Considerations on bruiser and mages, and ideas for the ADC rework

Hi @ all

I've been wanting to write this post for a while now, and knowing a rework on ADCs is coming in the next months (maybe this fall?), I think now is a good moment.

Disclaimer: I'm not a high-level player, I'm unranked, but I've been playing LoL since S1, and quite regularly since Season 3. I'm no expert, but I've been in LoL for a while now.

If you want to skip the lengthy introduction, scroll down to the four asterisks

First, let me say I like how Riot is approaching champion releases and reworks as of lately: champions with clear strengths and clear weaknesses, who fill a distinct niche and bring something new and different to each game they participate in. I know it doesn't always work out, but at least I appreciate that you are trying. Juggernauts are the most recent and obvious example: you first identified a class of champions who struggle in the game: juggernauts are champs identified by high resilience and lack of mobility and who contribute to fights mostly with damage rather than CC. Within this category, you got rid of unnecessary features and focussed on the class' strengths (damage, tankyness) and weaknesses (lack of mobility), and tried to build distinct identities for each champion from there. Again, I'm not here to discuss the result, but that's the intention behind the reworks, as far as I got it. I think this is a good approach because if two or more champion are too similar in what they do, the problem is that you can tell which one is the best at doing it, and then that champion gets played and the others don't. Diversity creates niche situations where even if two champions belong to the same class, sometimes one champ is the better choice, sometimes the other.

A few days ago I read a comment about taking a similar approach with mages. This made me frown, as I think mages are much better defined and have much greater variety than other classes. This is mostly because of what defines mages: skills. Mages are champions who contribute to the game mostly with their skills, and skills have a ton of parameters and features that can be used to make them different from each other: damage vs utility vs CC, spammy (low cost, low CD) vs more impactful but costly, burst vs dps, single target vs aoe, long vs short range, mobile vs immobile... Mages have a great variety, we have burst champs (Syndra, Annie), long range poke champs (Xerath, Ziggs), short range dps machines (swain), short range CC machines (Lissandra), hybrids (Zyra, Malzahar) and the list goes on and on. And I'm not even taking into consideration the unique effects you can have with spells (e.g. Anivia's wall, Bard's magical journey, Lissandra's built-in Zhonia,...).

So, what's the problem with bruisers and juggernauts*, compared to mages? That bruisers mostly need to deal damage; and most damage they do comes from melee auto attacks. Sure, they still have differences (Irelia is a late-game monster, Renekton is a lane bully), but their job boils down to reaching an enemy carry and zoning/killing them. This means that at any given time, only 1-2 bruisers/juggernauts get a lot of play, while all others are outclassed. And given that the first and more important tool through which juggernauts and bruisers do their job are auto attacks, it's difficult to create variety, at least directly: autoattacks lack the sheer number of parameters that make skills so potentially different from each other. Autoattacks' features are damage, attack speed, critical strike chance, range (are there more? maybe I'm missing something). The first three are mostly gained from items, I'd hardly say they can be distinctive for a champion. An range, well... these champs are all melee.

**** This lends me to ADCs, finally. Unfortunately, this is also the part where my ideas get more murky. I think the problem with ADCs diversity currently is the exact same problem that bruisers have, and the reasons are similar. ADCs even more than bruisers are defined by their autoattacks. When I think what the differences between the ADCs are, these come to my mind: long range vs short range, lane bully vs late-game hypercarry, autoattack-based vs caster, mobile vs immobile, single-target vs aoe. Also, while each champion has 4 skills (not counting passives and skills with more uses), each champ has only one way they autoattack (except some very rare exceptions). Another problem is itemization. While mages have many stats they can build and each mage synergizes better with some stats than others (flat AP vs penetration, flat mana vs mana regeneration, CDR/utility vs more AP,...), ADCs just need to build damage and damage multipliers. With the AP item rework, you made the amount of AP given by each item more similar, thus making the players' choice about the unique features of the items rather than the raw power they can get.

I think when you are going to rework ADCs and ADC items, you should first take into consideration what makes each marksman different from the others, and working from there. Think of what skills you can give to ADCs that interact with/change how they autoattack, so that you create variety through skills (that's what you did with Juggernauts, by the way). Try to take the chance to work on autoattacks at their core, add more levers to balance them and add variety. Maybe you could make an item that affects range? Maybe you could make Runaan's hurricane more worth (as an item that ADC do aoe damage)? Maybe you could help caster ADCs or immobile champs? You could also work on the items the same way you did for mages: make the raw damage given by each idem more similar, and let the players' chose according to the passives/unique features of the item rather than to how much more damage they will be able to do.

I'm aware this post is more an analysis and some ideas rather than clear solutions, but it's important for me to at least have brought this thoughts to your attention, and maybe in the comments there could be some good discussion.

Thank you if you read through all this, it took me way more time and energies than I had planned to write this together xD

See you on the fields of justice.

* since juggernauts are the immobile "off-tanks" who mostly deal damage, I suppose bruisers are the mobile "off-tanks" who deal damage. At least that's how I use the term in this topic, to distinguish champs like Irelia, Renekton, Pantheon from champions like Garen or Nasus.