Official details revealed about the upcoming new League of Legends "Brawl" mode

In a recent Reddit AMA, Riot Games revealed a ton of details about the upcoming new "Brawl" mode for League of Legends.

The Brawl mode is a fast-paced, explosive 10-minute competition. Two teams of five choose their favorite heroes and continue to kill enemies in a small map, aiming to reduce the opponent's shared health bar. The first team to reduce it wins.

Unlike traditional maps, the entire team shares a total health bar, which means that every death affects the entire team, making the pace faster, the pressure higher, and more exciting.

Many players are concerned about whether heroes such as Kassadin, Nasus, Veigar, and Smodeus, who rely on late-game development or stacking, are still "playable" in the 10-minute mode.

In response, Riot software engineer Fogcloud said: "This mode has a specific built-in balance mechanism like ARAM, Nexus Blitz, etc., so the traditional development curve does not have such a big impact on the game. But some heroes with strong built-in growth mechanisms (such as Veigar and Nasus) still need some time to stack before they can really play."

Riot's QA engineer also added details about the rhythm: "We have significantly adjusted the passive experience and gold gains to ensure that players can experience the complete hero growth process in a short period of time. In internal testing, most players can make about 5 pieces of equipment within 10 minutes, and the overall rhythm feels just right. Of course, the values may still be adjusted, and we will also listen to the feedback from players after actual experience."

AzuBK, head of game mode design at Riot, also revealed that although Brawl is closer to the gameplay of Summoner's Rift than ARAM (players can return to the city, recover health, and the rhythm strategy is more diverse), they will still carry out hero-specific balance for this mode.

“We will make special adjustments for some heroes like ARAM. Overall, Brawl is more like a regular game than ARAM, so we don’t expect too many extremely unbalanced heroes, but we are already considering pre-weakening or strengthening some obviously strong characters.”

The launch time has not yet been determined, but Riot said it is already in the active debugging stage and will not be far from the official launch.