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An Answer to Assassins' Absense of Utility

Darathdecimator·12/23/2016, 10:13:04 PM·7 votes·887 views

#Introduction TLDR In the answer section

In League, Assassins have always been problematic to balance, because their nature makes them inherently feast of famine. They lack the utility to help their team when behind, and their only contribution to the team is killing essential targets. Riot's recent class reworked primarily aimed to lengthen the burst window of assassins, in they succeeded in doing that, but the issue is that if assassins are not able to quickly kill those high damage priority targets, those targets will kill them. Their high mobility may allow them to escape and, depending on the champion, even attempt another assassination. However these opportunities are few and far between and further more the available outcomes are still feast or famine. The other main goal of the reworks was to nudge 'utility' into assassins' kits. Assassins clearly can't have access to heavy CC, and enhancing effects simply have little coherence with their kits. So Riot gave them mobility tools and a few vision tools. But despite the interaction with team-wide elements (like map-wide vision) these mostly provide the assassins themselves with ways to flank teams, set ambushes, and achieve their objectives. (This is a good thing BTW) Those objectives still have the same all or nothing outcomes. Take, Rengar for example. He is a bit Diver-ish as he lacks the mobility to escape situations, but that simplifies an encounter.

#An Example

If Rengar aims to kill the enemy adc, both who are neither too ahead or behind the two most extreme cases are:

A. The Adc is caught out alone, Rengar obliterates them at essentially no cost to himself B. Rengar charges headon into an enemy team, and is locked down and killed

Its generally agreed that these situations are fair, adcs should be dependent to some degree on their team against assassins, and assassins should have to think a little in order to assassinate.

The rest of the potential outcomes occur within teamfights and can be surmised as the following:

  1. Rengar outpositions the adc and eliminates them, removing their dps from the fight - Success
  2. Rengar fails to completely kill the adc, but someone else finishes them off - Effectively Case #1
  3. Rengar fails to completely kill the adc, but they are forced to back, removing their dps from the fight - Marginally better than Case #1
  4. Rengar fails to kill adc, and they lifesteal thier health and remain in the fight, maybe blowing some cooldowns from themselves and allies - Failure
  5. Rengar fails to withstand the onslaught of peel and fails to significantly damage adc, maybe blowing some cooldowns - Marginally worse than Case #4

As you can see there are effectively two outcomes: Complete success: The adc's dps is nullified, or Abject Failure: The adc's dps is maintained.

#The Problem

There are two barriers between Failure and Success. First is access to the adc, which is dependent on a combination of positioning of both teams, vision of both teams, strategy, and the kits of the assassin and target. The second is the razor-thin feed or famine barrier of: does Rengar have enough damage to cut through the heals shields and health, and kill the adc. The extreme differences in the cases on both sides of this barrier is why assassin mains can complain about adcs being to hard to kill at the same time that adc mains can complain about assassins killing them too easily. They can both be true at the same time, because there is NO MIDDLE GROUND. You can't semikill an adc...
But what if you could?

#The Answer (An Answer?, An Idea.)

In general the importance of an assassin succeeding at their goal, is that the enemy team's primary source of dps (the adc) is gone. If they fail at that, they've had no effect (As you're probably tired of hearing me say: Feast or Famine) So what's an Intermediate Case? Their dps being halved (or cut to 75%, or whatever numbers you want). And what form of utility (something assassins lack that contributes to Feast or Famine) has been woefully underused? Debuffs. So imagine replacing Case #4 in the example, with: Rengar fails to kill adc, but the attack has crippled them, and while they can still fight, thier contribution is severely hindered - Moderate Success. Some might say debuffs haven't been used because they're 'unfun', but really what situation is better as an adc player: Modified Case #4, or Case #1?

(TLDR; Allow Assassins to debuff enemies, debuffing their dps (Effect scales with damage dealth) for a significant period of time)

#Implementation

So how to go about integrating such a mechanic into the game? Firstly it should be an effect so its application can be controlled. It also should be target bound so it doesnt make assassins great duelists. If it reduced AD it would affect too many champions, Crit and Attackspeed are the two other main dps factors for adcs. Debuffing attackspeed has the added benefit of inhibiting kiting, which makes positioning more difficult. Clearly this still leaves an adc player with options to survive the ordeal, but simply pressing right click on minions to lifesteal back health is no longer a feasible option. In terms of debuff length, Illaoi's spirit vessel provides a good example. If the debuff is integrated into champion kits then there is less chance of abuse, but it's application may be be strange. Putting it in assassin items, makes it a buy in option, but it runs the risk of opening up abuse by other classes. It likely should scale with recent damage done, so and severly damged adc is far worse off then a slightly nicked one. There are other nuances that would need to be solved, but that is the principle of the idea. Thank you for reading through this wall of text.

