"Why do ADCs get to 'burst heal' with lifesteal while other innate healers don't?"

Popular question, I see it all the time on these boards. I'm going to explain it and I truly believe Riot has the correct balance around lifesteal for ADCs and innate healing on healer champions. Let's get to it..

For starters, this is a false equivalency. Innate healers don't have to buy their healing stats, and many of them can only have their healing reduced through grievance wounds. ADCs have to actually buy lifesteal, which isn't even super common these days, and they typically need to buy other stats to make it noticably effective, namely attack speed and armor pen: more AS = more auto attacks and that obviously leads to more potential healing and armor pen because lifesteal is reduced by armor, so even moderately stacked armor champions can deal with attempted lifesteal tanking ADCs, especially without armor pen.

lets take Swain or Mundo as an example. Swain and Mundo have innate healing once they hit level 6 and there's no way you can stop this healing short of killing them. You can reduce it, but you can't really stop it. That's not including the fact that they can take the %healing/shields amp mastery and spirit visage to further amp their healing, something ADCs will almost never get. This is also relatively on interactive healing, especially in mundos case and to a lesser extent, Swain because unless you can kill him outside of his R range, you are going to have to deal with his healing.

These are pretty loose examples but you see the major difference. ADCs have to buy their healing and scale it with other stats and that comes at the expense of damage, and these are supposed to be the damage dealing class. Other innate healers don't buy their healing and typically the items they like to amp their healing (AP/SV/HP), help them in their respective roles and have no drawbacks.

Do you see the problem here? For one, comparing these things is stupid. And secondly, even if we invoke the idiotic test of trying to compare them, you see why ADCs buying lifesteal is a non issue. If this was season 2/season 3 when ADCs rushed BT, you might have a point because that made bot lane very stale. But now, you probably only see BTs roughly 60% of the time and that's assuming you get to a game where an ADC gets to 4+ items because they need AD/AS/Crit/Armor Pen way before they even think of lifesteal barring outliers like Kalista and even Draven or outright snowballing, which is an outlier in itself. And this is why you can't compare the two, because there's simply no comparison. Riot has it right.