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Marksmen (ADC) Swing Games Far Too Much.

Best Ekko NA·May 22, 2015·4 votes·718 views

I have a little bit of a rant about AD Carries, not about how well the champions are balanced, but instead how huge the impact is of Marksman champion in games. Currently when one Marksman gains even the slightest edge over the other I find games become nearly unplayable unless you have some insane bursting champion such as Leblanc or Zed to deal with them. The majority of games seem to be about one AD destroying the other one and then naturally the rest of the enemy team follows as now their bot lane can 2v3, 2v4, and sometimes even flat out 2v5 the enemy team.

Since the enemy team can't fight they're forced to trying to split push however that just leaves the enemy team running around bullying the opposing team as now they're fighting with uneven numbers against stronger enemies. Even when Top lane is doing very well and dominates lane they are often still unable to do anything vs their ranged counterpart from the enemy team.

The Bottom lane is a very troublesome lane. Not only are the unstable right clicking champions located there, but Dragon is there too, which is a major objective seeing how it's giving buffs that increase a teams snowballing potential as well.

While I have no answers to any of this, I find that Marksman is the biggest design flaw in League of Legends. No matter how you 'balance' the champions the game in its current state tends to come down to one Marksman running around doing as he pleases while the other tries to find ways to work his way back into the game as the rest of his team struggles to contain the enemy Marksman. The game needs some way to keep one Bottom lane from flat out decimating the other one.. while I understand ganks, skill level, and team play are what enables this to happen the road to recovery for the losing Bottom lane is a hard and painful one that comes down to crossing your fingers and praying your enemies make some major mistakes.

6 Comments

SEKAIMay 22, 20155 votes

The game used to have a holy trinity A counters B, B counters C and C counters A system. It was also when everyone, to different degrees depending on which champ, could solo carry games by him/herself, at least they were trying to achieve that.

Until someday Riot started thinking "Nah it's too hard let's just call a specific group of people carries and the rest all glorified supports and roll with it".

Yet with that they still fk up balance time and time again anyway.

Oh dear.

EDIT: The game caters to ADC too much. Unlike other roles, which are interchangeable depending on what you need in a specific synergy, however you simply can't function without having at least 1 ADC in a team for whatever reason (I am not talking about general AD Carries, because that would also include melee, the RANGED ADCs).

The Dragon rework, the constant nerf hammer on any support champ/pick who can do more than just being a ward bot, the constant nerf to anyone who counters ranged ADCs as a whole, the refusal to fine tune melee and ranged carries, the constant biased treatment to tanks and their itemisations, constantly giving and maintaining ADCs' problematic kits and items, 0 meta shift in bot lane for god knows how long, etc are all shining examples of such catering.

Don't let everyone (except the ADC players) play as babysitters once a match has passed the 15 min mark, that would be nice. ADC players won't feel so pressured by their responsibility to win the game single-handedly every match too.

BestTristMyHausMay 22, 20151 votes

{quoted}

EDIT: The game caters to ADC too much.

I don't claim to be an "expert", but I actually think the reverse is true. Using your "holy trinity" as a base point, I think the only "healthy" prong is: -Assassins/Burst mages kill ADCs

If we think of it as: AD > Tanks, Tanks > AP, AP > AD, then the obvious "problem" is the tanks, except not really. The PROBLEM is "but, muh flashy LCS plays".

To explain, ADC should kill tanks (and generally they do/can) but tanks should take the burst champs in order to hold their prong. But if tanks have too much gap close they can wipe ADCs AND AP, and if they DON'T have gap close, they can't kill the AP because top APs have too much mobility. The one thing that MIGHT work (haven't given it extensive thought, just spitballing) is make a "tether" item with ZERO range. Something that you can't root anyone from 500 away, BUT if they come in on you, they get "stuck" with you for X number of seconds. That way, marksmen still hold "trinity" advantage with tanks (because they don't want to be anywhere NEAR them anyway and can kite) but burst assassins can't blow up tanks (and mages are too slow, aside from LeBroken who needs rework anyway) without risking themselves, but they can still sneak behind them to kill marksmen.

Simply put, ADCs need to be able to tear down the wall (tanks), and APs need to be able to take out the guns (ADCs) so the problem is how can Tanks stop sneak attacks (APs) without being OP against the opposing guns (ADCs) also, since both are just spitting out damage. (at the end of the day, the PROBLEM is how to balance mobility, since the other aspects are balanced decently)

Mandang0May 22, 20152 votes

I think the problem's more general than one of just marksmen.

You have 5 players in 4 lanes (counting jungle), so you're always going to have to put 2 people in the same lane. The need for these players to coordinate in the laning phase (and the prevalence of duos in this lane for ranked) are going to lead to snowballing regardless of which lane they're in. The fact that they're also in the lane closest to dragon only makes matters worse, but that's a dragon issue, not anything specific to ADC.

