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State of the Game - Balancing Marksmen

Recons·7/18/2017, 2:02:19 PM·32 votes·1,975 views

Lately I have seen a lot of complains about the current state of Marksmen in the game. A lot of people claim Marksmen deal too much damage, and have too much Life Steal. In my opinion, you are not wrong, at least not entirely. To understand this we need to go back to the role of Marksmen.

What are Marksmen?

Marksmen are ranged sustained damage dealers, they are supposed to deal the most damage per second when ignored, and should succumb easily to crowd-control, zoning and burst damage. They have to itemize intelligently, choosing to sacrifice Damage-Per-Second (DPS) for survivability.

Marksmen also serve as effective siege tools, able to damage structures from afar, and are the most suitable to build armor penetration on, since they can utilize their range as a safety barrier, because armor penetration items provide no survivability stats.

So, what? Marksmen are OP OP

Well, here is my opinion on how to balance Marksmen, which will also cascade into other roles, in order to accommodate the change.

  1. Marksmen should have the most DPS when not interrupted.
  • This means Marksmen should itemize effectively with Attack Speed items.
  • This also means Marksmen should not be able to deal large amounts of damage when interrupted.
  1. Marksmen should be vulnerable to crowd-control, and burst.

  • This means Marksmen should not have insane sustain. Life Steal is not an ability Marksmen should have, it should be an ability Juggernauts and Fighters have.

  • This also means Marksmen should sacrifice DPS in order to build defensive items that mitigate these weaknesses, not increase their DPS, items like item 3139 and item 3053 should feel really bad on Marksmen

  1. Marksmen are not Assassin's they should not be able to one-shot any one, literally anyone. This should be relegated to Assassins, and fed burst Mages (notice the caveat, FED and BURST mages).

  2. On the other hand, Marksmen should be the best at dealing with Tanks and Juggernauts. They should be able to reduce bonus Armor to nothing, dealing stable damage to Tanks and non-Tanks alike.

  • To achieve this Marksmen itemization should ideally be: a) Medium attack damage, or % Health Damage. b) No critical chance, at ALL this stat should be Assassin only. c) Attack Speed. d) Only % Bonus Armor reduction.

How does this all fit together?

Assassins should get access to high attack damage, critical chance, and flat armor reduction. These stats would make assassin more risk-reward characters. On the other hand, they would be useless against tanks, losing all % health damage and % armor reduction.

Juggernaut's and Fighters would get medium attack damage, % armor reduction over time, and life steal. Letting them stay in the fray more, dealing medium damage. Less vulnerable to burst.

Control Mages should get Medium Ability Power, % health damage and % magic resist reduction over time (Think of an AP item 3071 ), but they can't burst, and their DPS is limited by Cooldowns.

Burst mages would get flat MR reduction, and high-AP items, but higher Cooldowns, having to prioritize their spells correctly, or risk losing team-fights. And they should not focus tanks, or be able to one-shot tanks.

This leaves Marksmen to deal DPS, equally to all targets, % bonus armor reduction that increases over time, if left unchecked would mean they can deal the same damage to tanks and to non-tanks alike, they should also have high-attack speed, and medium mobility and damage. However they have no critical chance, which means they also can't one-shot squishies, and they don't have flat armor reduction.

Conclusion

This is just my opinion on how to redirect the meta, and roles in the game. Limiting % and flat resistance reduction by range or something like that could be a solution.

What do you think about this?

Do you agree with these ideas? And how would you change the meta?

83 Comments

Resolution7/18/2017, 2:14:12 PM24 votes

Honestly, I think itemization is where they went wrong. If you build complete damage it should mean Glass Cannon. There's way too many "Free" stats/bonuses on AD items that have made balancing them a nightmare.

It's not even about building smart anymore either. I remember there was risk/reward for building GA - survivability at the cost of damage late game. Now you get damage on top of those defensive stats/with little to no drawback. Not to mention the other items that give you random defensive traits while handing you massive offensive traits at the same time.

I feel like ADC should be based solely on positioning and smart play rather than out sustaining late game even if caught out.

Yaskamasandwich7/18/2017, 3:07:20 PM12 votes

Crit needs to be removed flat out. It should have been during the marksmen update. Instead it was amplified. Sure it requires fixing some champions if it was removed like Tryndamere, Yasuo, Ashe, etc. but most of them need some fixing anyways. Only guaranteed critical strikes like Fiora's E or Jhin's 4th shot seem okay since it's not a constant thing.

As for the ramp up damage how do you plan on helping out the Marksmen whom are not good at it, like Jhin?

