Boards›Gameplay

What is Jayce's Intended Weakness?

Wobly·12/6/2017, 5:37:28 AM·2 votes·832 views

A core part of LoL champion design and balance philosophy is that every champ is supposed to have areas of strength and weakness.

Artillery champs like Xerath can outrange everyone, but are frail and slow up close. Skirmishers like Yi do tons of sustained damage, but are squishy and need to be in melee range to do their thing. Jayce is a hybrid Artillery / Skirmisher. Other Skirmishers can't kite and poke like Jayce; other artillery champs lack his self-peel, mobility, close range burst, and defensive steroid in hammer stance.

What is Jayce's intended weakness? Not a rhetorical question. What do you think his intended weakness is?

Personally, I think when Riot gets around to nerfing him, they should either reduce his self peel or mobility, to make him a proper artillery champ, or they should reduce his range and poke damage to make him a proper Skirmisher. He can't be effective at every range, while also having the mobility and CC to keep his opponents right where he wants them.

14 Comments

Quepha12/6/2017, 5:49:42 AM2 votes

Jayce has very weak sustained damage in the late game.

His Acceleration Gate has a pretty long cooldown for a regular ability and while it's down his Q has mediocre range and damage and the rest of his kit is barely more than melee range. His only option in the late game is to wait the full cooldown on his acceleration gate until a target is low enough and close enough for him to burst.

TehNACHO12/6/2017, 5:48:20 AM1 votes

He's still particularly squishy, especially in the case of a Top Laner. Say what you will about his self peel, he'll still explode if a Diver or Assassin really wanted to hit him hard enough. As a carry, he's also particularly prone to CC, especially since he doesn't stack Tenacity nor have built in tools to avoid or negate CC.

According to lolalytics, he's countered by tanks but counters fighters and skirmishers. This is pretty obvious, when you consider the range advantage and self peel hard countering fighters, but as Tanks build Armor into his Lethality and can lock him down rather than have zero options if he knocks them back, Tanks can easily deal with Jayce's actually really limited self peel. His Mid Lane matchups are a lot weirder to explain, but in summary, he has plenty of weaknesses for his strengths. His strengths just make it look like he has no weaknesses in particular scenarios.

Baron Barian12/6/2017, 5:56:46 AM1 votes

I see two weaknesses.

He is basically a range AND a melee champion. The flexibility is nice, but he's not a master of both. A smart opponent will fight him when he's in the proper mode. I play melee top a lot, and while his range form will poke me into oblivion, but he'll have to go back to melee eventually. That's when I tend to murder him.
Similar to Elise and unlike most others, his ultimate is one he gets at level 1 do to how important it is to his mechanics, to the point that it's more of a passive then his actual passive. That said, he doesn't really have any real power spikes. Him getting to level 6 means little, while someone else getting to 6 means they have super strong killing move ready.

AR URF12/6/2017, 6:18:51 AM1 votes

I pretty much 2 shot him as Quinn once. Although you have to catch him by surprise or he will just get away from you.

oOBestEveNAOo12/6/2017, 6:56:40 AM1 votes

Lackluster team fight.

That's it.

Of course he's a siege master with a huge team MS buff ability... so... he doesn't really have to pick team fights that aren't to his advantage.

So...

None really. Sorry. All the transformers are the same. They don't actually have weaknesses (except strategic ones) and are poor design philosophy.