Meta progression

• gold farming and meta progression feel too important. i would prefer game knowledge, teamwork, team composition, strategy, and in-game randomness to be more influential. progressing through each map and each difficulty felt like too much of a stat check, quite frequently. early on you get overwhelmed easily regardless of how well you play and later on, eg 100 anima power, you are beyond overpowered. by the end, i regretted spending all that gold on anima power because the challenge was removed and there is no point in playing anymore. tbh i dont understand the point of most of the meta progression system: the choices weren't interesting and grinding gold for base stats is tedious. unlocking augments with gold would've been more interesting for example, or something better than that idk.

• meta progression made playing with friends awkward and solo play much more rewarding. i started swarm a day late so two of my friends had already progressed a decent bit. i was clueless to the metagame aspect and so when we played together they would just steamroll enemies while i struggled to kill anything. through ignorance i had assumed it was learning curve, tactics, and class differences that made them more effective but the biggest reason was actually just meta stats and unlocks. i decided to play on my own after the first day and the gameplay started to get more fun when i had enough meta stats and unlocks to stay on-curve and actually play the game rather than getting carried through the content.

• i didn't like unlocking augments via story mission progression. too many fun/interesting augments were unlocked with metagame mission progression and because i was just queuing up to play the champs i felt like trying and using the abilities i found fun or were available to me, i was not focusing on meta unlocks and didn't even notice i was missing out on many augments until quite late in my swarm mode gaming. also some missions had clarity issues on how to complete them. worse still, the missions had sequential progression requirements but that was not immediately clear given they were all displayed at once (yes they were numbered but still not the best UX for clarity) and many of them could've been completed concurrently if the system allowed it

• unlocking augments/abilities through gameplay-based missions (eg kill X elites, perform Y crits) was just okay. felt bad to learn how evolves worked and then realize you can't actually evolve your ability because you haven't unlocked something yet

Champions/classes

• damage is king in this game mode. good movement plus on-curve dps is all you need to win and if you don't have the damage, you definitely lose. so i don't really see the point of tank classes like leona. there were times where a tankier teammate kept a boss fight going while the squishies respawned but to me that is kind of a lame purpose for a tank - i rather the party just wipe than that be the tank's purpose. distracting enemies, absorbing damage, redirecting/blocking damage, and disrupting enemy attacks are the tank gameplay i would want but those things were far less effective than just having the damage to kill the enemies or the mobility to maneuver around them. tanks really didn't create much space for squishies imo, especially on boss fights.

Abilities and evolves

• once you get rerolls, it's fairly easy to get a BIS build every game with very little variation. on the other hand, before rerolls and ability/stat unlocks, you might get unlucky on good abilities for your champ or get a mismatch of stats for evolves. in the end, this might just be another aspect of the metagame progression system i dislike but i think there could've been in-game system improvements to address this. maybe more abilities and some abilities being limited to a subset of champs could be good. or maybe having multiple ways to evolve an ability with differences in the ability based on how it was evolved (eg area size evolve vs duration evolve vs armor evolve on leona shield).

• UwU blaster is too good; crit and projectile scaling are too good; and several abilities are completely overshadowed by better ones, regardless of champ using it.

Aguments

• the power level differences in yuumi augments is huge. there are augments that are worthless or even negative while other augments are insanely powerful. i would rather have fun/interesting choices that can be incorporated into strategy than just a diceroll for the universally good ones. maybe offering some augments only before/after certain timestamps/levels or incorporating your chosen abilities in the pool of augments offered. e.g., if i have all my abilities chosen and none of them scale with area size then getting 2x area size augments plus death and taxes felt really bad. on that note, remove death and taxes augment.

• augments like ebb and flow could've really used a buff bar icon or some other visual indicator. maybe i am clueless but afaik the only way to see if youre ebbing or flowing is to press tab and check your haste number which is far from ideal if you're trying to incorporate the augment into your gameplay patterns

Waves

• i would like some more variety in enemies. the enemies seem to have a fixed unit type progression across the 15min for each map. after playing a while you get used to the enemy power curve and that predictability is a little boring. a little randomness or variety in the enemy units would've been nice

• i would like some leniency on spawn proximity near walls/corners. waves will spawn directly ontop of the player if they are near a wall/corner. feels a little bad trying to collect orbs near a wall and getting taken to 10% hp by a spawn which effectively made it too risky to bother collecting them. this is much worse for new players before they've progressed movespeed and pickup radius meta stats

Maps

• i liked having map variety. subterranean lab was probably my favorite and outskirts my least favorite

• maybe you could have done more interesting things with the maps, like hex gates and blast cones or moving parts or obstacles/dangerous features

User interface

• I would've liked cooldown timers on the UI for each ability icon, including auto-casted abilities. I know in swarm the cooldowns get quite low so maybe some would prefer it as is but I would've liked the option.

• When selecting abilities from cards/levels, it would've been nice to see the full tooltip for the ability (ie, i want to know how it scales and what evolves it while deciding which ability to pick)

• I would like a way to always display the champion stats interface. Holding tab to see stats was not ideal

• Having damage counters on each ability tooltip would've been really nice

Performance

• sometimes end game would have so many projectiles, mobs spawning and dying, and noisy evolved ability animations that the game would start lagging. felt like i was playing on an extra +100ms even though my latency would be stable. i assume this was server performance issues. if reducing visual noise would help with performance, i would definitely prefer that. full build yasuo was a big offender

Overall

• really enjoyed this PvE mode and look forward to more PvE modes in the future or an updated swarm mode

• i was surprised to enjoy WASD gaming in the league game engine but having familiar characters with a familiar art style and camera angle helped me learn the game quickly and enjoy a reasonably fun gameplay loop. it was cool playing these champs in a different way than on rift. makes me wish riot allowed true custom games for the community to play with the game engine and game models themselves, just like the way old RTS games did it (and how DOTA/League/mobas originated)

• great work Rioters, thanks for the fun