Book of responses to Meddler's design questions about marksmen

Meddler our great league designer/leader/messenger, posted his last gameplay thoughts. And i was a bit surprised to find a lot of interesting questions about marksmen that really deserve our attention.

In this post i'm just going to write my own opinion on them, and maybe things that can be done

• The arms race between champs who build multiplicative damage and multiplicative defense and how that affects champs building a mixture of both

First, i would like to say that this problem was brought back by a lot of players during tank reworks The thing is due to void staff/last whisper/black cleaver existing in their current form, or liandry/blade of the ruined king, defense will flat out fall off in late game without anything you can do against that. So to make defense viable, you need to snowball and be ahead to get defense faster than enemies can reach penetration this creates a massive feast or famin situation the second problem is that historically since like 3 years, everytime a tank was top tier it was because of one reason: -damage i can't think of one time where this wasn't true every time ANY of them was broken it was because of damage, you would play against them and feel like you die too fast against them that at one point everyone among them got a damage nerf one or multiple time.

Anyone here in this post remember a tank being broken because of a unique utility, or anything that isn't damage because i really can't used to be broken in season 2 because his E cd was 5 sec and attack speed slow was 3 sec, that this utility was insane and made attack speed reliant champions having troubles used to be broken because his silence lasted 3 seconds (season 2) But today, since Armor/mr/hp got smacked hard your defense will fall off so you need to snowball quickly to buy defense before they get anti-defense items and to snowball you need damage

https://youtu.be/WlXo-67JYyk?t=2583

example of the amount of armor/mr you could buy before on a non-tank champion like old warwick, this made penetration good but you still tanked a lot (LW removed 35% of your total armor, bringing you if you had 300 armor from 75% damage reduction to ~~62% damage reduction)

• The need to be able to kill full tank builds late game

That question i have troubles to answer to that honestly From my experience in dota2, there isn't a rule of "this class kills this class" because classes aren't even well defined it's rather "this champ should kill this champ" on even gold/lvl , so a tank would counter a carry/mage well because they have a mechanic that makes them insanely tanky against that kind of carry and vice versa. For instance Bristleback is a tank that has 40% damage reduction if he takes damage from his back But outworld devourer is a ranged carry that converts 8% of his mana into true damage on basic attacks and he steals inteligence on autoattacks, which a stat bristleback needs

I would say league doesn't have enough differences between adcs, a lot of them just rightclick with crit and do not have unique on-hit effects the only one i can think about are %hp true damage, and %hp magic damage, and kog has a problem where his on-hit effect leads him to abuse items making him tankier and harder to kill WHILE having 710 range. You can say Varus's W but it doesn't hold a lot of power budget in his kit compared to everything else he has In Dota most carries do not rely on crit to work, or AD, and they use way more on hit effects that are different and take a LOT of powerbudget, like Lifestealer's 7% current hp steal on attacks Some of them are definied by a single spell that dictates which game they would be strong (Yurnero's Omnislash), we have that in league too (thinking of ult)

• Whether the balance of power between marksmen general damage and marksmen tank busting effects is correct

I don't know what you guys, and what the boards think about that one but i think "general damage marksmen" are better than tank busting marksmen (unless tank busting marksmen become "everyone busting marksmen" due to number issues) Simply because since defense gets outscaled so hard by offense, why would you bother picking tank busting marksmen? any marksman will be able to kill them unless their kit screams YOU CAN'T DPS , the only reason you would pick them is because their numbers are so high they end up dealing a lot of damage against everyone, so you would rather pick general damage marksmen, and deal so much damage to squishies with boosts+crit, and still be able to deal with tanks.

• How front loaded marksmen damage can get, later in the game especially (e.g. crit + Shiv crit)

not goanna lie i'm trash at english, i didn't understand that one so i can't answer

• What stats are needed to make playing a marksmen feel good earlier in the game versus what power's actually needed

https://i.gyazo.com/d25a3bd615c79589960a1b23a32ad475.png

this is such a shame that for some reasons marksmen start with 325 base movement speed, in exchange of broken poke

you cornered them into bot lane with that, and gave them a high base ad (even if it's the lowest base ad in the game, it's still high and allows them in duo lane to poke you into oblivion) that forced anyone but marksmen out of bot lane It's a shame because Jhin for instance would make way more sense mid, he has literally nothing to do bot and if he had 340 base movement speed in exchange of less AD at lvl 1 he would totally work mid lane. The way items all give so much movement speed later in the game means to me that you're telling them "hey stay bot you can't go anywhere else unless you have a dash like lucian and then later in the game you can have a high movement speed"

i'm not saying give 340 base ms to every marksmen and reduce their base ad i'm just saying you should do that to marksmen who should be able to go in more lanes than bot like because those champions do not scale hard and could use to be good in other lanes in early game since it's part of their power curve to be good in early game (maybe not ashe)

however do not do that to hardscaling adcs like or , because them not being safe in early game should be a weakness in their power curve

• How much reliable burst mitigation there is available for marksmen, both from supports and from other sources

just going to leave them there, ask yourself why they have 100% pick/ban in pro people here on this boards complain about janna having 53% win rate when this is normal because a good/bad janna have hardly any difference, good janna players exist, but a bad janna can just press E+ult and do something good this isn't bad, because there needs to be easy champions in every role to make the life of autofilled players easier But tahm kench and braum are absolutly broken if played by good players, and are picked 24/7 above d1 and in pro Janna can only protect you from melees, she cannot nullify burst in any way (a 300 hp shield won't help you against veigar i assure you, neither will a delayed heal ult) Tahm kench and braum can not only protect you from melees (as good as janna) but also nullify any attempt of burst unless it's instant Tahm kench eats you with W and removes any projectile that is on the way, same for braum And you already know it since Imaqptie mentioned braum and tahm kench like twice in beyondtherift, question is when you're going to fixe them

• How marksmen power curves compare to other classes and whether marksmen have sufficiently distinct power curves from each other

their power curves are definitly different from each others however it is unacceptable that a hypercarry has a safe early game (tristana which is being fixed in next patch i hope so) and it is unacceptable that a hypercarry achieves late game in mid gamewith 2 or 3 items (IE+2 zeal items) it is acceptable that a hypercarry achieves MID GAME with mid game (makes sense right?) before, i remember adcs doing quite a good amount of damage with 3 items (generally IE+PD+old LW) but they didn't become gods able to kill an entire team in one teamfight

• Marksmen wave clear late game (and wave clear in general)

I don't know what you expect from them, do you expect them to have bad waveclear?

in the past, (season 2) there were infamous adcs for waveclear: sivir and graves(old Q) in the present, there are no famous adcs for waveclear, they all waveclear with like IE+Shiv, and those who have runaan can waveclear

waveclear became common, one weakness to vayne used to be the lack of wave clear that is no more now If you expect them to not waveclear, you need to take action then

• Amount of power having decent resourceless ranged damage early game offers (while many champs are still quite mana gated) >

oh it is LOL, thank you for realising that why do you think that right now, the only non-marksmen champ able to go bot are ? if you have mana and you don't have ranged manaleess early game damage there is no way you can go bot

when morde is banned, i'm playing rumble even when he's garbage, because: -i can't play adcs -if i can't play adcs i need something to replace him, but i can only play manaless champions that have ranged spells bot else marksmen poke me out of lane for no mana, and rumble is the only one that has that

this question should be so obvious even Imaqtpie told you that if you take a mage bot, you're going to run out of mana while enemy adc sustain with doran's blade your poke and you don't have sustain yourself which means if you take a bad trade you're done for unlike them

so that will be it after 1 hour of writing!