Some Ideas and Rants About Ms Fortune

In the light of the recent Bilgewater event and MF "rework" I got to thinking about MF as a champion and why she's one of like 2 marksman that just doesn't see competitive play. As a note, I consider myself a support main, I'm unranked this current season and got to silver two last season. I am by no means great at the game, and probably also woefully unqualified to theorycraft. But please, hear me out. This is what I came up with.

MF has so many elements within her kit that are similar to those of other champions or ADCs, though in most cases, the other ADC’s have better versions, make better use of them, or are more effective without these abilities/with gimped mechanics in their kits. Yes, MF has synergy within her kit, her W speeds up the stacking of her W, her ult applies her W and also increases how high it can stack. That’s about it though. Outside of that what she has is movement speed that becomes next to useless in most skirmishes/teamfights, a Q that is very similar to Lucian’s, though you could argue it isn’t quite as good. She has and E that is so similar to Graves’ W and one of the best teamfight ults in the game, which I would argue is pretty comparable to twitch’s, though the rat’s ult actually makes sense. So I’m going to individually breakdown each ability, including her passive, with a very opinionated view meant to skew you towards agreeing with what I plan on suggesting to you.

Passive - Strut After 5 seconds of not taking direct damage, Miss Fortune gains an additional 25 movement speed. This bonus increases by 8 each second up to a maximum bonus of 70.

Not bad. Better for a champion that actually likes to roam, but not bad. It scales pretty slowly, is probably the only movespeed bonus in the game that doesn’t give %movespeed, and like I said earlier, is broken by damage, so unless you get that magical teamfight where nobody touches you and you don’t really need it anyways, it doesn’t do a lot for you.

“But you can apply it with max stacks when you hit W!”

Please show me a time when you get hit once, smack W and run off safe, please. Most champions in the game will CC you, hit you with poke or a ranged ability/auto, speed up to you anyways, or just hit you again before you leave range so it doesn’t matter. Yes, you can use it proactively, but that just makes it a good escape tool before they’ve gotten to you. So you’re running from ganks before they happen, or leaving a fight when you possibly could’ve turned the outcome if you dodged the enemies instead of just hoofing it out of there. The change to W is great for MF, sure, but it isn’t enough to convince me that strut is good enough.

Q - Double Up Miss Fortune fires a bullet at an enemy, damaging them and a target behind them. This attack does more damage to the second target if it kills the first one.

I like this ability. Like I said, a lot like Lucian’s Q, though it has more flexibility. It can’t hit more than 2 targets though and maybe I’m just bad but even after they gave it a quality of life improvement, It still doesn’t work amazingly for me. I don’t have too much to say about it other than I think it would be a good place to put another slow or some other form of self peel. Hell, maybe if it hits champions it chains them together and they can’t move some distance from each other, that would be cool, or maybe it does that no matter what it hits, you could chain people to walls, that would be awesome.

W - Impure Shots Miss Fortune passively increases damage dealt to a target with each strike. This ability can be activated to increase Miss Fortune’s Attack Speed and grant her Strut.

I already went over strut, so I won’t reiterate that here. I’m also a fan of Impure Shots, I like the idea of increasing your damage as you hit a target more, I can even deal with the fact that it does magic damage, though as a tuning point, it would be a lot stronger if it actually just increased your damage to the target as you hit them more, instead of dealing stacking magic damage. The fact that it scales with your AD and deals magic damage is fairly weird to me, but I’ll get into my rather ranty point about scaling and damage types later. 

The active is a pretty basic steroid, though with the general immobility of MF, I feel she needs a movespeed bonus on there that** DOESN’T DROP IN COMBAT.** How hard is it to just make it a normal steroid? Atk spd, movespeed, easy. Once of MF’s great struggle points is the fact that her only mobility in her kit becomes next to null in most combat situations, and giving her something to work with instead of her passive, which I’ve mentioned many times, just falls off anyways.

E - Make it Rain Miss Fortune unleashes a flurry of bullets at a location, dealing waves of damage to opponents and slowing them.

This one’s a doozy. For a marksman, it isn’t even great for self peel, we’ve seen this same sort of situation with Graves, he has a slow field too, and it doesn’t do much for him either. The spell’s damage outside of AP MF it entirely unthreatening, and in most situations, it can be flashed over, dashed through, walked around etc etc. It is most effective in a choke point where enemies would have to walk through it, but an issue happens if MF can’t kill them before they get through because unless she’s been kiting, all she did was buy herself 2 seconds of the enemy moving slower, and her escape tool isn’t a fighting tool, it’s an escape tool, if the enemy has any dashes, CC, ranged damage, it isn’t hard to just tank through it for the like 100 damage it does, then kill MF where she stand crying.

