Removing Critical Strike would fix a majority of the problems regarding Marksmen

AirKingNeo··5 votes·1,197 views

Critical strike chance has always caused this weird fluctuation between ADCs being incredibly weak until hitting their late game spike (which causes late game ADCs to have high winrates usually) or they're completely too broken as they damage well early and can still do their crit hyperscaling (which causes early game ADCs to have high winrates usually). Riot has always been enforcing a meta of ADCs building crit. Building armor pen? Nerfed that dead. Building rageblade? Nerfed dead. They refused to try to balance it. Just kill it off and force them into building Crit.

AD carries just have too little itemization options and are forced into things. They always have 2-3 crit items, 1 being IE, a lifesteal item (pick of 4), and a last whisper item. Mages build completely independent based on their champion. Swain and Aurelion build a tanky DPS mage. Annie builds an assassin mage. Viktor and TF build Lich assassin mage. Mages only have 2 items they're forced into: Deathcap and Void Staff. Bruisers have the requrements of 1-2 damage items (being Cleaver/Trinity, Ether Hydra, and BoRK) into unlimited tank options. Tanks just go Sunfire into the umlimited tank options plus Visage. But again, AD carries have to build the same thing: IE, Zeal, Zeal/ER, BT/BoRK, LW.

Image the build diversity if critical strike was removed. Miss Fortune would build armor pen to be an carrykiller who's main goal in fights is to get off the perfect ult. Lucian would be a spellweaver that does moderate damage to tanks but can still hurt them a bit while being a lane bully by building Trinity. Ezreal would probably lose Sheen interaction as new AD carry items would make him too powerful. Vayne wouldn't Q one shot and would be forced to be a tank shredder. Of course some champions would need adjustments. What should happen is:

Berserker Grieves are nerfed, so Lucidity Boots can compete with them.

Infinity Edge changes and gets a passive that increases Auto Attack damage by 25% (except onhit effects). (Would apply to champion ability onhits like Yasuo's Q, GP's Q, Ezreal, Q, Cait's passive, ect, but not Kayle's E or Yi's E.)

Ezreal's Q would no longer apply Sheen effects because of the above and below.

Essence Reaver would change into an item that grants 60 AD, 20% CDR, some mana, and missing mana regen. Buildpath would so change into BF Sword + (New Item that builds from 2 longswords + Sapphire Crystal. Grants lesser mana regen than ER and gives 10% CDR).

Yasuo's Q AD ratio is increased. Riot can go balance the rest of his kit from there.

Lucian's base AD would increase, but his ability damage would decrease a bit (helps with Trinity builds).

Rageblade would be reverted to what it was preseason 6, but keep the same build path. (Also attack speed onhit would be changes to 6% from 8% so it wouldn't give ~80% attack speed.)

There would be a new attack speed item that gives 70% attack speed and has a passive that applies onhit effects an additional time every 3rd hit. This item would also work on AD champions like Rageblade which is mostly hybrid. (Similar to today's rageblade, but it doesn't have stacking and isn't every 2nd hit.)

Hurricane would lose it's crit and just gain a bit more attack speed. Also the ratio on bolts would increase from 25% to 35% as it no longer crits. Also no longer builds out of Zeal.

Stattik Shiv's passive's chaining range would be doubled and gets to shock 1 more target. Also the passive gets a 40% bonus AS ratio (since it can't crit anymore).

Zeal is changed into building out of Dagger + Longsword for 1150 gold cost. It gives 15 AD, 15% attack speed, 5% movement speed, and now gives some onhit percent health physical damage. Every item that builds out of Zeal (except Hurricane since it doesn't build from it anymore) would enherit the percent health damage passive.

The reason behind the percent health damage idea is if tanks are killing in 7 attacks by a marksmen who crits, and meanwhile that same marksmen kills other marksmen in 3 hits from crits. However if they deal percent health damage (for some part), they would still kill the tank in 7 attacks, but they would kill the opposing marksmen in 5-7 as well. (Number of attacks is an arbitrary guess.) This would make Marksmen sources of DPS to kill tanks (mostly) while not quickly killing other marksmen (mostly). This would also make marksmen who build most armor pen (or this this scenario, not percent health damage) deal less to tanks as they wouldn't have crit to fall back onto.

