The real issue with Enchanter is actually ADC

The Deckowner··45 votes·1,556 views

ADC by design is just a stat stick role, not saying adc takes no skill or anything, but ultimately adc has the most reliable damage with basically no counterplay, it just does damage equals to whatever stat it has.

Enchanters mostly just gives these stat stick champions free stats with so called "utility". Heals, shields, attackspeed buffs, movementspeed buffs, ad buffs, etc, all does one thing at the end: give the stat stick more stat so it hits harder. There is no counterplay for the receiving end of these free stats, which brings a feeling of lack of counterplay.

You can't really make enchanters more interesting and interactive unless they do more than giving free stats, and there is real counterplay to adc dps.

34 Comments

Spoofghoul17 votes

which is exactly why i'm constantly suggesting we change adc's first

then make enchanters more diverse in what they can support

AgeOfTheMage2 votes

mmhm, supports like janna and lulu are.... ehhhhhhhhhhh, I don't like em, I prefer supports like braum, since he doesn't just sit there and spam a shield onto his adc, he actually has to be in there, and watch out for potential and oncoming threats to protect his adc from since his shield can face only one way.

Cowseed1 votes

Lulu can be a shield bot I agree but won't be as potent as janna if she does that. The thing I lke about Lulu is she can really screw over a team if she targets the right persons with her cc and time her ult right.

I hate Janna with a passion because i legitimately do not have to be anywhere near the fight to actually have an impact. I just stay right behind the adc and spam shields or shield people when there low and Q and ult whenever.

With lulu though all her skills have some decision making involved.

Linna Excel9 votes

How do you counterplay someone who builds IE+SS and has a basic idea how to right click?

ZT Xperimentor13 votes

That's part of his point, marksmen are by and large uninteractive yet have the highest damage on the field. Enchanters often just buff them without changing how their damage pattern functions, notable examples would be nami & janna.

Linna Excel2 votes

Yes, I agree.

KitSun91 votes

I resent that you put Nami in the same postion as Janna, Janna can have an impact even if she literally does not involve herself in the fight and just shields, Q's, and Ult's from the backline, but.... Nami requires alot more skill than that with landing bubbles, the timing and placement of ultimates and utilizing the bounce from your W most effctively. Namis E is probably the closest she has to the braindead enchanter stereotype. Yeah just here to defend Nami, the best designed Enchanter.

ZT Xperimentor1 votes

Likewise so can nami, if she's low on health & mana, she can just give her marksman the auto-attack buff before leaving. Her heal gives them movement speed and indirectly bounces towards enemies, which doesn't change how a marksman does a hit & run pattern, just enables and amplifies it. I'm not trying to put her down nor am I saying enchanters are braindead; however I'm saying they're in general, too focused on buffing marksmen instead of any other class on their team.

Dream High1 votes

In an ideal world burst them with a mage, so you can kill them before they kill you. But with shield supports, ap being weak you can't even do that unless fed.

Linna Excel1 votes

Yeah. Since the assassin rework and mymu, being able to properly burst an ADC is at an all time low while ADC burst seems to be at an all time high. I was looking at midlaner winrates the other day and with the possible exception of Malz, there doesn't seem to be any one midlaner that is dominating the meta.

Imperial Japan1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Linna Excel,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=HiLoehiB,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2017-09-26T03:49:38.995+0000)

How do you counterplay someone who builds IE+SS and has a basic idea how to right click?

Pick an assassin. The reason why ADC's are strong right now is because enchanters are able to protect the ADC's the the point in which assassins can't get to or kill ADC's

LightIsMyPath1 votes

That's supposed to be the case. If you were able to just instakill an ADC right under the nose of his support enchanters would have no point whatsoever being picked. On the other hand if the assassin didn't die instantly after unloading his stuff only with the ADC focus and said ADC didn't have all this sustain, you would still be in a fight where their support just used all of his stuff, leaving the ADC vulnerable and thus forcing him out of the fight temporarily. As of now you jump in, get peeled and die. The fight is 5 vs 4 and the ADC will just lifesteal everything back in the blink of an eye

Teridax688 votes

I agree to some extent with this, one of the main issues with enchanters isn't simply enchanters, but the enchanter-marksman combo, which is exceedingly reliable and powerful. This is also why I dislike arguments that enchanters are the most powerful class in the game, and so need a nerf, because their power is being almost exclusively transferred to the marksman, which is why the enchanter subclass itself comes across as strong. Nerfing enchanters I feel would simply leave them in a bad state overall, and limit their ability to be effective outside of working with the marksman when the meta inevitably shifts.

