Title. ADCs either don't have enough agency early, or have far too much control over the game late because of this. While pretty much every other class' items scale somewhat linearly, ADCs either tickle or drop fucking nukes with nothing inbetween. The first thing that ought to be done is to flatten their power curve somewhat, then you can go about decided how strong or weak they need to be.
Fuedaddy2 votesmaybe some ranged specific itemization that includes less ad with resistances. Less powerful ramp up damage, but wont get deleted by one of the 13 assassins currently in the meta at level 6. But I agree, something needs to be done.
TotalJerk1 votesPart of why they ramp up like that is that they quadruple down on multiplicative synergy. AD, Attack speed, crit chance, and crit damage all feed off of eachother and their items are designed with synergy between multiple items in mind. The old I.E. was designed such that it's passive was almost worthless without a zeal item, and incredibly strong with one. The new I.E. makes that even worse because it effectively does not even have a passive without a Zeal item, but then when you get it you have double crit and true damage.
Assassin don't need to buy another item for 
or 
to come online. The same is true for mages and 
or 
, tanks and 
or 
, or even enchanters and items like 
or 
. Their shit just works when they buy it.
Paroe1 votesMarksmen itemization is not bad, it simply feels awful due to marksmen having a 4 item core to be properly effective. Riot wants them to be a lategame class, but they also should not have the best early game out of everyone else because of it.
Their attempt to rectify this was to slow down power spikes and shift around some power (the current IE, when you do the math, does similar damage to the old IE. Its basically -20 damage per 100AD after 200AD). It was a good start, but with riots official endorsement of storm razor as a marksman item marksmen mains have once again fallen into the cookie cutter looking for their 'old oneshot at 2 items'.
The way you fix the current marksman itemization issue is to reduce their itemization to three items from four. You can do this by simply reworking storm razor, as ive went over in my above linked thread. Marksmen mains also want to do tons of damage with IE, so you can rework IE so that over-crit (crit above 100%) becomes crit damage, letting them forgo flexible item slots for mOaR dAmAgE instead of true damage.
TotalJerk1 votesPersonally I think they should go back to the season 6 philosophy, but weaker. I think they really had the right idea with the direction of the ADC update, but they just made ADCs too strong.
Paroe1 votesPersonally I think they should go back to the season 6 philosophy, but weaker. I think they really had the right idea with the direction of the ADC update, but they just made ADCs too strong.
'same but weaker' is just a bad philosophy in general, though. We need to move forward not backwards.
TotalJerk1 votesI mean they took the wrong things from why that update failed. It failed because they made ADCs overpowered across the board. That update did a lot of good that they just completely undid over the next two seasons. It was good that ADCs could actually do their own job.
Moonscourge1 votesADCs are among the best champs level 1, then most fall off slowly until their first back. At level 9 they are the most powerful with their first ability maxed, then they fall off because their strongest ability isn't getting any stronger anymore due to scaling and their builds now focusing on AS at this point.
Phreak made a video about this on youtube, it was quite interesting. Sadly there isn't much they could do about this besides changing AD ratios all across the board.