Actually, I think ADC snowballs less than other lanes, because even when one ADC is behind, they can still farm safely in lane. This isn't true top, and while it might be true mid, the higher roam potential from that lane makes the snowball potential higher there imo. Maybe it's the fact that ADCs rush BF sword, so the difference between being ahead and having one and being behind and being stuck on pickaxe is fairly large, but that's all I can come up with. In most of my games, it isn't the ADC snowballing to get his team to snowball, it's the team getting ahead in the first place that allows the ADC to get farmed up and end with a crazy good KDA. Sure, I've seen bot lanes where one ADC crushes and does exactly what you've said, but I've seen tops do this too & become an unstoppable splitting force. I've seen mids do it and roam to snowball the other lanes. And I'm pretty sure we've all been in games where an enemy jungler either terrorizes your jungle or controls all the objectives. As I see it, all of the lanes have this potential to snowball the game, and I'd actually say mid probably has the most (they don't need to build up as much to when they're strong).

ZeeDrakonMay 22, 20151 votes

So, 1 of all ill judt guess you main riven and your pobably in quite low elo aswell. How the hell are adcs a problem for you? As riven?

Adcs are very weak for the most part of the gsme, early and midgame mid/top/jungle is often times more influential than adcs, and adcs cant duel/splitpush...
Where have you been the past month? Tank meta completely wrecked adc. Almost every adc thst doesnt have a kit to fight tanks had a huge decrease in winrate (best example lucian who dropped 3%). game balance: tanks counter mages/assasins, m/a counter adcs, adcs counter tanks. But recently tanks gotten so unbalanced adcs didnt even counter them anymore

Best Ekko NAMay 22, 20151 votes

{quoted}

So, 1 of all ill judt guess you main riven and your pobably in quite low elo aswell. How the hell are adcs a problem for you? As riven?

Adcs are very weak for the most part of the gsme, early and midgame mid/top/jungle is often times more influential than adcs, and adcs cant duel/splitpush...

Where have you been the past month? Tank meta completely wrecked adc. Almost every adc thst doesnt have a kit to fight tanks had a huge decrease in winrate (best example lucian who dropped 3%). game balance: tanks counter mages/assasins, m/a counter adcs, adcs counter tanks. But recently tanks gotten so unbalanced adcs didnt even counter them anymore

You completely missed the entire point of what I wrote so I'm just going to leave my response at that for you good sir.

1.) My post has NOTHING to do with my ability to carry, why you are talking about what ELO I'm in is beyond me because it's completely irrelevant to my post.

2.) Your information about "tank meta" wrecking ADC's is wrong, ranged ADC's counter tanks which means ADC's are needed now to win games more than ever before. There's little to no way to win anymore without an ADC, however this too has nothing to do with my post.

My post is about ADC's being a win / lose single sided lane. In other lanes there's a lot of room for players to work their way back into a game. In 1v1 lane there's many ways to come back when losing. With Marksman lane that's very seldom the case. When one gains an edge over the other the lane becomes a slaughter fest where the other ADC is nearly helpless. All the losing ADC + Support can often do is stand under the turret and pray their jungler can come and try to assist them or that the enemy makes mistakes like diving at the wrong time. Even when you watch players like hi im gosu this is the case. He either wins lane by a landslide, or he loses by a landslide. The Bottom lane is almost always a 1 sided affair, even at LCS. That is what my post pertains too.

WolfChasesMay 22, 20151 votes

It depends on the pick comp mate. There are 3 types of comp in bot lane:

Kill Lane ---> Usually a high burst ADC with a high threat support. Perfect example of a ''Kill Lane'' is or + , or composition.
Poke Lane ---> Long ranged ADC with a good/decent poke and support with similar mechanic. Perfect example would be or + , ,, or .
Sustain Lane ---> This mostly depends on supports that can heal you such are and literally every single adc, but, most common ADC picks for sustain lanes are the ones with poor early game but strong late such are , etc.

The thing is that each one of these comps counters the other. For Example:

KILL LANE counters POKE LANE because poke lane usually doesn't have enough damage and sustain early game, they depend on long range skillshots and because of that they are weak to KILL LANE's all ins. Also, cons of poke lane in this case is that it's really hard for poke lane to make a comeback once they fall behind.
POKE LANE counters SUSTAIN LANE if played correctly because sustain based supports are usually mana hungry so they can't handle the amount of constant poke that's coming from POKE LANE. In this case, if POKE LANE gets the lead over SUSTAIN LANE that's it because POKE LANE scales awesome into the mid game where sustain lane is weak if they are behind.
SUSTAIN LANE counters KILL LANE because the entire KILL LANE's kill potential lies in their burst, If they fail to burst you down they will get punished because they do less damage if their spells are on CD. And if KILL LANE falls behind they won't do much later cuz they need DAMAGE and TONS OF DAMAGE in order to scale well into the late game.

So as you can see, you can always counterpick or make a specific teamcomp against enemy teamcomp. Why should you pick Caitlyn and Sona into Graves and Blitzcrank instead of Jinx and Janna for example?

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