With that said, I don't believe one class's faults should excuse the other's, and I think part of the issue here is that both marksmen and enchanters are individually too reliable, beyond just how they interact with each other. On one hand, marksmen are notorious for having damage that is essentially uncounterable and costless, on top of being very high, and on the other enchanters have a common problem of also lacking counterplay to their utility or CC, which has also harmed their prospects in solo lanes, where their core playstyle is usually revealed to actually be quite unhealthy. Janna and Lulu are the most egregious example of this, with their long-duration shields and stat boosts on top of easy hard CC, but Sona and Soraka also offer very few opportunities to counter their abilities, even if they themselves are rather squishy.

Those who have read my posts on this kind of issue before know my opinion already, but I think the core problem with enchanter design is that it's predicated on an incomplete notion of counterplay: Jinxylord mentioned this a few weeks ago, but one of the main obstacles to adding counterplay to enchanters right now is that the most common tools for counterplay, e.g. delays, skillshots, things that can be anticipated, don't really work on supports, whose utility generally needs to be on-demand and reliably applied if it is to work in sync with teammates. Heroes of the Storm somewhat challenges this assumption with Ana, their newest support whose heals can all miss, but the general idea is still true: interacting properly with allies can already be very difficult outside of organized play, and the less responsive a champion's utility, the more frustrating it can be to use. However, this is only one side of counterplay, and completely ignores effects that can be outplayed after they've been applied: Tristana's E is one such example, where her bomb always gets applied, but only deals important damage if Trist then follows up with basic attacks. Technically some supports have that in the form of boosts conditional upon their shields holding, but usually the shields are too strong and prolonged to be focused down in time, and the boosts themselves end up not being the main feature anyway: if the power on that were reversed, and the bonuses themselves were huge but the shields themselves quite small, then that kind of ability would have a lot more counterplay, as focusing the shield down to interrupt the bonus in time would be much more realistic. On a slightly different note, double-edged abilities like Kindred's or Bard's ults, which can be exploited by the enemy, also set a fantastic precedent for support abilities that could be both powerful and versatile, while still being fair.

To some extent, I think some of this can be applied to marksmen: because a large part does and always will come from a source of damage that is unavoidable, it might help to add more forms of counterplay to them that allow their opponents to legitimately react to their moves, instead of simply trying to kill them before they get killed first. Making more steroids conditional, rather than on-demand, could go a long way towards establishing this, and it could also help shift a lot of marksman power towards mechanics that are more interactive, and therefore less reliable. Generally, reliability is the biggest issue with marksmen, and the fact that they have so much reliable power in their basic attacks means they would benefit from being extra unreliable with their abilities. Simply tacking abilities from other classes onto marksmen doesn't really work all that well, because most other skillshots, dashes, etc. are predicated on the fact that the champions wielding them have only limited reliability, and so often need to be able to have some consistent mode of damage or movement. If a marksman misuses their abilities or gets outplayed (which presumes that their abilities can be both misused and outplayed), they should not be expected to succeed any more than any other non-marksman who does the same thing, in spite of their autoattack-based power. This would likely involve shifting some of the raw damage marksmen currently possess off of their basic attacks, and instead placing it onto their abilities, which should still complement their autoattacking power, and as a result that could hopefully also create better diversity between marksmen, who currently all tend to do the same thing by dint of having most of their power concentrated on a mechanic that changes little from champion to champion.

Salson5 votes

How the hell does one counterplay buffing people. No really, I can dodge a Blic hook, I can't stop Janna from shielding an ally.

The main issue is Enchanters power. If Blic is unreliable and Janna is reliable, how much more power should Blic have? Keep in mind that a 100% accuracy Blic is a faar bigger monster than Janna.

So the main Enchanter problem is current overpowered state of their items. The same is ultimately true for Marksman, only Twitch is too strong by himself. Their items are simpy too cheap and too strong.

The Deckowner3 votes

It's hard to create counterplay to buffs to allies, that is a major issue in enchanter design sinfe the creation of MOBA.

Salson1 votes

Well yeah, but because of that they should only have a part of a 100% hitrate Catcher like Blic or Thresh.

I can't really speak of direct numbers, so this is a bit generalizing: Lets say Janna is balanced when she has 60% power of 100% Blic, as he only hits 20% of his hooks (but those count x3). If the items buff her to 70% she is broken, if bad items give her only 50%, she is weak.

