Let's talk about the 'jayce 60% HP Q+E at a screen and a half away' situation

let's be honest, it's a result of his kit being too synergistic with lethality to a point where the average jayce builds the glass cannon khan build and 1shots things while ignoring the rest of his actually interesting and combo heavy kit. It's tragic really that such a high skill cap champ has such a low floor due to bad balancing of lethality.

Riot wont ever fix this, they'll probably nerf him into the ground before they actually stop and think about making him more of a bruiser/marksmen and less of an assassin/artillery champ. I've been trying for three seasons now to ignore his meta build but he has already been pidgeonholed into it by riot rebalancing of his kit over the past few years to the point where you get a 6% winrate drop for not building lethality, but then you go through the 25 minute shutdown of your power where you're completely useless because you've put everything into base damage and just get outclassed.

Meanwhile I've found a 14 input combo on the champ and there are more out there, this champion is as complex and mechanical as any other at his highest levels, but try to not build him as a squishy 1shot champ and watch

What would I do? I'd gut his burst but give him better sustained dps, maybe some interaction with melee/ranged only items that make him stand out more. Like a unique item that's half and half .

Maybe i'd take some of his early power and just... slide it into late game to make him consistent, maybe not so feast or famine. With the death of middle of the road ahri we've lost that consistent carry champ from the roster and I feel like it'd be good to put jayce in.

But i mean a ranged AD 1shot is what it is, I think it's unhealthy for the game and it's honestly detrimental to the health of jayce as a champion. He went from a champ that used to go atmas, frozen mallet, triforce, manamune, and either brutilizer or bloodthirster to building 2 lethality items, a black cleaver, and a last whisper. Tell me which build encourages mechanical mastery? which build requires knowledge on the champ to get kills,

yeah i know atmas is gone and brutilizer has been turned into last whisper but.

What's a healthier thing to encounter?

a duelist with who has to take a second to fight you, has to use their kit, weaving their autos and kiting. with team utility

Or getting 1shot under your tower from river by

two years ago, people stopped doing the 40% crit build (Triforce+essence reaver+Infinity edge) and started going this khan build which encourages the worst qualities in league.

Has jayce always had loads of damage? Yes! But i mean, it wasn't always this 1shot burst crap, he's not zed, actually functionally he's more of a diver than an assassin. But what happens now if you try to go and play bruiser jayce?

you spend more money on items then lethality jayce, and your damage scaling got lopsided. Riot rebalanced him over the years and put more and more power into his ranged form and only really has the melee form for mana sustain, defenses, knockback, and a gap closer or situational minion/monster targetted escape

you have six moves, three of them aren't even utilized for offensive combos unless they're to 100-0 someone, and the ranged w is usually just used for kiting during Q cooldowns.

the fuck?

How do I have a champion with two resets, a buffer, animation cancel mechanics, a gap closer, a knockback. and auto attack potential get forced into the role of Glass cannon poke machine? What's more fun to play against? The poke machine or an actual fighter? What's more fun to play as? Because jayce with lethality is generally speaking a shittier version of xerath around 45% of the time.

I still refuse to build lethality for any reason other than counter building or if i need the active on ghostblade/edge of night. and it's less about being stubborn and more about wanting to have fun on the champ. The champ who started out being played the way I play him and wound up being slowly turned into the AD version of oldschool nidalee (The one that got reworked out of the game because it was cancerous)

Over the years jayce has lost viability in building among a few other options. Most of this was due to ADC itemization infringing on fighter itemization thus having ranged and melee stats for said items, or having the items reworked so hard they actually got nerfed into horse shit, meanwhile on the other side of things iceborn got nerfed thanks to fizz, and steraks was nerfed because of irelia, after it was already nerfed because of lucian and graves. Manamune has been mostly useless for two seasons now outside of very few champions... the only one i can think of being ezreal, otherwise it's a cheese item for lucian, taric top, and... yeah that's about it

Riot give me my champ back, please, I beg you.

in comparisson imagine if riven became a full tank champ right? like due to every item in her pool slowly being taken from her in viability and then her kit slowly being rebalanced into more cc and less damage... until she became essentially a warden. That's how the last two seasons of jayce has felt to me.

hell his identity as the snowballing early/midgame top laner has been taken with all of this anti poke stuff going on on top of gold value in general rising for everyone else. this makes his modern niche more or less defunct because if you're behind you can just headhunt 1k gold and come back into the game. But if jayce isn't ahead with this lethality shit he's useless, and if he hasn't ended the game by 25 minutes he falls off hard