Teamfight speed is undoing years of game health efforts
A trend the game's been following for years is that teamfights are getting shorter and less strategic. Forget zoning, waiting out crucial cooldowns, the back and forth of engage and disengage and reengage, none of that matters anymore. Now it's just a game of "jump in and blow people up with instant reliable burst".
As I see it, the cause of the problem is, ironically, some successful attempts by Riot to bring some of these champs in line. Look at Leblanc, Kata, Eve, Ahri, every champ that got a rework that slowed down their kill-time or required some setup. Riot tried to push bursty characters toward making plays instead of just smashing the keyboard and watching everything melt regardless of whatever else was going on. This was a good thing.
Of course, that's not what a big segment of the playerbase wants. I could do a whole thread on just this, because it fascinates me how many people have no interest in huge swathes of what this game (and even their role and champ) offers. But I think I can comfortably assert that if people have a way to win without having to bother playing well, that option's gonna be very popular.
Tying this back to teamfights, I notice a common thread among the picks that became popular in retaliation to Riot trying to add gameplay to assassination:
-Instant burst -Mobility, or high area in which that burst can be applied -Reliability (no room for your opponent to outplay) -Immunity to consequences (even if you screw up you probably won't be punished for it, such as Zed and his shadows)
These characteristics have always been popular, which was fine in the past because so much of the roster had them. That isn't just player preference either, the first 3 are basically a checklist for what's needed to deal with an adc who has a dedicated support. I'm going to talk about assassins, but all the same applies to other classes when they get enough of these characteristics to blow up adcs (ie every tank meta, duskblade j4, etc).
This is the core problem. Riot adds gameplay to assassins, but assassins mainly go after adcs. The adcs (that don't have outplay potential baked directly into their mechanics anyway) don't really have a way to play the game the assassin is offering, other than to rightclick and win the statcheck with their support's help. And with lifesteal existing, instant reliable burst is the assassin's best option.
This causes a regression toward unhealthy play patterns, because only a handful can still meet this criteria in any given patch. Anyone who can't will see a teamfight start, be halfway through their kill pattern on the enemy adc, and then notice their squishies are already dead because a Zed pressed R and then barfed out damage in melee range. This is bad for any champion whose teamfight strategy takes less than 2 seconds, and actually makes them an inferior pick.
Darius: Pull someone, aa W aa Q aaand the fights over before you get your passive or ult rolling. Pantheon: Channel ult aaaand the fight's already over before you land. Zoe, yes even freakin Zoe: Land a bubble, the full QR combo takes long enough that it's entirely possible someone will faceroll your team before you finish it.
You'd assume I was talking about all of them going on an adc, but they could actually be doing this to the assassin, who would finish the kill (and escape if we're talking about Zed) unhindered because most champions have kill patterns longer than a sneeze.
You could say that this is the fun of the assassins. In a PvE game, I would agree. In PvP, there has to actually be a way for an adc to survive, and that's usually supports dropping 3k worth of shields on them. Then the meta demands even more burst to compensate, and thus more shields, and so we get the Ardent meta.
This is a problem. It ruins strategic play, biases the meta AWAY from champs that are fun and interesting to play against, and kills many interesting aspects of the game. URF is well and good, but right now that manic nonsense is the standard against which adc-killers are judged.
