The rise of Varus, from the perspective of a Varus main.

Anyone who's been a frequent user to the boards will be aware that I'll usually post in threads relating to Varus, or I'll be starting threads about him. Usually most of my replies are generally cheeky one-liners, or usually I provide advice for people looking at how to use his abilities well or even how to counter him and fight back. This one will be different. For once I'll be making a genuinely serious post about him.

For a long as hell time, Varus has always been considered a poor choice to play into any champion. In most scenarios for the way he can be built, there will always be a better option. ADC's could utilize crit better than him. Mid-laners can gap close and blow him out of the water before he gets anywhere to a level of being strong. Even in the pro-scene he was picked as a utility situational as a poke caster.

This changed with the 6.22 update. The Assassin class rework. With the change from armour penetration to lethality, one of Varus' most known builds, the Tear build caused him to faze out of the scene completely. For me, that wasn't much of a concern. I had always built him as a crit ADC, however there were others who were concerned how would he even be usable since his now core function - that is to act as an immobile, long range AD Artillery caster - had become effectively defunct. Aside from general murmur within the Varus Mains community. We have a Redditfor those who are interested in learning about him. Alot of us weren't too pushed about it. While we were disappointed that one of the core items for this particular build on Varus was effectively nerfed, we're so diverse in our builds that it only really struck those who built their skills on that build as Varus players. As I mentioned before, I built him as a crit ADC, so I wasn't too worried. I did wish something could be done for the players who built tear however.

Roll onto Patch 6.24, something that Varus Mains everywhere have been essentially dying for.

> Passive now scales with bonus attack speed and its duration is the same regardless of proc type.

>When Varus has been successful in the past, it’s been by building raw attack damage and armor penetration items, rather than marksman crit builds. We want to support Varus as both a caster and a traditional marksman, so we’re making the basic-attack scaling on his passive more appropriate in the late game. >Passive - Living Vengeance >NEW: BONUS ATTACK SPEED RATIO +50% bonus attack speed on champion kill/assist (halved for minion/monster kills) DURATION 6 seconds for champion proc, 3 seconds for minion/monster proc ⇒ 5 seconds in both cases

For a lot of us, this was our moment of joy. We knew above all that this buff, no matter how insignificant it seemed to non-varus players, was essentially the key for many of those who used his on-hit / auto-attack based builds. We also knew that this buff alone would be what would end up putting Varus into firstly; the meta and secondly; the professional scene. This tiny, tiny buff is what turned Varus from a poke caster into a formidable duelist ADC. While Varus himself was always capable of being a decent duelist, this buff just enhanced that ability a little bit more.

With the rise of the 'meta' of tanks and the somewhat intriguing duo-mage botlane, the majority of meta crit ADCs started to fall out of favor. Mages like Zyra, Brand, Ziggs and Malzahar could decimate any ADC / Support duo. Slowly, the crit ADC's were bullied out of existence. All for just a handful. Tanks became walking 1-shot machines with insane damage outputs that slaughtered crit marksmen before they could do any serious damage.

Cue the entrance of Jhin and Varus.

While Jhin has always been a meta ADC since his release, he brought abilities to the field that could easily beat these mages. While his popular armor penetration build had been nerfed, he always had his crit build to go back on, and this build started taking form.

Varus however, brought more than just that. Because of his above average auto-attack range, Varus could easily trade back and forth. He started becoming a stronger presence over time thanks to that tiny little buff he received, as it easily allowed him to trade blight stacks and trigger them quite efficiently. Essence Reaver into Runaan's Hurricane became his staple. His lane dominance became quite obvious due to his Piercing Arrow scaling, and that's just for the early game and amazing waveclear + mana regen rates. From mid - late, Varus had a free anti-tank ability as well, his blight stacks. Coupled with a LDR or MR, unless you hard focused a fed Varus, you wouldn't be getting out of a teamfight alive due to his ultimate and grievous wounds AoE. The buff to his passive easily turned him into one of the most effective crit ADCs that could fight back against the mage botlane. Varus was now being noticed and had already started to be picked in the pro-scene as an ADC. His crit build being one of the most popular and often. Hell, even in the Korean Ranked scene, a BorK into Phantom Dancer build had been steadily gaining popularity as a soloQ build.

Roll onwards to Patch 7.2, the lethality buff. This is where shit goes sideways.

The long-awaited lethality buff. AD Assassin mains rejoice! Or at least you'd think the AD Assassins would rejoice, if it hadn't been for the fact that a few of the marksmen had started using armour penetration items since the early to middle stages of season 6. The biggest offenders being that of Draven, Miss Fortune, Jhin and Quinn. Each single point of lethality was now equated to .60% of armor penetration. This was the defining patch for the current scene in both meta play and professional play. Both Varus and Jhin became the only quintessential marksmen to pick from. You either now banned them or tried to steal them into your composition before the opposing team could.

I knew that Tear Varus, now re-dubbed as Lethality Varus, would make an insane comeback with this patch. I also knew that, with lethality being, in my honest opinion, overtuned as hell, that any AD marksmen that had 100+ percentage AD scaling would become effectively highly destructive with this patch, and would tear everything that wasn't a tank to shreds. I also knew that Varus himself, would become probably become a devastating 'meta' marksmen that would benefit the most from the build. Funnily enough, it's actually Quinn who's the biggest offender with the lethality build. Sure, Jhin and Varus are all you see in pro-play. But while Varus sacrifices dps for his poke damage, Quinn can easily both have dps as well as insane damage ratios, and also gets insane movement speed from base while doing so.

With the lethality buff, this put the final nail in the coffin for the crit ADC. Assassins can easily decimate crit marksmen with little to no effort, as ADCs will be blinked out of existence before they can even react. Botlane poke mages can safely harass them with their spells and not suffer much consequence.

There was only one viable answer to both scenarios. Long range, hard hitting AD marksmen. Jhin & Varus.

While in the professional scene, Varus was previously picked for his utlity ultimate. Now he's picked because of the devastating damage he can throw out thanks to the benefits of lethality items on top of his utility. He's a low-risk, high damage backline marksman, and he always has been. He can easily reach an opposing enemy backline to chunk anything that isn't a tank and take them out of play. People have seen this, and Lethality Varus is now a common sight in team compositions. So much so that people actually rage at me for not building lethality.

There have been countless threads since Varus' rise with lethality, with people in uproar about how his Q can easily 2-shot any squishy champion with ease from the fog of war. So much so, that Riot Meddler has even mentioned the idea of a Varus nerf. While I'm super disappointed in this decision, I still believe it's due to an over tune of lethality. With runes + items, I can easily reach 60-80 lethality total. Not just on Varus, but on Jhin, Quinn and Miss Fortune.

Varus has always been an interesting champion. I've played him solidly for nearly 2 years, learning everything I could about him and how to use him effectively within any team composition, and building any and every build on him that could be thought of. Lethality could be easily defeated with hard engage from tanks. Hybrid / crit can be wrecked by something as simple as a frozen mallet. Hell even AP can be messed with by simply building MR. To see him getting potentially nerfed because of the piss-poor over-tuning of lethality items and runes is disappointing.