Tristana may be the first AD Carry many summoners play, thanks to being free, but she hasn’t been a professionally played AD Carry for years. However, in the last 2 weeks, she has seen a sudden resurgence. The core gameplay team has been hitting her with small usability buffs over time, but the ultimate catalyst was the ADC itemization rework in patch 4.10.
4.10 Patch
Tristana has a traditionally weak midgame. This was exacerbated by Bloodthirster being the dominant item, as it is an extremely strong midgame item which can snowball lanes thanks to its stacking mechanic. Worse for her, Bloodthirster works best on AD Carries with AD ratios on their spells, of which Tristana has none. As a result, with everybody rushing Bloodthirster, Tristana was left out in the cold.
In the 4.10 patch, a number of AD Carry items were changed, making room for new AD Carries. Essentially, the two strong builds are an auto-attack, teamfight oriented build - Infinity Edge + Statikk Shiv or Phantom Dancer - and an isolation, chase oriented build - Blade of the Ruined King + Youmuu’s Ghostblade. (The 4.10 patch has been broken down extensively here.)
Now that Infinity Edge is a dominant starting item, lategame paradigm AD Carries can shine again, and none does better than Tristana.
High Damage, High Range, High Altitude
What makes the IE build-path so good on Tristana? Tristana has one of the highest damage outputs of any champions, at the highest range, and has the mobility and self-peel to stay alive through many threats.
At level 18, Tristana has higher range than Caitlyn, and is outranged only by low mobility AD Carries like Kog’Maw, Jinx, and Twitch. On top of that, she has one of the strongest attack-speed steroids in the game, Rapid Fire, which gives her a whopping 90% a bonus attack speed, something which can again only be compared to low mobility champions like Kog’Maw, Jinx, and Twitch (or low range champions like Quinn and Graves).
This gives her pretty strong damage from a huge distance, allowing her to act as a sort of artillery battery for her team. Note how Complexity’s RobertxLee, as Tristana, is able to put out consistent damage from off the screen for the start of the fight. Given how low he was to start the fight, this range is crucial.
However, add her reset-based mobility and Tristana becomes a force to be reckoned with. First, she is well able to use her jumps as repositioning tools, making her very hard for any team to dive onto. Notice how, in this fight, Doublelift is able to use his jump to get away twice, first to get away from Twitch, then again to elude Shyvana’s followup after he bursts down the Plague Rat.
However, in the right circumstances, her jump can also be used offensively. In part, this is due to its high early and mid-game magic damage, something which Vasilii uses to great effect towards the end of this fight.
However, more importantly, it can put you in range to hit a target you may otherwise have been too distant from, while still keeping you isolated from dive targets. Watch as Vasilli stays on the outside of the fight to take down the support, then jumps behind the teamfight to continue putting damage onto the AD Carry. Offensive hops for damage can be risky, however, and Tristana dies securing the kill on the AD Carry.
Offensive Rocket Jumps are much safer in small skirmishes, as the incoming damage is lessened. Here, Vasilii stays on the outside of the fight until Jarvan goes down, at which point he jumps into both Lucian and Gragas, almost picking up both kills thanks to offensive positioning made possible by his jumps.
Combining offensive and defensive jumps, Tristana can become an absolute monster. RobertxLee manages to jump a whopping fourtimes during this teamfight. First, he jumps into the fight to get in range to attack Helios, knowing that the rest of EG is too far away to followup. Once he has the kill, he jumps onto the knocked up Syndra, flashing away the moment her CC ends so as to avoid her damage. From there, he jumps away to avoid any CC from Braum, abusing his range to hit the Twitch despite Braum being the closest target. After killing Braum, he jumps back in onto Innox’s Jax, only narrowly missing the kill thanks to a quick-thinking Leap Strike.
The amount of mobility Tristana has scales with the amount of damage she and her team has; no kills means no resets, and can spell doom for her. It’s crucial to get the kill on offensive jumps, and jumping early is a critical Tristana error. Late game, her auto-attacks do more damage than her jump, and a common mistake of Tristana players is jumping for damage when they could simply keep auto-attacking.
Buster Times
As if Tristana didn’t have enough ways to avoid the enemy team, her ultimate can serve as a last-ditch effort at protection. We saw that Vasilii use the burst earlier on Doublelift’s Twitch so that he could reset his jump to escape Seraph’s Shyvana. However, the ultimate can also simply be used to push a team away and disengage. Watch as Vasilii uses Buster Shot to knock away three members of EG, allowing LMQ to turn onto the now isolated Innox
Of course, that burst can also be used to net quick kills in lane, preventing any retaliatory damage.
All of this adds up to make Tristana a late game terror, with more combined damage, range, and mobility than most AD Carries in the late game, so long as you can make it there. Much has been made of the ability of Caitlyn to stay at the back of a fight and output damage thanks to her range and .90 caliber net, but Tristana can outshine even her at that role, thanks to her attack speed steroid, slightly higher range, and potentially spammable mobility. North American teams have shown that they can make it there, with Complexity and LMQ both going 2-0 with Tristana in games that averaged 47.2 minutes, compared to the Week 7 average of 40.8 minutes and the Summer Split average of 39.3 minutes.
All of this may mean a dawn of a different era for team compositions. A team with a talented enough AD Carry can afford to hold off on early-mid game objectives, and intentionally draw the game out to the late game, where Tristana can abuse her positioning to win teamfights. Complexity and LMQ have already led the way; will other teams follow suit?
Jinx maximun range is 700 while Tristana should be about 703 at level 18, so Tristana has longer range (contrary to the article) (arguably, only at 18, so Jinx range is overall better)
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