Since its release on July 20, League of Legends’ Arena gamemode has been a smash hit, with players flocking to Arena. Augments, Arena’s core power system, spice up fighting, but Riot Games had a couple in mind that didn’t make the cut.
Riot worked really hard to design several augments to guarantee that each game feels unique. Because each player can choose up to four augments in a single game, combining each one is a good play. However, as the Arena creators stated in a recent Reddit AMA, not all of these augments made it into the final version of Arena.
Riot revealed Augments that didn’t go live with Arena
First Augment: Shitake Happens Prismatic Augment. This entailed planting a lethal Mushroom someplace in the arena, but any player may step on it and receive damage. The person with the augment was able to spot the mushroom and avoid being hit.
Unfortunately, Riot withdrew it before it went live since it was thought to bend the fighting experience too much around it. Riot also attempted to include three smaller mushrooms across the map, but it fell short of expectations.
Second Augment: Flicker. Flicker allowed you to teleport to a random point on the map while remaining undetected. Unfortunately, it was cancelled since it offered little to no chance for counterplay and you had to be lucky because it teleported you at random.
Truly a contentious augment that some players like but others found uncomfortable to play against.
Last Augment: Pass-a-Fist. Pass-a-Fist prevents you from attacking enemies while increasing your ally’s attack damage or attack speed by 50% and causing their attacks to trigger your on-hit effects. This is often seen as a support Augment, and it would be ideal for enchanter and AD carry duos.
Ideally, you could buy on-hit items like Nashor’s Tooth or BOTRK and your duo would apply these effects without having those items. While an unbelievably cool idea, the development effort required for an augment like this with 166 champions would have been extremely challenging. As a result, it was not sent to the live servers.
There are probably additional augments that didn’t make it into the live version of Arena, but it’s always potential that they’ll make a comeback in the future.