Top Strategies for using your Ban in Live Arena

One of the biggest challenges in Live Arena that people are coming across, is team selection, or more so, your opponents teams, and who to ban, when faced with several options that will be fighting you it can be a bit overwhelming with knowing who to remove from the fight.

There are many different options that you can consider getting rid of in the majority of team compositions, and today we’re going to break down the best and most commonly picked champion bans.

Warlord and Yumeko are both incredibly common champions in the arena meta and for good reason, if they manage to get a turn they can completely nullify your entire team by fully locking out your cooldown skills, resulting in you only being able to use your basic attacks.

Removing these instantly from team selection is the easiest decision to make, as they alone can and will cost you a fight.

In the lower ends of arena, you may run into players using Basher as an alternative to this, however he is nowhere near as strong.

Harima brings some major threats to any opposing team, with the capability of bringing some serious damage, Harima also completely ruins the enemy damage by reducing all ignore defence effects by 50%, this is absolutely massive, especially when all serious damage dealers will be built in Savage, Lethal or have built-in Ignore Defense in their kit. 

Not only does Harima bring insane damage, she also has the ability to provoke Demonspawn Champions, which cannot be blocked or resisted, and given the fact that Demonspawn Champions make up a large part of the meta with champions such as Duchess Lilitu and Prince Kymar, this is massively effective.

While the presence of tank-based teams in arena is massive, you will occasionally bump into Speed based teams, especially in the lower ranks due to players access to champions, if you are facing a team that is clearly going for a speed into damage, banning their speed champion/turn meter booster, such as Arbiter, Lyssandra, or even Epics like Gorgorab, will completely ruin their plans, however, it is important to be mindful that if they are using multiple speed based champions, they may still be able to go first and take you out before you take a turn.

Whilst Mortu is massively effective in Classic Arena, he’s not used nearly as much in Live arena, but in the event that you do come across an enemy using Mortu-Macaab and you have a team that consists of Champions that have AOE A1 abilities, you may want to get rid of the Mortu-Macaab to prevent triggering his Peril skill, if you do not have AOE A1 abilities, then you can keep the Mortu-Macaab in the fight and simply ignore hitting him with any skills till you need to kill him last. 

The first Champions that come to mind with the idea of disruption are Tormin the Cold, Hegemon, and potentially Valkyrie, as they all have the ability to ruin your teams turn-order, whether that be in the form of hard control like Hegemon’s block active skills and Tormin’s Freeze and Provokes, or Valkyrie interrupting your turn meter and cutting in front of your team, they can be incredibly annoying.

Often when you’re facing an enemy Tormin you will want to use a fast, [Block Debuffs] champion, for example Siphi the Lost Bride, however it is important to realize that players who are picking Tormin would likely ban your Siphi to leave you exposed, meaning you will want to counter-ban their Tormin to not put you on the back foot.

Hegemon can be relatively ignored if you are running Champions in stoneskin, or a fast cleanser that can get rid of the debuffs, but if not, you may want to consider banning him. As for Valkyrie, unless you are running an all-out speed team, there’s very little reason to get rid of Valkyrie as she won’t harm you enough otherwise. 

Taras and Marichka have taken the meta by storm, and what a pair they are, even alone these Champions can completely ruin opponents, but if you are in the situation where you are facing the pair of them, you will want to get rid of Taras in most situations, Taras gains a huge amount of damage when paired with Marichka by retaliating any time she is hit, and also joining in with her A1 attacks, while Marichka alone is more of an annoyance than a threat, she will make the fights take longer rather than being your demise. 

Since Ultimate Deathknight was a free Champion that everyone had access to, you can almost guarantee you’ll meet lots of them in Live Arena, since not only was he free, but he’s just incredibly good in a defensive setup, especially when facing enemies that are using Single-target based attacks.

One of the best damage options in Live Arena, is Rotos the Lost Groom, but the presence of Ultimate Deathknight makes him almost useless, so in the situation that you are using Rotos or another single target damage dealer, and your opponent picks Ultimate Deathknight – this is likely who you want to ban as otherwise you will not be able to deal damage to the enemy team.

Sometimes you’ll find opponents who only bring ONE win condition (way of actually killing you in arena), you can quite easily nullify their entire threat by banning it, leaving them with just a group of supports that will not pose much of a threat to your team, other than the fact that they may be a pain to kill.

However, often people will draft two damage dealers into their team to prevent this from happening, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

We all know revivers can be incredibly annoying in the arena, even more so when they’re incredibly defensive ones that are tough to kill, and really have no counter – such as Duchess Lilitu, Siphi the Lost Bride, and Pythion. 

If these are the heart of your enemy team, and the only way they’re going to stay alive, you may want to ban them to remove that hassle, allowing for a quick easy win. 

More often than not however, one of the options above at the very least will be picked alongside two revivers, in which case you’ll have to handle a long-drawn out fight. 

Nekhret is a great way of keeping your damage dealers alive, with the ally protection and huge shield, if you are facing an enemy that has not got a huge deal of threat outside of keeping their damage dealers alive through a Nekhret, it may be a smart idea to remove them from the fight to make the fight simpler. 

There are so many different ways you can approach Live arena, but ultimately, these are the best ways that we know of currently to deal with the banning part of the draft, as things develop and people come up with new ideas in arena, or even as new champions are added this may change. 

While all of the champions listed may not be relevant, this approach can be applied to any level of the game.