ARAM, or All Random All Middle has its origins firmly ingrained in the League of legends community given its birth as a fun community game mode that Riot eventually made into its own official game mode with its own Field of Justice (The Howling Abyss). However, many players to this day seem to ignore the map and game mode and some people seem to have assumed a mentality where they think it is a waste of time. However, I am one who has reaped the benefits of adding ARAM into my playing rotation and in this piece, I will document 4 reasons why you should consider doing the same if expanding your LoL arsenal of knowledge in the pursuit of LP is your goal.

New Picks

One part of the whole ARAM setup is all the champions played are chosen at random from the available pool at that time which means you are physically unable to pick your bread-and-butter champions 99% of the time. It is this fact that drives why you should be playing ARAM from time to time, since you aren’t playing your regular champion pool you are now forced onto a champion that is new to you and it is this fact that opens the door for new champion scouting. Now sometimes you will get a champion who is completely useless to you and you will learn nothing other than, “I never want to play this champion ever again” (I’m totally not screaming in Ivern with no camps to farm). But you will have occasions where you discover something that you might want to bring to your ranked games because you deem it underrated or you may even find something that is fun that you might want to try in a five-man setup with friends (my mind goes to full ability haste Thresh). And this potential for new picks is worth the trade off that it takes to play ARAM.

Great Warm Up

Coming from a background in coaching traditional sports, this is a principle that apply in my real life and therefore my League of Legends life on a regular basis. I would never go into a Field Hockey match without warming up first and it should be the same with ranked games of LoL, and this is where ARAM comes in, since ARAM games have a lower average game time by quite a margin and feature almost non-stop intense gameplay (in the form of teamfighting and sieging) it makes this game mode ideal to get your fingers moving and your headspace focused for some League. So instead of spending a full game in a normal game to just get the blood flowing in the fingers and cranium, spending sightly less time but at a higher intensity may be a better option, a better option called ARAM.

Know Your Enemy

As many of the wisest people to ever exist have quoted ‘Knowledge is Power,’ and of course this is true for LoL as well. Now I hear you ask: But how does this apply to ARAM, I’m playing the champions I’m probably going to end up facing! To answer that I refer you to the works of arguable the greatest military general of all time, Sun Tzu. To paraphrase he teaches that to truly be able to beat your enemy you must know your enemy, and this is where ARAM comes in, through having to play the very champions you will face later you get information on them, when they are weaker, when they are stronger. All information which you can then reverse engineer to ensure their demise in your ranked endeavours. This potential for a new arrow in your quiver may make playing some ARAM worth it.

De-Tilt

Now the last few points have been, well, try hard. LoL is supposed to be fun, right? And this is a point that even I forget from time to time (Thankfully, I have friends in my local Irish scene who remind me of that). But, anyway back to the point, one of my personal favourite things about ARAM is the absolute chaos that the constant fighting brings to the table, and it is chaos, but chaos can be thoroughly enjoyable and can, humbly, say that some of my favourite moments in all my time playing have come from this majestic game mode (flashbacks to Orianna Alistar ball carrier wombo combos bring a grin to my face). Now whilst keeping lol fun is not a strategic advantage so to say, but it keeps your mentality strong and as we have all seen in solo queue, a strong mental is a key component to winning more games, and it is for this reason that it may be worth adding ARAM to your League of Legends routine.

Conclusion

There it is, four reasons why you should consider visiting the Howling Abyss from time to time in your pursuit of personal better League of Legends play and the ranked LP gains that come with it, now remember that if you’re using it to scout new picks, trade patterns, or even other types of information that you do need to play for that effect and think about what you and your opponents to get that deeper level of understanding. With that I wish you all the highest enjoyment on the single laned field of justice, and as always GL, HF, and GG!