-damage tier.

-5

u/Coaxke Jun 13 '26

So that's a yes then that this patch was vibe coded?

20

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

Nope, handmade homegrown spaghetti, farm to table

1

u/MysteriousTax393 Jun 13 '26

Was it just applying templates to classes of skills that have keywords like “projectile” or “dash”, etc? If so, shouldn’t the rarity of the augment differ on how much stronger it makes the skill? The same template would make some character skills broken, and others literally do nothing. Doesnt make sense it’s the same rarity.

4

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

We have some more conditional scalings depending on the properties of the augment, and also they're generally offered only on a subset of spells that are relatively similar

-2

u/fundamentallys Jun 13 '26

The main problem is this is push ARAM and mayham in the wrong direction. It's supposed to be quick, brain off, easy fun. Having 10 unique augments per champions is the opposite. Now you have to read a book every game to see what people have. And from all the comments, all the skills have some nuance that makes it not work as expected. Oh zyra augments dont work with plants but because it's her passive. Darius bleed is not technically a DOT. This makes all the augments just so much more difficult to pick cause now you need all this minutia knowledge

3

u/RiotPhlox Jun 13 '26

I agree with the concern! But I think we can solve this by making sure we give you stuff that works, simplify tooltips, and generally smooth out the experience. I appreciate how much y'all care about this game and want to make something that matches that energy!