Sire Hippington7/18/2017, 3:58:16 PM11 votes

There's just one thing i REALLY disagree with: 'Assassins should get access to high attack damage, critical chance...' IMO critical strike has no place at all in a competetive game like that. RNG based damage just should not exist! The only points going for it are the scaleing, which can be achived by other non rng means and is quite quetionable balance wise, and the statisfacion of high numbers+extra AA animation which couold be achived with more focus on energized effects or spellblade.

I think Marksmen should get much more ramp-up mechanics(Fervor and Guinsoo'S go in the right direction), giving more backloaded damage for extendet fights rather than upfront burst. It would be nice if LW items would give a per target debuff that ramps up bonus armorpen by 10% per hit, up to ~70, so if they can consitently hit away on one target, they shred through it, but if you can prevent that their damage isn't that impressive. I think Lifesteal is fine on them in general IF they are actually vulnerable to burst and cc, though the current amounts are a bit overtuned no matter what. However, the main issue with current lifesteal is that it also coutners burst, DD has the 30% delayed damage, BT has the overheal for effectively 350more maxhealth, Mercurial has mr and a fucking cleanse(really mercurial was the beginning of the end, if marksmen want an as powerfull defensive effect like QSS, they should pay for it instead of getting a butload of stats with it), and on top of that they get so much rotection from their kits and supports that it's near impossible to burst them if they and their team play properly. With all the protection(if they want, they can get 3 cleanse effects!! summoner 1 item 3139 item 3222), they really don't deserve lifesteal right now.

I also don't like forceing itemisation onto classes. It's fine when classes/champions can use different builts aslong as it's a choice with clear tradeoffs. i have no issue with marksmen going for lethality and high AD to boost their burst and poke, as long as they sacrifice their dps and tankshredding by doing so. I have no issue with mages going for High Ap+flat pen for burst if that means missing out on CDR and %pen for sustained impact. Same for about every class, as long as there is a clear tradeoff for a choosen path, there is nothing wrong with haveing multiple options. And this is one thing where Riot fails horrible since S5, they just streamline champs and entire classes into set item builts with just small room for variation(like which Zeal item to get), but they totally kill ofbuilts that enable alternate playstyles. And by now, Abillity Power should be renamed, back in the day, it did what it says, it increased the power of your abillities, wether you played YI, Tristana or Anivia. But now, most non mage champs have lost nearly all theri AP ratio or atleast got them reduced so far that it's no longer meanigfull in any way.

Overall, i feel aside from vision(or rather the lack thereof) and masteries(to a lesser extend by now), itemisation is the main issue of this game. Back when i truely loved league, items were mostly stat sticks with some passive effects. This may sound boring to some, but it has some really huge advantages: It puts all the focus on a champion's kit. Stats only amplify what's already there(well, exept for tankstats but one can also implement individual scaleings with those, as quite some tanks already have), so the strengths and weaknesses of a champions kit are more meaningfull. If you lacked waveclear, that was a meaningfull weakness that couldn't be compensated by just paying ~1000gold. If you wanted the cleanse from QSS, you sacrificed an itemslot for nothing but the active and some small MR. There were some item actives that broke that rule, like DFG, and that one was removed for exact that reason. But now? Items have so many powerfull effects that champions are defined by their items as much as by their kit. Supports feel mostly like item bearers that get those powerfull effects for their team(imo feels even worse than the aura bearers in S1/2), most burst mages go for a hextech item into lichbane/ludens (why did we remove dfg again??), and currently the combination of 3 ad-ish items grants about 1k extra burst just from active/passive effects on top of their stats(item 3147 item 3078 item 3748 , while also granting ward detection and waveclear... Same for adc, whats the point for playing sivir when her main strengths, aoe damage and waveclear, can be achived by any adc with item 3087 /item 3085? Even her ult can be simulated by an support item if really neededitem 3069 ...

Ahristocats7/18/2017, 2:08:11 PM5 votes

i wonder why the board has such a boner with marksmen

marksmen ARE NOT THE FCKING PROBLEM RIGHT NOW, they do not need any kind of changes however league needs a better laning phase against ranged champions because ranged champions having 70 ad at lvl 1 is what makes marksmen going bot 100% of the time, well 99% of the time since morde can go bot

Hyrum Graff7/18/2017, 8:02:20 PM5 votes

{quoted}

Lately I have seen a lot of complains about the current state of Marksmen in the game. A lot of people claim Marksmen deal too much damage, and have too much Life Steal. In my opinion, you are not wrong, at least not entirely. To understand this we need to go back to the role of Marksmen.

Working from principals -- good approach :)

What are Marksmen?