10 Comments

CrazedPorcupine2 votes

wrong, removing crit is NOT the answer, making it a Restricted Unique item that can't be stacked up to 80% is what's important.

Crit is problematic because AS/Crit is Exponentially scaling, meaning that once an ADC completes their AS/Crit item, their power spike is heavier than any other class in the game.

Making Crit items unique, and changing AS/Crit items to just AS items would better balance it out. This is what Dota 2 does, because it opens up a lot more variety in build paths for Heroes that have built in Crit (mostly Melee champs) by allowing them to build more defensive options to allow them to get up close to a target.

Imagine if for all Ranged ADCs they had to choose between IE or ER, then the AS items only gave AS. It'd be a lot less problematic, and you wouldn't have people except a few select adcs who scale best with AS (Kalista) rushing a Crit Item with only a BF sword for damage because AS/Crit is so stupidly efficient.

AirKingNeo1 votes

Yes but you still makes every ADC build linear of 2-3 crit, lifesteal, and an LW. My idea lets them build more freely like mages.

CrazedPorcupine1 votes

Not really because it means that you can add in the ability for certain ADCs to have innate crit chance removing their ability to build crit items.

Tyrone Lannister1 votes

Crit is part of marksmen build because how else are you gonna deal with tanks? Not all of the ADC's have % max health in their kits and bork isnt efficient on most of them.

Maximum Morde2 votes

Team focus fire. Shouldn't be any one champion shredding tanks imo.

AirKingNeo1 votes

Zeal is changed into building out of Dagger + Longsword for 1150 gold cost. It gives 15 AD, 15% attack speed, 5% movement speed, and now gives some onhit percent health physical damage. Every item that builds out of Zeal (except Hurricane since it doesn't build from it anymore) would enherit the percent health damage passive.

Zeal items would get % health damage. If you think the new idea of a phantom hit item would break it and make everyone go it, you might be right. However AD carries like Caitlyn would rather go IE to enhance her passive.

EDIT: Plus not every Marksmen would be the TOP TOP TIER tank killer. Lucian would deal moderate damage as he deals more to a squishy. Vayne however, who's Q would probably be changed to grant attack speed or deal % HP damage, would be the best tank killer. MF would be the worst tank killer unless she ults them and they decide to face tank it all.

Teridax681 votes

Crit is a stat used only by one class, and perhaps an extra subclass of fighters. Tanks, by contrast, go up against four other players, most of which are likely not going to be marksmen or light fighters. For sure, they're meant to be tough to kill, and burstier classes should have a harder time killing them than DPS classes, but marksmen should not be the only tank killers in the game. Fighters are also meant to be great at DPS, and DPS is meant to be especially good against tanks. If you want crit to be essential to taking down tanky enemies, that's fine, but then you also need to accept fighters and other DPS non-marksmen getting percent health/true damage added onto their kits on practically every new release, since they need to be able to deal with tankiness and don't have great access to crit.

l Dárius l1 votes

yeah and we should give ie and essence reaver 140 ad each and double the attack speed on zeal items to make up for the 50% potential damage reduction in adcs because we all know champions like Rengar Darius Fiora Zed (anyone who likes ad) wont abuse them at all

AirKingNeo1 votes

Fiora would rather buy her standard items. She might buy IE, but that's it.

Rengar buys ghostblade which is also 60 AD and 20 lethality. He doesn't use mana.

Zed doesn't use mana and wants lethality.

Rengar already builds IE.

I never mentioned increasing attack speed on Zeal items.

Teridax681 votes

While I think marksmen would have to receive fairly significant changes, and crit should probably stay in some smaller, different form, I agree that it's not healthy for the game in its current state. It provides a lot of power, but no real gameplay, as its impact is purely RNG-dependent, which also makes it tremendously difficult to design around, besides just slapping on crit scalings to abilities. It's also largely responsible for making a lot of marksmen far too bursty, as in the case of Vayne's 420% AD Q crit, and is still tremendously frustrating when players get lucky crits early in the laning phase (one of the reasons why Tryndamere feels so horrible to play against, for example). It also forces a carry curve on marksmen when we're at a stage where many of them are capable, sometimes even dominant, in the early game, and at this point I don't think it's really worth making them scale cubically when everyone else scales quadratically with their own stat combination.

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