Edit #1: Oh I almost forgot, Upvote if you hate Yasuo!

12 Comments

Ralanr12/23/2016, 10:22:22 PM2 votes

This is an interesting idea, but wouldn't it be simpler to just nerf lifesteal in general?

Teridax6812/24/2016, 12:12:40 PM2 votes

I like the idea of giving assassins options to succeed even when they don't kill their priority target, but I don't know if a long-duration debuff is the best way to achieve that. I also don't think assassins should have to rely on such a mechanic to be counted as successful, particularly when every other damage class, including mages, who are also bursty, and fighters, who are also melee, can often reach a happy medium. I think what needs to be addressed directly is why assassins are snowbally, and not just what they need to make an impact.

The example of Rengar you brought up highlights the epitome of snowballiness in League: even after his rework, Rengar is a champion with reliable target access and primarily upfront burst. Add to that his unreliable, mostly situational escape, and you have a champion that, by design, can only end a fight with high success or failure, with no real middle ground. In fact, every time you let a champion reach any target they want with relative ease, but also front-load all of their damage, you end up making them generally unhealthy and extremely fragile to balance, as is also the case with Kassadin and pre-rework LeBlanc. Because of this, no champion should be able to easily reach whichever target they like, yet also deal most of their burst within the first second. Rengar should probably keep his reliable target access via his ult, but should take more time to kill his target, and in exchange should have even better tools to survive and escape fights. On the flipside, champions like Katarina and Kha'Zix can afford to have good amounts of quick burst, because they tend to be much more opportunistic in how they enter fights and select their targets.

I also do think it's possible to give assassins crowd control with the right sacrifices: if upfront burst and reliable target access are major assassins strengths, of which you can only pick one per champion, hard CC/utility could be a third, provided your champion has neither of the first two: Shaco, for example, is known for his CC, and not so much for being able to instantly reach any target and kill them right then and there, yet is still an assassin. He could be a great example of this third type, but his rework left him in a spot where he has a bit of everything (he has some upfront burst with Backstab, and some good target access with Deceive), yet in such unsatisfying amounts that he doesn't feel great. Ekko was likely intended to be an assassin of this type as well, but his damage output tends so much towards autoattack-based DPS at this point that he might as well be a light fighter.

TL;DR: Assassins can only have one of a) front-loaded burst, b) reliable target selection and c) powerful CC/utility, but should also be balanced around their strength in such a way that they have something to fall back on: type A assassins should have extremely good escapes, e.g. Zed's shadows, so that they can retreat even if they fail to kill their target, type B assassins should have enough raw strength to kill targets that make themselves vulnerable to them, and their unreliability should be tied to their target access, and type C assassins should have their non-damage tools to stay useful no matter how far behind they are.

Chizzah12/24/2016, 9:53:25 AM1 votes

As an ADC main in bronze V I can tell you that ADCs are almost never protected (peeled for).

I would say if you do this then the best window should be lengthened just a tiny bit more with a nerf to ADC and mage damage to balance things out.

TequilaZombie12/24/2016, 1:51:31 PM1 votes

I quite like this idea. I believe the optimal way to implement this would be through items with a mechanic similar to Sterak's Gage, yet being it's polar oposite.

UNIQUE Passive: Cripple the Weak: Uppon dealing XXX to ZZZZ damage (scaling with levels) in 2 seconds, the AS of the target unit is reduced by WW to ZZ% (based on % missing hp) for as long as they remain under K% hp.

Slap that unique passive on Assassin items, possibly make it so it has to be applied into a certain range (like, 300 units at most, so we don't have Jhin and Lucian abusing assassin items again) and you're good to go.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it could, instead of taking down AS, affect the target's primary source of damage, AD or AP. So if the main threath to your team is the 10/1/5 enemy Viktor, you can deal with him instead of jumping on the 1/23/4 Ezreal and wasting your CDs on someone who is giving you less gold than a minion wave.