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Fighter Rework: Remove Critical Strike Chance on Ranged Champions

Fluppets·7/28/2015, 8:58:27 AM·25 votes·36,843 views

The main problem with Fighters is they share or can share alot of the items ADCs use. It is really hard if not impossible to make items that benefit Fighters but ADC's cant (ab)use better or vice-versa.

I have an idea, but it is quite radical and requires a complete item and maybe even kit/balance overhaul. However I think it has alot of benefits.

Remove Critical Strike Chance for Ranged Attacks.

  • Gives Melee fighters a distinct characteristic: If they get close they have a chance to deal extra damage (with less AD investment + high risk/reward).
  • Emphasises Ranged Marksmen's characteristic of dealing sustained, constant and reliable damage. (opposed to RNG/Bursty).
  • Removes alot of the problems with crossover itemization and abuse cases.

This will allow fighters to make item choices balancing damage (prioritising ARpen + Crit chance) with tank + chase items so they can get to melee range, deal their damage, apply their CC and ARpen.

Rather than focusing how Fighters get close and stick to a target ( ), I would focus on how they get rewarded for getting close and how it compares to champions that dont need to get close (ie: ADC's).

Fighters would be able to get a crit item for their (RNG) damage, get some tank + sticky items and Armor shred. In turn Armor shred should be more expensive for ADC's, thus requiring Fighters in the late game to provide Armor shred and peel power for the ADC's while not making their damage obsolete. In return ADC's should get better scaling due to the removal of Crit chance.

With Yasuo and the Ashe rework, you can already see Riot testing this direction.

67 Comments

RiotMeddler7/28/2015, 9:19:56 AM30 votes

We're on the same page when it comes to fighters and ADC item overlap, which makes it difficult to offer effects that are an appropriate fit for one class, but not the other. Removing ranged crit's not the solution we're trying out however, we feel that does add some important value to the ADC role. What we're looking into instead for fighters are items that:

  • Are a combination of offensive/defensive effects and therefore generally of noticeably lower appeal to ADCs who want to go full offense (e.g. the revised Black Cleaver which has a significant part of its budget spent on health, something fighters are fine with, but ADCs often aren't).
  • Offer additional rewards when combined with other defensive/partially defensive items (Atma's Impaler back in the day was an example of this sort of effect. It did have some other issues and so we felt we had to remove it, we believe there may be some variants on the concept that work better however).
  • Help melee champions engage in a fight, or stick to targets better once in a fight, in ways that aren't as consistently useful or accessible on ranged champions (Randuin's and Phage are good examples of this category) .

We're currently working on some items using the above approaches, which are intended in part to be good fits on heavy, immobile fighters like Garen, Darius, Udyr etc. More details to follow sometime pretty soon (patch 5.16 or 5.17 at a guess, so potentially hitting PBE 1-3 weeks from now, depending on how the rest of the work goes).

Dr Poro7/28/2015, 9:14:55 AM8 votes

What they should've done 3 seasons ago is replacing crit chance with an AA dmg amplifier. It has the same effect, just removes the RNG part. Crit could still exist in some abilities where you get a 100% chance to crit, like Pant.

This means that a few abilities that happen at the event of a crit need to be reworked, Like Tryndamere's E cdr. Also Ashe's passive would probably need a slight change (as she already has the AA dmg amp, but only on frosted targets).

Woken Spectre 7/28/2015, 9:12:18 AM6 votes

Dude, If you remove the distinct characteristic from ADC to give it to unranged chars, what is the distinct characteristic for ADCs in the end ?

Knight SoIaire 7/28/2015, 9:34:59 AM6 votes

bad identification of problem causes you to think of wrong solutions

i cant agree with anything in this thread

Solideus7/28/2015, 11:55:40 AM2 votes

Making different stats attractive for ADCs and Fighters is a good idea. Why crit chance, though? It'd be a HUGE overhaul, and crit would have do work very differently. It's much more tailored to ADCs than fighters. The way it scales multiplicatively with offensive stats incentivices ADC-builds. It has much less synergy with what fighters get: high base stats, survivability, CDR or AS, low-scaling high-base damage, etc. Base stats synergyze much less with crit than stacking damage-items does.