I really wish that, for once, Marksmen's viability wasn't tied to...

... synergizing with rushing the most broken item currently available in the meta.

The issue is self-explanatory, and it's there since season 1. In LoL we always had the botlane metagame (= which ADCs are strong and which are trash tier) completely determined and dictated by the strongest 1st item the ADC can build.

Historically, there has been an endless (literally for years) alternating of BOTRK vs IE marksmen. With buffs and nerfs, the rotating botlane metagame flip flopped between those two items until recent times, where a bit of variety was added, i.e. Duskblade right after the assassin's class reworks, rageblade last year, and Stormrazor in the present.

The point of the post is expressing my personal disbelief in how Riot game's balance team, a group of individuals fully dedicated to balancing a video game, in all those years, failed to even be aware that the problem is not in the items but in the very roots of how marksmen work: their purpose and success is ridiculously tied to purchasing items and stacking a certain combination of exaggeratedly synergistic stats.

Instead, they operate like It's a dog chasing its own tail: nerf botrk, buff ie, nerf ie, buff botrk, introduce duskblade, nerf duskblade, buff ie, nerf ie, introduce stormrazor..