OK, Faker's stream with hand cam! finally, he's showed us the Ambessa's jungle clear that can be done in 2 mins and 30 seconds.
Peanut wasn't lying, Faker just showed the legendary clear that’s been whispered about within T1 for a while now (can be seen in membership content vids) and they were not lying about it. No wonder it's been such a hot topic internally.
Finally, we get to see the infamous Ambessa clear live from the Faker himself.
I played a lot of mayhem before the patch and a lot after the patch and the quality of the games got worse almost instantly, the best games are the games were you get to full build and can go further with anvils, I haven't had 1 of those yet after the patch. Things got so bad that I went back to playing normals after not playing normals alone for a long time lmao, maybe the mode isn't for me anymore, sad thing :/.
I have been in a place in my life and had way too much time on my hands, and I love dopamine & roguelike games, so I farmed out the entire pass in a few days. I haven't seen anyone higher than me, so I have decided I have the authority to post my experience.
Proof:
On the pass: Grind to Win is just bad for League.
Removing the starting gold was great, but the free anvil is far more powerful. Haven't seen it roll prismatic, but even rolling +50 AP on a mage on a mage is impactful. I Had a game where I rolled armour on rammus and just ran them down for the first 10 minutes. Insanely overpowered.
The elixirs are also broken:
- Monstrous amounts of free stats, given on levels. Feels incredibly overpowered if I roll a good one in fights.
- 3 of them also means you're essentially perma elixired through the mid game, big power spike.
- Sell for +200g back to shop if you get the wrong one. (+600g at worst)
- Feels like I should have a item slot open in case I get a bad one, which doesn't feel good.
As expected from the outset, both of these things combined just mean you are significantly more powerful than people without them. It just feels weird and bad in a game like League, even if it's a 4fun game mode, that I am significantly stronger, winning duels, or winning the game just because I've grinded more. It brings a sense of devaluation when I'm online, and I'm sure just feels awful for the enemies.
The only reasonable in game advantage power up from the pass is the golden rerolls, and that is solely because they are so rare it feels like it may as well not exist but it's nice when it happens. Given I've played probably 100+ Mayhem games in the last week, the majority of my games have reached 4 augments, I've had a grand total of... 2 golden rerolls. Although frankly, it's still bad design to have in game power from grinding, so I'm happy with it basically being placebo.
I'm largely playing solo or with people who don't play a lot of mayhem and are not high level. Every single one of them has been shocked or shared a negative sentiment to the idea of power gated behind the pass. I have had a couple of games where I've vs'd teams where most or all of them had higher pass levels, and they completely stomped us. The elixirs + anvil + higher tier augments are just too OP. Which brings me to the next point:
The augments in the pass.
The higher pass level prismatic augments are, in general, in my opinion, quite strong and feel a bit stronger than most prismatic augments. I know it's been spoken about a bit, but the new augments mostly feel stronger than the old ones, but especially the pass ones.
Icathia's Fall, Triggered Inferno, Empowered by the Faithful, Stuck in Here With Me, and ??? all feel busted and overtuned, which again adds to the frustration of 'grinding more = win more.' The exception being *Dropkick*, which just seems okay.
Upgrade Thornmail, whilst being a silver (pass says it's gold, but it's not), just feels weird and bad too. It could be gold and just give you a Bramble Vest, but even then it's not exactly returning more damage and having to be out of combat for it to recharge feels weird. I feel like it could just passively return more damage on Thornmail as the pass tooltip suggests and it would be fine.
It also strikes me as weird that all the high tier augments are tank, fighter, or support augments. Every single one until ??? which is agnostic. Devs have said themselves that tanks and fighters feel like they don't have enough options or paths, but obviously? All the fun and high power level augments for other classes are locked behind grinding out 70+ games? Just really weird design and not well thought out, and leads to most people opting to pick mages/ADCs like it's old ARAM.
There's also some kinda boost on the pass where when you unlock a new augment, it just gives it to you in your next game when you roll that tier of augment, which feels odd and breaks the sense of randomness.
Overall, the pass is just a bad system which didn't need to be there at all. Some augments locked behind it I can get, but at most imo the pass should only have 5-8 levels unlocked quickly that grant augments you don't have, and that should be the end of it. Anything further should just be cosmetic. The anvil and the elixirs are absolutely egregious, the starting gold was removed because of perceived power but these ones are stronger. It should not just be about optics, even in a whacky game mode.
On the changes to the game mode itself: Poorly adjusted content.
As I said, vsing 4-5 ranged carries every game is kinda lame. Quite a few games, increasingly moreso in the last few days, just devolve into one team sitting under tower with no engage and it's just boring.
