@GhostCrawler AskFM marskman Q/A

Introduction

AskFM doesn't really seem the place for longform feedback so I guess the boards will have to do. First off a little bit about me, so you can know where I am coming from. I am a primarily a support main (Plat Season 4 and 5, Silver season 3) and focus on disengage supports. I have written before about support itemization specific champion reworks and riots terrible manner in which it defines the League of Legends Season. You can read these and get an idea of how I have thought about the game in the past and how that may inform my current analysis.

For the most part I will ignore perception issues. Due to various human biases I am not sure that these can be solved, or that they stem from legitimate complaints.

What is a Marksman?

Before we get into the points you raise and whether or not or how to address them its worth talking about just what a marksman is, or should be. To do that we might have to talk in depth about what a team is and how or why it wins but that seems like a bit too much background for something like this. Lets just assume for a minute that a team needs to have some sort of manner in which it wins fights and takes objectives (whether this is by fighting or not) and that the manner in which how a team is constructed relies mainly on target selection.

That is; because it is not possible for our team to decide perfectly between potential focusing targets each member on our team will have a different objective in a fight relating to who, how, and why we target enemies. And similarly because it's not possible for the enemy team to decide perfectly between focusing any member on our team each member on our team has a different objective in a fight relating to how, when, and why we allow ourselves to be targeted by enemies.

A Marksman is then a champion that does primary consistent DPS while not wanting to be targeted. Marksmen are always ranged because range is the mechanic which allows a marksman to be untargeted while still being able to do damage. If you make such a champion melee then you run into raw number balancing problems because any champion who will be targeted has an advantage in moving towards a tankier build. [I can elucidate on this later if necessary. Its also worth noting that this is an effect of the itemization differentiation that riot has chosen]

Does a team Need a Marksman?

Yes and No. If we establish that there will exist a champion on a team who is hard to target, either by nature of the champion or by nature of other champions on the team, then it makes sense for that champion to go all out on damage. If we establish that it makes sense for a champion to go all out on damage then we're going to pick champions who do that best and do it in the manner we want best. I.E. we're going to have marksmen.

This has less to do with taking down towers (Burst Mages/Assassins/etc) do that just fine if they can get the time/space to hit the tower and more to do with the structure of a teamfight. But it still does not mean that a marksman is necessary. Wombo teams have existed and can exist in the future. What a marksman is in this instance is insurance against a bad cleanup operation. That is a marksman isn't necessary but is consistent. Mixing your damage between burst and consistency is generally more powerful than going for all burst in the same way that splitting your damage types between magic and physical is generally more powerful than going heavy into one side.

If marksmen are made weak enough teams will not simply limp along with them. They will be replaced by bruisers/engage/burst champions and champions which can take towers by zoning or diving. And lets not pretend that even with marksmen teams can't draft poor siege into good clear and have problems taking objectives. That or a move to more split focused teams, so that the 1 split pusher who has strong tower taking skills can grab objectives.

This is also the reason why marksmen tend to go to the duo lane of often. Bottom lane is like a mini-team fight from level 1 and so having a ranged consistent damage champion there to back up someone the enemy is more or less forced to hit, will almost always be advantageous. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing [Morde is though, morde is a bad thing] it's just a natural result of the most team fight focused champions being best in the most team fight related lanes. We really don't want ADC's that can 1v1 from level 1 well and survive in a long lane, or that can counter push an AP mid. Those are monster champions that will have to be nerfed into uselessness.

Does a marksman need to be a lategame focused champion?

Yes, absolutely. The reason for this relies on the idealized game structure that riot has put down. This consists mainly of an early laning phase, a middle skirmish phase, and a late team fighting phase. If marksmen are early game champions then we risk cuting off the laning and skirmish phases. Moreso than marskman changing, other champions would be forced to play their role around the marksman at all points in the game. Skirmishers/Bruisers/early game champions who attempt to leverage the laning/skrimish phases or duels would suddenly find themselves with little to do.

If there were concerns that marksmen were too prominent when they're primarily lategame, adding early game options would just make the problem even worse. You would be removing some of the options that non-marksman teams can exploit to win.

Point 4 is additionally strange to me because Riot has been consistently reworking many mid game focused champions into lategame champions(like the aforementioned Viktor) , making early towers harder to take, reducing the snowballing power of mid game objectives like dragon and in general making it much easier to survive into lategame. I am not sure how you can say that the lategame aspect of marksman is a problem when near every design choice in the past year has been moving the game in that direction.

What is wrong with Marksman itemization

I am actually going to go with "almost nothing" here and I am not sure why people think that there is a significant problem. Besides RNGesus of course. As it stands, depending on champion, and the enemy there are four to five reasonable opening items. BT, IE, BotRK, Ghostblade, and Triforce. Additionally sometimes you can go Muramana or Hurricane and Ashe has a specific optimal opening of Component AD into Phantom Dancer into IE/BT rather than IE into PD [basically you have the same DPS going from component AD to PD than you do going for IE to PD at all important cash breakpoints but the extra AS and move speed mean you're better positioned to actually fight]. Anyway, all things considered that seems pretty good. Champions can decide to go all in on earlier game builds at the expense of crit or all in on lategame builds at the expense of survive-ability.