Marksmen are ranged sustained damage dealers, they are supposed to deal the most damage per second when ignored, and should succumb easily to crowd-control, zoning and burst damage. They have to itemize intelligently, choosing to sacrifice Damage-Per-Second (DPS) for survivability.

Marksmen also serve as effective siege tools, able to damage structures from afar, and are the most suitable to build armor penetration on, since they can utilize their range as a safety barrier, because armor penetration items provide no survivability stats.

Agreed.

  1. Marksmen should have the most DPS when not interrupted.

  • This means Marksmen should itemize effectively with Attack Speed items.
  • This also means Marksmen should not be able to deal large amounts of damage when interrupted.

Agreed. I'll add on, they must scale with crit as well. A bit more of that in an old post of mine.

  1. Marksmen should be vulnerable to crowd-control, and burst.

  • This means Marksmen should not have insane sustain. Life Steal is not an ability Marksmen should have, it should be an ability Juggernauts and Fighters have.

Here I'm going to have to disagree.

Squishy carries who aren't marksmen rely on cooldowns (with a few exceptions, like cass and ryze). This means they can walk up, drop a full rotation, and walk back while they wait for their abilities to come up. It also means, if they're about to get blown up in a fight, they can spam all their buttons and at least contribute something.

By contrast, marksmen have to constantly stay within AA range of their targets in order to maximize their damage. With very few exceptions, this also puts them within range to be hit by their target. A marksman who's at half hp when the fight starts is going to get sneezed on and die without contributing anything (again, with a few exceptions, like Ashe or Sivir). Going into fights, marksmen need to be healthy enough to use their DPS. Lifesteal allows this to happen, by healing off of creep waves or jungle camps. It's not the only way -- for example, I could imagine an item like warmogs, but it has no health threshold, and it won't heal you past [220 + 60/lvl] HP (ie, 280-1300 based on level).

The same thing applies to during a fight. If an enemy mage or assassin drops a combo on a marksman as the fight begins, bringing them low, the marksman now has to back out of the fight entirely, or get blown up as soon as they try to do anything. Lifesteal allows a marksman to be useful if the attempt to burst them is unsuccessful. Again, it's not the only way, but in this case I can't think of anything quite as effective.

Let's imagine a world where lifesteal doesn't exist. Because of the above two scenarios, marksman can't afford to stay in AA range for extended periods of time. Therefore, they have to be effective in shorter periods of time -- ie, they need the ability to burst. We've already established that's not how things should be, therefore, we need lifesteal.

One clarification: I absolutely agree that marksmen should not have access to significant quantities of lifesteal in lane. Draven getting first item DD and instantly healing to full after you chunk him is beyond frustrating, and completely invalidates many poke supports.

the rest

Was going to respond to this too, but I have to head out now, so I'll end here.

It Hertz When IP7/19/2017, 2:00:33 PM4 votes

{quoted}

b) No critical chance, at ALL this stat should be Assassin only.

I disagree. Assassin's damage should be coming mainly from abilities, maybe with empowered AA's woven in. That way, they have clear windows of power, and windows of weakness. Encouraging crit builds gives a lot of power to their AAs, which starts erasing those peaks and valleys in favor of sustained damage, at which point you basically have a mobile fighter building glass cannon.

AirKingNeo7/18/2017, 3:45:47 PM4 votes

This leaves Marksmen to deal DPS, equally to all targets, % bonus armor reduction that increases over time, if left unchecked would mean they can deal the same damage to tanks and to non-tanks alike, they should also have high-attack speed, and medium mobility and damage. However they have no critical chance, which means they also can't one-shot squishies, and they don't have flat armor reduction.

Then who kills assassins and mages if ADCs can't hurt them, but only tanks? Even I asked myself this when I tried to rework crit.

Also the rest of your ideas are terrible, but here's the core right here to show you why you're flawed.

TwitchInMyPants7/19/2017, 3:21:00 AM4 votes

Lifesteal has been in the game since S1 and Juggernauts + Fighters with innate sustain can build lifesteal to get extra sustain and more benefit, especially when combined with visage. Marksmen and supports are balanced around them having lifesteal as a defensive option and are countered by grevious wounds and they just added another option for it, if you want to get rid of defensive options start with shit Riot added like GA or Scimitar. Also if melees having their items gutted is a problem, suggest more splits in the items. They just made a difference in duskblade, maybe ask for more lifesteal for melees on BT and BoRK instead of begging for it to be deleted from Marksmen.

And when you suggest they should build full damage but not be able to one shot anyone, you're basically saying "Delete crit" and even if that happened it'd likely just transition into things like lethality being the main damage which still results in burst which means, yes, marksmen will one shot you if they're ahead and you're out of position.

