@Riot: Of Marksmen, Assassins and Ryze

So, a while back, when Ryze was reworked for the... okay, I lost count. In Ryze's last rework, many people questioned his seemingly out of place ultimate.

"Ryze wants to button smash and deal damage, why he has a pure utility ult?", the Boards clamored.

"Part of the reason why he was a pain in the ass to balance, was because he ONLY wanted to button smash and deal damage, so we changed that" -- Meddler, kinda

And that is a very good and solid explanation. Make a whole champion's worth be their damage and they are either doing too little and being nothing but a walking bag of gold for the grabs, or doing too much and turning the game in "burst them down instantly or get your whole team wrecked".

Even Burst Mages, which sound like the kind of class that would be solely reliant on damage, usually have some fail safe tool that is not necessarily damage.

Has his AoE stun that also acts as a zoning tool I hate her, but she also works as an AoE stun bot if everything else fails is a middle ground between Burst Mage and Assassin, but she has a pretty strong pick tool with her Cocoon Is the only one with damage as his fail safe, at the cost of not dealing as much damage as fast as the others, his %health damage keeps him always relevant is another one with an AoE stun that also works as a Knock-Back peeling hability

Anyway, you get the gist: a burst mage who falls behind has more ways to help his team than his now not-so-scary damage, usually through some sort of AoE CC.

This is also true for quite a bit of Bruisers (I know, outdated term, but the list is now too long, think anything relatively tanky and melee that is not a Slayer all the way up to Juggernauts), who can peel or initiate team fights. For mostly all supports, the class designed to work without gold, this also holds true. Tanks are the definitive Team Play class. Virtually all Mages also offer some CC.

There are only two groups of champions (technically three with Slayers, but they are a whole different beast) who offer almost nothing but damage. If you read the title, or just clicked two or three random posts in this board, you know that I'm talking Marksmen and Assassins.

At this point they have been for the most of their existance at an arms race and in a delicate situation. Marksmen have their Late Game Fantasy™ of striving at the edge of danger, dealing incredible amounts of damage while slipping away from the grasp of their enemies. Assassins have their worth measured by how well they can ruin said Marksmen's fantasy. Give one side too much power, and the other is useless (and for all intents and purposes, I'm going to say that giving Supports more power equals to giving it to Marksmen).

Currently, both classes sit at exactly the same place that Ryze sat a while ago. They button/mouse mash and get a kill. They don't save allies, they don't peel, they don't shield, nor engage. They kill things. As fast as humanly (or demonly, or bugly, or bird-girly) possible.

Assassins are specially guilty at this, with the only ones offering more than damage being the Wizard/Assassin multiclassing freaks and Shaco who has always been the odd guy at the party.

Marksmen do, very ocasionally, offer some utility in their kits.

all offer some kind of utility for which they are ocasionally picked for (some others, like do offer some utility, but it's not the reason why they're picked, but rather for their damage).

Those are, if I'm not mistaken (I have horrible memory, might be talking out of my ass here), the Marksmen that shine whenever the "ADC in 2K17" situation happens, and the same ones who get either outclassed by the Dravens and Twitches (or picked for their damage rather than utility) when Marksmen find themselves in a stronger postion. This is, in my opinion, a sign that those champions offer something unique inherent to their kits that synergizes well with team oriented play.

All of this rambling that I've just did is to ask a question: is there, by any chance, group discussions, talks over coffee break, a single member of the balance team having random thoughts at the bathroom, or anything at all related to toning down the damage dealt by those two classes and filling their power budget with something more team-oriented? At this point I'd even take the creepy guy who nobody likes craking jokes at how stupid this would be, because it would mean that the idea has at least been into Riot's Zeitgeist.

I'm not a game designer (the most I've ever accomplished is doing some D&D adaptations that a random internet guy classified as "Pretty Rad"), but I'd think that something along those lines could be a pretty decent path to deal with the overall problems that plague both of those classes. If anything, it could be the inspiration to a path leading to a more healthy state for those classes, similar to how a robotic killer became an artist obsessed with the number 4.