Basically, the AD itemset is full of Gold and Slot efficient options on a class which really wants gold and slot efficient options. While it seems like it would be nice to add more interesting options. I am not sure that you can do that without running afoul of how marskmen interact with the team and how itemization interacts with marksman.

To explain a bit about that lets talk about AP marksmen. I am not sure that AP marksmen can be solved without reworking the entire game. As it stands, we can consider there being three primary itemization paths which have a decreasing level of multiplicative scaling

• Attack Damage [4x] [AD/AS/Crit/Pen]
• Ability Power [2.5x] [AP/Pen/Cap|Lich|Echo]
• Defense [1.5x] [HP/Resists]

The multiplicative scaling is quite important to how item paths progress and how champions are defined in terms of early or late game. Paths with lower multiplicative scaling generally have stronger raw items[additionally they often have more build efficient items] which pushes power towards the early game. But at the end of the game they're very close to the sum of their parts. Paths with multiplicative scaling tend to have weaker raw items which end up stronger than the sum of their parts.

Why don't AP marksmen tend to work? Because they gain a fourth multiple stat for scaling in attack speed[AP/Pen/Cap/AS] while still sitting on the raw power of a 2.5x scaling item set. They become early game focused lategame consistent damage dealers. Reminiscent of Phreaks April first Lee Sin Champion Spotlight. They more or less can't be marksmen without the extra multiplicative stat, but similarly they can't be balanced without gutting AP itemization for all the rest of the mages. Add that onto the inherent weaknesses in magic damage itemization, base/scaling resistance differences, and lichbane and it starts to add up to "everything has to change to make AP marksmen work". Maybe not, but at least, I haven't come up with a way that makes things reasonable. AP items provide too much extra defensive stats and too much utility in order to not be ridiculous on higher multiplicative scaling champion while also being reasonable on the rest of the mages.

So if we're adding "new and interesting" options to AD items then we're potentially giving them utility they might not need; after all they're being protected by their team. Or we're simply reiterating on the primary multiplicative stats and so not really doing anything interesting. If we give them more utility this is either a raw power increase if we don't mess with the base power[especially a raw power increase to AD assassins] or we're removing power.

Aside: It is interesting to note that this does work for the AD assassins because it's going the other direction. Because AD assassins don't have much range they don't get all that much value from AS or Crit[can't stick around to try to auto attack a lot] and so this turns them into 2 or 3 multiplicative scaling champions.

RNGesus really is the worst though

Really. Get rid of crit. In a game like league RNG is even worse than it normally seems, where you might have a team fight decided by who gets the crits at the right time. Give Ashe another new passive and just give everyone the mechanic she has on her slows. Do it. Please for the love of god do it.

The biggest reason that crit is the worst mechanic in the game is not just because it can turn the tide of a fight that one side "should" have won. But because it changes the decision tree with regards to engages in a way that fundamentally alters how the game plays. Back when Phage was a random on-hit slow it used to be said that Cop was the best ADC in the world because he always got the first Phage proc. The first phage proc meant that the allied support could easily get to the trade and either force a lane wining advantage or a kill. Then you're ahead and can zone and the slows do the same thing, snowballing the game.

Crit is basically this on steroids. When crit is rare (so the good old 1% crit rune page) if you're the first to get a crit you can almost always all-in on the assumption that the enemy won't get a resulting crit and so will be unable to win the engagement, even if you don't the extra damage "sticks" more compared to sustain, and so getting that rare crit lets you push trades harder, knowing that you're more likely to come back. But just how strong is a 1% crit rune? Well in 11 attacks you will have about a 10.5% chance to crit once. So if you trade 11 auto attacks per laning phase [this seems low to me] then you have about a 10.5% chance to win the laning phase outright, assuming your opponent doesn't run a crit rune.

This same thing, writ large, happens in any poke situation, where auto attacks might be traded and where AD's don't have 100% or 0% crit. And then, on top of this terribleness, we will have the RNG deciding important fights. Important fights that might send teams to worlds or give them the championship.

The most important argument though is that in League is that the law of large numbers does not apply. Normally we might say that "over a large number of attacks the amount of crits goes towards the true crit %" and that is all well and good. But we don't actually care about that. What we care about is the SUM of crits, since we want to know when we will get over an enemies HP total. And the sum is a random walk. And random walks do not converge. So whomever is lucky enough to get the first crit? Probably wins. Someone who gets two early crits in a row? Probably wins.

And then that advantage is carried over into the next fight and that into the next fight. Get. Rid. Of. Crit. If you do any one thing in your tenure at riot. Get rid of crit.

Conclusion

A lot of issues with marskemen are unsolvable, or generally tied up with the rest of the game structure. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be working on champions to make them differentiated and unique, but it does mean that you need to recognize why AD's are similar, and why similar AD's become ascendant as the meta shifts[it's because their job is more reliant on what the team does and the meta tends to favor what team orientation is stronger]. I hope I have shed some light on why you get comments relating to "gotta have an AD" or why AD's don't tend to go to other lanes.

And I also hope that you crucify RNGesus.