Riot Games announced on May 4 that ARAM: Mayhem will change in Season 2 Act 2 when Patch 26.12 rolls out, phasing Traits out of the mode and adding roughly 50 new Augments, including a new class called Ability Augments and a standalone Stackasaurus.
Riot Games framed the shift as a design reset for Mayhem: Traits, which the studio introduced in the past season, will be removed from the system and some of those effects will return as standalone Augments instead.
The scale matters: Riot said about 50 new Augments will arrive with the update, and that late-game stacking effects will remain available as standalone Augments. Among the named changes, Riot Games said Stackasaurus will become a standalone Augment. The studio also said the update will focus Augments on enhancing champion fantasy and expanding the kinds of Augments it can offer.
Riot spelled out why it is changing course. The company said Augments that provide the same effect across the board can start to get stale over time, and that more of the new Augments will directly enhance champion fantasy so some Augments feel like they are worth building around. Riot also said it looked at the most requested Augments across the Mayhem community when deciding what to add.
Context: Traits were introduced as part of the Mayhem system in the past season as an experiment in broad, mode-wide modifiers. The developer video and official blog post released May 4 present this update as part of Riot Games’ broader goal to keep Mayhem feeling fresh through rotating and evolving systems.
The tension in Riot’s plan is explicit in its own words: the company is taking away a system it only added one season ago because uniform, across-the-board effects can grow stale, even as it reintroduces some of those same effects in a different form. Riot is promising deeper, champion-focused Augments and expanding the toolkit with Ability Augments, but phasing Traits risks disappointing players who enjoyed the simplicity or spectacle of the previous system.
What happens next is straightforward. In Patch 26.12, arriving with Season 2 Act 2, Traits will be phased out of Mayhem and the roughly 50 Augments Riot described — including Ability Augments and Stackasaurus as a standalone — will be available for players to try. Riot has signaled it will continue to iterate on Mayhem by rotating and evolving systems to preserve freshness.
Conclusion: Riot Games is trading a single, mode-wide layer for a wider, more varied set of Augments that aim to highlight individual champions and make specific Augments feel build-worthy; by pushing Ability Augments and converting some Traits into standalone Augments, Riot is betting that variety and champion-focused tools will keep ARAM: Mayhem more interesting than the Traits system it introduced last season.