As an AP MF, we run into a similar situation. Any player who is self aware at all will know not to stand in enemy effects if they can avoid it. So they walk out, it takes like a second, and it still hardly does enough damage to justify it’s use when you build for it. again, it’s best used either to hold targets in your ult for a marginally longer time, or in a choke point where the enemy has to other place to go. It’s simply not good enough if we assume that every part of a champion’s kit should be useful to them.

R - Bullet Time Miss Fortune channels a flurry of bullets into a cone in front of her, dealing large amounts of damage to enemies.

Again we’re going to assume that MF as a champion is mainly a markswoman and start there. This does physical damage, so that’s cool, but it scales with AP so enjoy your 50 damage per tick. The only reason this ability is relevant to a MF building AD is that it boths buffs your W and applies it, otherwise it would be the second dead ability in her kit sadly. On the positive side though, it can do pretty crazy amounts of damage and is something to be feared in late game teamfights. I understand that like twitch, an ultimate with this much potential needs drawbacks, like not being able to move like you channel, but I’m under the impression that the rest of her kit suffers because this ult is “too powerful” and she needs to be tuned back hard to not be ridiculous. Though, if we consider the “Marksmen” of the game, and what is seen/ what is competitive/ what is viable. You see a list of champions that have a place in the game, Urgot back to obscurity, Teemo randomly in the list, “What’s Quinn and when did Riot add her?” and then MF. Most of these champions are even good enough to be seen in professional play, as opposed to top lane where 80% at least of games has Rumble/Maokai as the matchup. But these fringe couple of champions are just not there. Why? and what can be done to fix that?

So here’s where I throw in my quick rant about scaling and damage types. First off, I like the idea of AP MF, and I support champion versatility, but putting random AP scaling on a champion like Ashe, just because an ability would be too strong with AD scaling doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s troll and noob bait at best. I’ve tried Ap Ashe before, I wish I would’ve picked Nunu, I would have been more relevant to the game around me. Point being, Ap scaling and magic damage are not terrible for ADC’s, just look at corki and ezreal,but there comes a point where things need to make sense for a champion to actually have an identity. Ashe’s ult could probably go without scaling, and would be pretty okay doing physical damage, and MF could do with a bit of sense within her kit which when almost entirely unrefined with her “rework.”

Now, I don’t work for Riot, and I won’t demand that MF be pushed in any direction, whether it be pure, AD markswoman, or Auto-attacking AP monstrosity. What I will request though is a very interesting, and happy medium that gives MF a very unique identity.

Strut is okay. Hell, it could even stay as her passive but I want something else added to it which I’ll go over in a bit, I’m just making this note now to say that I think it has a place in her kit, she just needs more to supplement it.

Her Q is fine, AD and AP scaling, though my idea earlier with the chains is very cool, Riot if you see this, look into that.

W needs a real speed boost, and if MF is pushed in the direction of a Pure marksman the stacking mechanic should change so that it doesn’t do magic damage. Please.

E could use a really serious change, but it won’t change the identity of the spell. I would suggest something like nevermove. MF launches bullets into the air, they fall on a location damaging and slowing all targets in that area for one instant damage and a persisting slow. Yeah, a skillshot, none of this pool nonsense.

R I like, I think it really defines MF, and there isn’t much that can be done with it anyways, though if it is the tuning lever that holds MF back, I would be entirely compliant with a change.

Finally that cool Passive overhaul I was hinting at. Bandoliers. MF would get, through her passive, access to items in the shop that I imagine would work alot like Jungle items. Except, here’s the really cool part, She gets to chose what kind of damage her abilities ( and maybe even autos) do based on which she choses. So perhaps there’s 3 different Bandoliers to chose from, being Physical Damage, Magic Damage, and Hybrid Damage. ( I don’t know how this would work, maybe retain her current damage scheme, or maybe just split it 50/50, I don’t know) After this, She would chose her Ammo, as she upgraded her bandolier (maybe even with a unique currency like GP. Eh?) giving her cool benefits, like maybe something like grapeshot, where enemies within 5 yards of her target take like 20% of the damage or something, maybe it’s evenly split amongst targets. So she would chose an ammo bag which would define her as this AP menace or the gunslinging, headshotting, name-taking badass we all know and love, just with less magic damage. Then, again, she would chose her type of ammo, which would define playstyle, maybe she doesn’t shoot to kill and instead likes to bleed out her victims, or she poisons the bullets, maybe she gets a range boost with a atk speed slow. There are so many possibilities with this passive that MF would be an incredibly versatile champion, and she would find herself with much more of an identity than she, or many other champions have ever had.

Thanks for reading and please consider that a lot of what I’m saying could be entirely wrong, but I feel like some of the ideas I’ve given are ideas for a future real rework if she ever gets one.