Let's talk vayne G&B, what makes her strong and what doesn't

Especially in the past few weeks, there's been a lot of discussion about vayne. Most people seem to agree that she's strong or OP even right now but no one seems to know why and end up repeating "percent max health true damage" like it's some autowin argument that trumps everything else. So let's go through Vayne's pros and cons and actually analyze how she works as a champion and why she is strong right now.

So let's go over her strengths first which most everyone are probably familiar with. She's hyperscaling what with having %maxhealth damage that is procced more often with attack speed, great chasing power, great at re-positioning in a fight (stealth/tumble), she's got a significant ad steroid on her ulti and is one of the few adcs to have a hard cc.

So what makes her kit not completely unbalance-able?

Well for starters she has a small attack radius.

Now I'm sure at this moment at least half of you immediately smiled to yourself thinking you've found another dumbass vayne defender who thinks she has low range when in fact her auto attack range is 550 which is pretty average for an adc.

So before you downvote and move on I'd just like to say that I am well aware of that fact and still assert that vayne is indeed a low ranged champion. The reason being that EVERY OTHER ADC IN THE GAME (minus tristana who gets extra range from passive anyway) has a way to damage champions from beyond the range of their autoattacks. I'm not sure if there's a term for this but I'd call it something like an effective kill range, which would be the maximum range at which a champion can damage and kill you. Note that mobility spells don't affect this because you're simply getting closer in order to do damage.

Kog'maw, Sivir, Lucian, Graves, and Quinn all have a lower basic attack range than Vayne but can all deal significant damage from beyond it. VAYNE CAN'T DO THAT. If vayne wants to damage a lissandra she needs to prepared to eat a frozen tomb (cast range 550) because she can do absolutely nothing to a champion that is more than 550 units away from her. Irregardless of whether she has the tools to get there or not, the fact of the matter is vayne must be close to you in order to do damage.

Further more vayne is also the only adc in the game who can't damage multiple targets at the same point (not including buying runaans). All of her damage is locked onto a single target which means she can't chunk down groups of enemies.

And in the same vein Vayne is forced to focus on one champion at a time or risk losing precious dps in a fight. Unlike other adcs in the game who can switch targets with impunity in a fight as needed vayne very much needs to focus down one person at a time. People gloss over this all the time but unlike every other 3 hit stacking passive in the game vayne's cannot apply on more than one person at a time, disappearing if you switch targets before getting the 3rd. THIS IS HUGE IN A TEAMFIGHT. What with all the mobility, invulns, and other shit in this game that prevents you from just focusing one target down with impunity as an adc vayne gets really gimped in situations where she's not able to kill champs one at a time. Of course this is balanced by making her 1v1 damage extra good but that's how balance works.

Lastly, to talk about silver bolts itself, the skill really isn't as OP has people say it is. Comparing to other percent max health on hit effects it's easy to see why it isn't broken (damage wise). Gnar's W does 14% max health which is nearly double what vayne does in base damage, Vi's W does 2% more and scales with AD, Kog'Maws autoattacks with W do 6% per auto which is more than double a single proc of silver bolts.

In return for being true damage the base damage is _significantly _gimped (not to mention that unlike the others she can't stack it on multiple people). I believe Stashu mentioned it in a thread a few days ago but %maxhealth true damage is actually a great mechanic for normalizing damage against champions with varying levels of defenses.

And like the actual duelist champion Fiora is being turned into, Vayne is also built to be a champion who has the ability to 1v1 most champions in the game and still allowing opportunities for outplay from both sides (especially with regards to dodging/landing condemn).

So having written all of this I can finally now say why I do think Vayne is in fact strong and it has to do with mainly 3 things: the cycle of nerfs and buffs, league of tanks, and blade of the ruind king.

You're probably getting tired of reading (as I am of writing) so I'll try and make this part brief but essentially a lot of vaynes counters have been nerfed or fallen out of favor. The big thing about was (and is supposed to be) that her laning phase is shit and you need to punish her for it. The problem is many of the champions that bully vayne early have fallen out of favor, namely caitlyn. If you've never experienced a vayne vs caitlyn lane (especially when caitlyn was at her prime) before count yourself lucky because it is an exceedingly painful experience due to the stupid ease at which caitlyn can poke down vayne and deny her engages (90 caliber net makes it nigh impossible for vayne to catch cait without support).

Because a lot of those champions are generally less effective against tanks late game, the league of tanks has contributed towards their fall from favor. Furthermore, due to silver bolts vayne is naturally good at taking down tanks.

Finally, Blade of the Ruined King makes vayne relevant much much faster than she was before. If you ever played vayne in season 2 or before (basically before blade was released) you would know that you were basically doing jackshit until you got 3 items (albeit you were a god at 6 items, man was building 2 PDs on vayne fun). However following the release of Bork vayne's powercurve has become much more forgiving in the mid game allowing her to actually be relevant in fights and win certain duels if played correctly.The attack speed, active slow, and passive percent current health damage synergizes with her kit to the point that getting to the late game is nowhere near as difficult as it used to be.

Now hopefully by this point you don't think I have some fantastic solution for solving this problem... because well I don't. The easiest fix would be to remove Bork but that would probably introduce a whole host of other problems into the game that makes it completely not worth. The next best solution would be imo to nerf her base stats (health and ad) and adjust her scalings so that it remains the same at level 18. It's the simplest way to weaken her early/midgame and while it doesn't fix her powercurve, it should make it possible to take advantage of her early game and punish her for it. It's not a perfect solution but once the meta shifts again I do believe vayne will also become more manageable.

I'm probably still gonna get downvoted by sheep who believe that if something can't be "countered" via building certain items it must be broken OP but I still feel compelled to at least try and get through to some people, I'll be happy if I can change even one person's mind.

tl;dr vayne is strong but not because of silver bolts and consequently needs a nerf to early game