Critical Strike, Marksmen, and How To Rebalance Them.

Critical Strike:

Critical strike chance needs to be removed from the game. Nobody likes relying on rng in the first place but the nature of critical strikes on auto attacks provides so much damage in this game that it does legitimately lead from damage per second to burst per second. Marksmen need rebalanced away from this stat as it lets them delete squishies too easily when their main design focus is to take towers, kill front-line tanky champions, and help clean up fights from safe range.

I've seen people argue that critical strike should be an assassin stat but nobody wants their assassination to be reliant on rng so you'd need a prerequisite like backstab or 3 hit passive to be fully proc'd before said crit would activate.

So, crits can work in the game if they are only found in certain champion kits, are conditional, and are not based on luck, but on skill.

Case in Point: and are mages who have a built-in, conditional "crits" and these mechanics often lead to some pretty interesting gameplay.

Items:

Reworking marksmen away from crit is going to take a massive amount of rebalancing but as far as items go they should offer a few basic things:

AD, attack speed, passives that take time to take effect (such as ), item actives that provide noticeable mastery, % hp damage, % armor pen, and lifesteal

Marksmen should have some items with multiple of the above traits such as as well as items that highly specialize in just one of these aspects i.e.'s niche as the best lifesteal item.

Side note 1: 's extra aa bolts should probably be removed to reinforce that marksmen are single-target dps and rebalanced to becoming the attack speed specialist item for marksmen.

Side note 2: should still be an option for better waveclear but reworked to not be based around burst damage (idk like a reapplying but less powerful chain-lightning effect when attacking the same target after 4 times (2 for minions)?) (I'm just spitballing)

Lane:

I read a post a while ago that explained how Dota2 didn't have marksmen as mandatory team members. Excluding "turn around time" there were 2 main aspects from this post that noted why melee's had a better time against ranged characters in that game compared to this one.

The first is minion/creep aggro. Minions/creeps in that game are better at responding when a ranged hero attacks another hero. This punishes them more harshly in the laning phase when they go for that free harass on melee characters.

The second is tower range. Tower range in Dota2 is great enough that a melee champion can more effectively be safe from the pressures of ranged auto attacks.

The tower range option is not necessarily one that should be added to League and would require even more work to be done for the game but fixing creep/minion aggro should definitely be looked at.

Another problem not included in that thread (because it was not Dota2 specific) is creep block. I know the boards have had lengthy discussions over this subject but if just YOUR creeps didn't block you then that would go a long way towards helping melee champions deal with ranged champions because then they would not have to go around their minions as well as the enemy minions to reach their target.

General:

Note: I am not making any claims of "brokenness" or saying "X champ is op". This section is about marksmen kit health.

Marksmen auto attacks should still be their main damaging source over the course of a long fight but more emphasis should be placed on giving marksmen meaningful abilities to work in while they weave their auto attacks in between those abilities. It's more enjoyable for the player playing as the marksman, the players playing against them, as well as viewers at home.

Marksmen, like , who are almost completely reliant on auto attacks for their damage are fine to have in the game and often do have a fair to high amount of skill expression but often times these type of champions can feel non-interactive due to auto attacks being undodgeable. Example: When shows up from stealth and shoots you from 700 range before pressing e to kill you after a few shots rarely feels like an outplay.

Marksmen like , , and have skillshots that make them more interactive and outplayable due to that sole nature to their kits.