User blog:YourPrivateNightmare/A comprehensive guide on how to ARAM (Part 1)

Ahoy community, it's YPN with another very relevant blog post. This time it concerns the new ARAM map (well...."new"...). I played several times on this map now and I start to notice that even good players start to act like braindead there just becasue they think tactics "aren't needed" on this map. FALSE! The Howling Abyss does need tactics...in fact it needs different tactics than the other maps

"But YPN, ARAM exists so long as a custom game-mode, why do you think people don't know how to play it?"

Shut up, it has always been a custom mod...which means that people didn't bother to develop tactics there, because it didn't matter anyway. It was just for fun. Now it's different. Now it's an actual gamemode and so people need to start taking it seriously (at least partially).

So without any further delay, let's start with what I found out about ARAM:

=The Goal=

The general goal on ARAM is to win (no shit, Sherlock?). However, to achieve this, you need to get rid of the Nexus. therefore ARAM is entirely about pushing turrets. This is what many people don't get. The following things DO NOT necessarily decide who wins the game: So to repeat myself: TURRETS are the important thing.
 * Farm (you can't farm with 4 other people next to you anyway)
 * Kills (yes, you hear right, it doesn't matter how many goddamn kills you got, if you lose your turrets)
 * OP-ness (most of the regular "op" champs (, ,...) aren't really much of a help on this map and get outplayed by other ones....but about that later)

=General tactics=

Now it get's interesting. What possible important tactics could there be? A WHOLE F***ING LOT!

1) Poking
As mentioned before, your ultimate goal is to push turrets...but you cannot push if the whole enemy team is still there to defend it...you need to get rid of them...but you can't do that because they still have a turret. So what do you do? You poke them, harrass them, shove spears up their filthy little asses...sorry got carried away....Anyways, the thing is...you can't attack the turret if 5 full health enemies are camping there...so you only have to damage them to the point where they can no longer defend without risking to die. Then you can get free hits on the tower and proceed to the nexus. This brings us to important rule number one: Range is important.

2) Kills
The next point is the kills. Of course you want to kill your enemies, but here it gets tricky. ARAM offers no recall or fountain heal...you only have those pathetic health relics. Now let's imagine a scenario: It's 0-0 and Team A decides to get First Blood and engages on Team B who now tries to counter this attack. In this process Team A manages to get FB with the sue of many Summoner Spells...with everyone below 50% health they retreat to their turret to remain defensive...Nothing wrong about that? FALSE! Now Team A is weakened and being held under pressure by poking through Team B's Health relics don't provide enough sustain and so they have to retreat and leave their tower to the brutal attacks of Team B's Carries. Therfore we learn our second rule: A kill is not worth it if you take too much damage in the progress (at least not in the early stages).

3) Tactical deaths
The last point is avbout tactical deaths. On ARAM you can't recall or buy stuff unless you die. Therefore dying is important to get better items. You can die in many ways:
 * You can just get killed by an enemy assault
 * You can try to get executed
 * And you can (the best way) try to make your death as painful for the enemy team as possible (by damaging their healthbars or their turrets)

Do not try to 10HP-escape someone if it doesn't benefit your team by giving them a kill. If you are low health and out of mana then just get yourself killed and come back refreshed and with new items. Staying alive with low health is mostly useless. So we learn our third rule: Dying is an essential part of winning.

Conclusion
So to sum up our rules:
 * Range is important (have at least 2 ranged champions or champions with ranged abilities)
 * Only safe kills are good kills
 * You need to die at some point
 * AND MOST IMPORTANT: TURRETS WIN THE F***ING GAME, NOT DEAD PEOPLE!

Note that these rules are mostly for the early stages of an ARAM match. In late game, kills DO matter a lot more, but still it's better to play safe, than to suicide just to kill a.

Of course these are not the only important things on ARAM, but it's too mcuh to write in one blog so you'll have to wait for PART 2, which will be looking at team compositions, viable champions and probably more stuff I haven't thought of yet. Stay tuned and don't forget to write your highly intelectual comments for we shall have wise discussions.

To the escape pod, I regret nothing!