The Deckowner1 votes

Here's the issue: rito's idea of skill expression is delay and skillshot, the first one make no different, because the counterplay is still "kill adc faster", the second one is also useless because skillshot onto ally teammate doesn't really show skill

ChuShoe1 votes

build executioners calling to stop healing, make sure your team has enough cc, if the supp is that big of a problem, jump on them instead

honestly, it's because adc's broke enchanters. Enchanters didn't break adc's.

Salson1 votes

That's some Garen/Ramus/Annie level of counterplay there.

Which is why enchanters are number reliant and broken when those numbers are too strong. Which they currently are.

ChuShoe1 votes

Speaking of rammus, can we talk about how ridiculous he is

I played him for the first time the other day, and he by far has the easiest clear on ANY jungle champion I've ever played in my life.

Salson1 votes

Well it's the standard Make a 'noob' champion viable in high elo. Yes, know the phase 'noob' champ is overused.

His entire balance is based on numbers, and as he has no skill expresion other that ones ability to jungle, he become obscene when those numbers are too high. Ramus just statchecks everything and needs a VGU.

Most of the boards are just so caught up in their Marksman/Enchanter hate bandwagon to care about broken stuff like Singed, Rammus or Malzahar.

FireDrizzle2 votes

Soraka is more reasonable than other enchanters because she cant peel herself so well. Unpopular opinion im sure. All though she can build tanky and still heal her team for a million.

XDDD1 votes

{quoted}

Soraka is more reasonable than other enchanters because she cant peel herself so well. Unpopular opinion im sure. All though she can build tanky and still heal her team for a million.

She's got summoner 7 /summoner 3 and summoner 4 and ulti but besides that she sits behind THE BACKLINE so half the time so she's out of sight range. No way in hell is it reasonable for a champ to let you autowin a teamfight if you don't always take her out first. That alone is way too much raw power for a support champion.

HeresyHorus2 votes

The real issue with Enchanter is actually ADC

... and the main issue with ADCs is Crit synergy with Attack speed.

Remove that synergy and u fix those 2 roles.

AirKingNeo2 votes

Everything is ADCs fault

mages are weak

keep buffing supports

tanks are not broken

everything is all because of adcs

-The Boards, 2017

Bottom Laner1 votes

[{quoted}](name=The Deckowner,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=HiLoehiB,comment-id=,timestamp=2017-09-26T03:46:46.430+0000)

it just does damage equals to whatever stat it has.

What ADC is capable of doing 100% true damage every aa? Because that's the only way anything is able to deal damage equal to its exact number.

The Deckowner7 votes

you are taking things too literally my friend, I am just implying that adc damage is extremely reliable.

Bottom Laner1 votes

You don't need to imply something you literally said in the previous sentence, that's just unnecessary information. I sure as hell are not gonna deny the fact that ADCs have the most reliable damage though. That's part of the point of ADCs as a class.

The Deckowner3 votes

repetition is a method to emphasize a point.

PokladnicaZla1 votes

Wish RITO would rework ADC's into a role that deals DPS and has to focus down a target,rather than ADC's with burst . . .

Sire Hippington1 votes

Certainly agree with that. But there's also an issue on side of supports and their items. As you already said, they 'just give these stat stick champions free stats with so called "utility". Heals, shields, attackspeed buffs, movementspeed buffs, ad buffs, etc,' Aside from that not beeing very interactive, the main issue is that all they give are flat heal/shield values, as, ms, ad and on-hit. So some generally usefull stuff and lots off stuff for AA based champs, but nothing specifically for tanks(% armor/mr boost or %hp(from target, no caster) based shields/heals) exept for tariks W and no buff catered towards mages. Same with items, heals, shields, onhit+as from arden't, zeke's also only buffs AAs, armor shred from BC...the only item to support AP's is abysal and in **very niche **cases Wit's end, and again non of the effects favour tanks. Even in masteries, stoneborn(and soon font of life) give on-hit based heal that greatly favours AA-focused champs.

On top of that we have the melee vs range issue, many enchanters can't really support diving melees as they lack the ranged to reach them in the opposing backline with their supportive skills, and the lack the needed mobillity and survivabillity to follow them there.

ADC are pretty busted on their own and objectively the best target for support as they are very reliable and consistent in their output, and at the same time supports and thier items/masteries are focused on boosting ADC rather than other classes, so it just goes both ways which causes the issue to escalate even more.

The Deckowner1 votes

your point about enchanter supports lacking counterplay is certainly valid, but it's better to fix the root of an issue before you fix the branch of said issue.

GrievousFetus1 votes

ADCs being stat sticks does not inherently mean that supports must be designed as batteries that increase the stats of said stat sticks. It's still a problem with the way the supports themselves are designed.

More from Gameplay

More by The Deckowner