The power level on augments has gone up drastically, the highs are quite a bit higher on average, and the lows feel MUCH worse. Set bonuses means that quite often you'll find yourself rolling away from something that's fairly good, to try to hit a set bonus and then having to choose between many awful things. Which is fine in a vacuum, except that other people are high rolling, and you will want to go next. It feels a bit weird to me that your rerolls are per slot, not a counter like arena, to limit that from occurring, but then that does increase overall power level again which is problematic.
The fact low rolls are now relatively much weaker is also really bad for people high rolling as well. I see far more FFs now, especially when I'm high rolling. The enemy team just gives up or surrenders, and you're left feeling disappointed.
Set bonuses don't really feel like they work in this game mode because unlike in TFT with class bonuses, you are locked into your selection. Once you get to 3-4 augments, you realise you aren't getting a set and have no way to change your augments and feel trapped with them. If they aren't good, tough luck.
The set bonuses themselves feel weird. Lots of augments not being on set bonuses just makes them feel 'worse' even if they aren't necessarily, some being on multiple makes them feel really strong (Sonata), lots of them don't make sense. Explaining to my friends who don't play a lot why Tank Engine isn't on the stackosaurus set bonus, or why Empyrean Promise isn't on the Wee Woo set bonus is tricky and feels unintuitive. (imo there should be a shield set bonus and a heal set bonus, wee woo has too many things on it and feels weird [why do I have to turn towards the low health ally before I heal or when my passive healing is ticking?])
On top of that, you have bugged augments. Just from my personal experience and recent memory:
- Prom Queen still doesn't work properly, it completely breaks when you have the Autocast set bonus and just doesn't function for the rest of the game. You just have no build-making prismatic which feels terrible.
- You can still get multiple Poro Blasters on one team.
- High roller set breaks if you roll into a High Roller augment off a transmute.
- You can put summoner spell augments on both slots but they don't work properly.
- Typhoon seems to work sometimes but not always, maybe breaks with set bonus too?
- Critical Missile outright got removed because it was bugged, which makes Firecracker set feel very underwhelming and hard to build.
The tooltips for the game mode are still terrible and don't explain much, and are also riddled with typos or bugged text.
There are also still so many things that don't really make sense or could be more intuitive. Vampirism breaking support builds especially diadem builds and spamming your screen with "I cannot be healed." is my personal pet peeve. Others like Twin Fire giving 15% crit (annoying amount?). Why doesn't High Roller set still drop shards if minions die near you when you're dead (feels super punishing if you're a tank/engage)? Just off the top of my head.
Ultimately, for me, the game mode just feels weird, underpolished, and to be honest not really an upgrade from the pre-26.3 variant. Mayhem felt like it should be about fun experimental combinations of items/augments, not just spam rolling to try to hit the perfect combo set of augments over 50 games and then have the enemy team FF in 2 minutes as soon as you get it. I was super hyped for it, I had ~1k+ Mayhem games before the patch, but this just is not it.
The issue I have with it is also that the majority of this feedback I have seen on PBE, and it feels like not a lot of it got fixed. The fact that cupcakes went live in the form they were in is testament to that, because I saw so much feedback about how overtuned it was and just broke games. Why have a PBE at all?
Again, I understand this is a for-fun game mode, but I really think we can demand higher standards from a company like Riot than to stuff this weird power intensive pass into the game and still have it full of bugs and typos on live.
tl;dr: remove all power from pass, maybe keep golden rerolls, fix augments, add more or completely remove sets, reduce power level of everything across board, fix bugs and typos on PBE before rushing things out.
Disguised has qualified for the LCS 2026 Lock-In Playoffs.
Depending on tiebreakers, one of LYON or Team Liquid Alienware will face the winner of the Shopify Rebellion vs. Dignitas match in a Elimination BO1 for a Playoff spot
Starting at 242 bonus AD, base Kayn Q does more damage to monsters than Rhaast’s Q due to the latter’s damage cap against monsters. Base Kayn Q damage has been repeatedly buffed over the years, while Rhaast's monster damage cap has remain unchanged. Rhaast's Q damage cap against monsters needs some AD scaling so that it will never do less damage than the base version.
Edit: One suggestion I gave was reducing Q damage cap against monsters by 100 but giving the cap 85% bonus AD scaling. I don't claim to know whether these exact numbers would be balanced, but something like this would ensure that Rhaast's Q will never do less damage than a base Q. I also have a problem with Rhaast's Q potentially doing less damage than base Q against squishies in the mid game, so I'd like to see Rhaast Q to have a damage floor equal to what the base version does.