Also your idea that "All marksmen build attack speed" is also flawed at the start. What is Draven? What is Jhin? What is Graves? Hell there's even situations like Sivir/Quinn where they have the option to go more pen oriented or crit/AS.

I'm a flex player who started as a jungle main and even if bot is my favorite role right now I understand items get unfairly changed due to another role using them, but you're here begging for an entire class to be gutted without even thinking about what Riot has made here. Would you not read something like this about how OP tanks are and think how they've had hard seasons and that there's legitimate reasons for their items to be buffed? Wouldn't you want a middleman solution instead of "This type of item shouldn't even be allowed on the class ever". Honestly I want to see more classes in botlane but all you seem to care about is nerfing Marksmen instead of finding ways to create fighters/mages/assassins in botlane.

Kariu Rena7/18/2017, 5:04:06 PM3 votes

Why should merc be bad on adc? From that logic we should remove the ap cdr from zhonya and banshee then rofl

Scary Door7/18/2017, 7:11:07 PM2 votes
  1. Marksmen are not Assassin's they should not be able to one-shot any one, literally anyone.

Could we just stop perpetuating this statement. Until someone shows me video evidence of a marksman "one-shotting" someone I don't want to see this. I am just tired of this statement regurgitated endlessly and the mouth-breather community tirelessly repeating this as their argument against marksman.

If you're going to make a claim, you have to prove it, and with replays being a part of the client now that should be very easy to do and yet there has yet to be video evidence of a marksman 'one-shotting' anyone.

The real problem with the game is that most classes/champions have too much damage. Damage is just far too high across the board on all levels in the game and has been for a while now.

AmetDeCrypt7/18/2017, 3:01:28 PM2 votes

I'd be open to a replacement for crit though it may be too ingrained in gaming culture to really be rid of it.

KuroCaliber7/18/2017, 2:31:48 PM2 votes

See, I love this idea, and I'm willing to expands on it with my own thoughts.

1). I saw this on another post once, about how CRIT was too bursty and sometimes unreliable. I agree that CRIT inherently seems to be a burst stat, allowing one to chunk the heavy health tanks. But also ends up popping squishy champs FASTER than they pop tanks. As the whole Rock paper scissors thing goes, ADC are intended to trade weak early games for the ability to kill literally everything late game.

A week early game is frustrating to play through though, which is why we see marksmen abusing lethality when it is strong. The post in question decided to replace CRIT for marksmen with a stat called ramp-up. It basically worked like guinsoos and increased damage dealt via percentage over Time. Similar to how the battle trance mastery works. It's odd because guinsoos did be very powerful, but it is limited without a full build, while CRIT begins doing work when you hit two items.

If ramp up were implemented, ADC would do increasing DPS when attacking the same target, increasing the emphasis on single target damage. You can either ramp up against tanks to kill them, or you can ramp up against squishies, and kill them over time too. This actually makes death's dance a balanced item as the ADC would be able to delay the assassin burst long enough to play on equal ground with the assassin because they're ramping up. It would take the ADC time to still kill the assassin, instead of two shotting them when they fail to kill with their initial combo. It would also make heals and shield less oppressive because ADCs would use them to buy time for them to ramp up.

Your ie passive would change to convert the full ramp up time from like 8 second to 5-6s. Or else raise the% increase in basic attack damage.

If you are a burst carry like jhin, then you use CRIT, which then would be relegated to a bonus damage scaling with spell damage, think of Athenes but instead of increasing healing, it increases your next basic attack damage by some amount. It's not dps so carries would not want it, but it would require a large amount of spell damage to charge up, which only assassins can provide.

Tldr: ramp-up instead of CRIT on marksmen, would accentuate their strengths as damage over time, CRIT on assassins to help with their burst.

NineTailedMystic7/19/2017, 4:31:14 AM2 votes

Giving Crit Chance AND Flat Pen to Assassins? Why in the world would you do that.

Zero Skill Tank7/19/2017, 5:30:11 AM2 votes

This means Marksmen should not have insane sustain. Life Steal is not an ability Marksmen should have

If marksmen didn't have lifesteal, assassins would need to be cut on mobility absurdly hard. Right now they can have pretty much free access to marksmen, because in case they get CC'd halfway through their kill atempt and leave the marksmen with say 50%, this attempt is a complete fail (because marksmen lifesteals right back in).

And Riot will never do this, since assassins are consistently among the most popular champions, particurarly in younger audiences. Nobody would want to play an assassin whos gapclosing potential is on par with marksmen range instead of tripling it - it would be balanced, with no lifesteal, but it wouldn't be as fun to play.