Are ADCs or Supports overtuned at the moment? A debate.
As we all know, the game pretty much revolves around botlane at this moment. This is not a rant about this fact, but what I am trying to do is create a little debate about what the right solution to this problem might be. Some players say ADC's deal too much damage for their safety, others say support itemization (and especially Ardent Censer) is overtuned.
Personally I've gone back on forth on this subject, but I think I've landed on the side that ADC's deal too much damage. Why? Well, recently, a quote from a Rioter from all the way back to early S3 sprang into my mind. I was reading the patch notes and Riot were nerfing Riven at the time. The context of the Riven nerf was about as follows: "We are nerfing Riven this patch because she has a lot of synergy with Black Cleaver and Ravenous Hydra. As we were looking into her we found out that she was balanced around the fact that she had no good item build. Now that she has, we are bringing her raw numbers to a normal level". A little bit of further explanation: until the end of S2 the only viable build for Riven was boots+ 5 Bloodthirsters. At that point in Leagues' history, AD items were nearly exclusively tailored to ADC's, so melee AD skirmishers and assassins that did not synergize with AS and crit were basically stuck building 5 Bloodthirsters and boots (Black Cleaver was still an ADC item back then which granted 55 AD, about 35% AS and each hit inflicted stacking flat armor reduction). In S3 the first iterations of Ravenous Hydra and the modern Black Cleaver were added, making the aforementioned champion types suddenly a lot better because they had items tailored to their needs. In order to keep things balanced, their numbers needed to be toned down a notch.
I think about the same is happening right now, although in a slightly different way. ADC's have, historically, always been able to crank out ridiculous DPS numbers lategame to compensate for the fact that they generally had bad earlygames, were squishy, could not very well defend themselves and - and now comes the most important part - could not very well be defended either because supports frankly had very crappy item choices (along with many assassins being a little too good at their job) up until not too long ago. At this moment supports of all subtypes have finally found their niche with the plethora of new support items that Riot has introduced so everyone is able to properly support their ADC and the rest of their team. Now we are back to the situation of early S3: namely that ADC's are balanced around supports not having the adequate items to perform their role properly. Now that the latter is no longer the case, ADC's should be brought back into line with everyone else.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own solution? Post away!
