@Riot @Meddler Some Proposed Change(s) To Marksmen.
Currently Marksmen are far too dominant of a role in the game.
Overall, Marksmen should provide the following strengths to their team:
- Consistent damage per second from relative safety.
- Strong tower siege ability.
- High damage to Epic Monsters.
- Moderately effective wave clear.
However, these strengths should come at a cost:
- Weak early game, solidified by item dependency.
- Vulnerable when isolated.
- Vulnerable against enemies at close range.
Unfortunately, Marksmen as a whole have strayed away from these clear set of strength and weaknesses.
- Due to nature of critical strike and other factors, their upfront damage is too high. This is problematic because for the most part, Assassins were reworked to have delayed upfront damage.
- Their damage per second is largely unmatched, due to the multiplicative damage scaling of Total Attack Damage, Attack Speed and Critical Strike.
- They have become much more protected by their supports, while this isn't bad game design, as Supports should be rewarded for protecting their Marksmen effectively; this gameplay aspect makes the previous two issues much more problematic.
With these issues clearly identified, I have some changes to the class as a whole to help bring them back to being a healthy role for the game.
The Big Change (Look here if you want a TL;DR):
- Ranged Champions' Critical Strike Damage is reduced from 200% -> 150%
- A new effect either placed as a passive buff for all Marksmen or added onto Infinity Edge for ranged champions:
> Auto attacks on enemy champions increases Critical Strike Damage by 10%, stacking up to 10 times, for 10 seconds (each attack refreshes the cooldown) (Unaffected by Rageblade).
- For Jhin and Graves this would have to be tweaked to compensate for their ammo system and fixed low attack speed, possibly 25% per stack, stacking up to 2 times instead.
- The duration and values of these stacks likely would need to be tweaked.
The Benefits of These Changes:
- Solidifies Marksmen's role as consistent source of DPS by greatly reducing their upfront damage, without too heavily impacting their consistent DPS.
- Delays to the powerspike of Marksmen, likely returning it to 4 full items, rather than 2-3.
- Rewards Marksmen for doing their job well, which is auto attacking the enemies frequently.
- Does not require any changes to Support's ability to protect Marksmen.
- Gives Assassins and Divers a much clearer window of opportunity against Marksmen.
- Does not affect melee champions that frequently use critical strikes. Additionally this opens up a window for these champions and other high damage melee champions to go bot lane take the role of the team's ADC.
- Does not require further changes to critical strike items, however it could allow for more interesting Marksmen item diversity by allowing certain items to alter the stacking mechanic.
- Does not affect the strength of Marksmen's tower siege.
- Incentives taking Lethal Tempo to quickly stack critical strike damage or Press The Attack to deal more damage to tanks, rather than always taking Fleet Footwork for lane safety.
The Downsides of These Changes:
- Could require a fair bit of engine work to implement these changes.
- Does nothing to address On-Hit Marksmen like Kog'Maw and Caster Marksmen like Ezreal and Miss Fortune.
Additional, Yet Smaller Changes to Go With The Big Change:
- Change Blade of The Runed King to deal 5% Max HP to help Marksmen against tanks.
- Reduce the cost or increase the attack damage of The Bloodthirster to promote more build paths and options for Marksmen.
- Reduce the damage of Guinsoo's Rageblade's extra on hit proc for ranged champions by 50% to address champions like Kog'Maw.
- Rather drastic but, remove Vayne's ability to critically strike and change her W to scale with critical strike and solidify her role as a Tank Buster.
I'd really love to hear some input from Riot on this, so please upvote and comment!