Let's Talk About Quinn

Preface:

I’d like to begin by expressing the fact that I am not the utmost authority on Quinn and Valor, nor do I consider myself to be so. The most credit that I can give myself in that regard comes from the fact that I do indeed main the champion and have done so for over a year now on the NA live server. I’ve played her mid (long before RedMercy made his video), adc, top, and even jungle. It has come to my attention that Riot intends to make balance changes to Quinn, or at least that is my understanding based on their quote in the 5.6 patch notes.

“Quinn's problems don't begin and end with Vault…” -Rito 2015

Indeed, myself and all the other Quinn players in the community praised Riot for these long-awaited and much-needed bug fixes. I’d certainly gotten tired of Vault not always applying Harrier when I needed it. Thank you, Rito. I’m going to talk about Quinn as a champion and how she does and doesn’t fit into the current meta, why she hasn’t in the past, and how she can be improved to scale up as a more reliable champion.

What She Is Today:

today, in my opinion, is one of the single most balanced champions in the game. She’s a lane bully which is counterweighted by her less-than-stellar late game scaling. She can play the role of adc, assassin, and ranged bruiser fairly well, but none of which can she play incredibly. Her adc ability is downtrodden by lack of usefulness in her ultimate when trying to play a strictly adc-style roll, and by her range, which is short among the adc champion pool (525, which is the same as Graves). She doesn’t have the wave clear that other low-range adc's do, like Lucian, Sivir, and Graves, which is one of the main points that make up for their lack of range.

As an assassin, Quinn is much better. Her lane bully capabilities allow her to bully just about anyone she’s fighting out of lane, giving her free pressure and CS and forcing the enemy jungler to allocate time into keeping her down so that she doesn’t snowball that early game. Tag Team makes her an incredible roaming threat, forcing the enemy team to place deep wards to spot Valor before it’s too late to retreat. In the early game, at least pre-six, Quinn has more burst and damage than a Zed, some of the highest level one burst in the entire game if Harrier is used correctly. Post-six, she becomes a threat to everyone on the map, including the enemy jungler, able to arrive long before her opposing laner can react and follow.

If built like a Zed, Quinn can be a devil to the enemy team, at least in the early game, before she inevitably falls into the late game role of second adc. Quinn’s engage is similar to Vi’s; once you go in, there’s no coming out. Because of this, Quinn and Valor’s burst becomes irrelevant in teamfighting. She needs to sit back and deal damage like an adc until she can call in Valor and finish off the stragglers. She requires multiple items to do the kind of damage a late-game Zed can do with just two. An underfed Zed or Talon of equal skill can kill a Quinn with a two item advantage in a late game 1v1 scenario simply because she isn’t a good enough assassin to outshine and outplay the champions designed to be exactly that.

Now as a ranged bruiser, which I often see in Quinn tops, there are obvious problems. Quinn lacks the proper tools within her kit to truly make a good bruiser-style champion. Irelia has a natural tenacity, sustain, waveclear, and hard CC. Vi has tankiness in her passive, and stacking armor shred which makes her hard to build defensively against, not to mention the hard CC of her ultimate and the flat burst damage of her Vault Breaker. Jarvan IV has a powerful shield that also acts as a slow. He has a knockup, an AOE CC ultimate, and HAD an additional armor buff.

The most one can do with Quinn as a bruiser is just build tanky-bruiser items on her and hope your team peals for you after you engage with Tag Team. Black Cleaver, Frozen Mallet, and Maw of Malmortius come to mind, often accompanied by Last Whisper, Bloodthirster, Randuin’s Omen, Banshee’s Veil, or Guardian Angel. This build style leads to a champion that plays the rather ineffective role of an assassin that can’t quite eliminate the enemy carry upon engage, has no disengage after failing the task, and is left often with only one option: play the second adc and try to kill the enemy bruisers/tanks so they can’t completely zone out your carries. This role ends up being rather effective, largely because the Black Cleaver and Last Whisper combination helps you shred through armor while Quinn’s Blinding Assault can reduce incoming damage, but also only works under the assumption that your carries are capable of performing their roles. That being said, again, her ult is left in that “useless except for catching people out and picking off stragglers” state. In general, Maokai would be a far better choice to fulfill that role.

Quinn is so stupidly balanced that she doesn’t fit anywhere. She has incredible burst, but not without incredible risk, and amazing 1v1 capabilities, but only against those who are inherently countered by her -- I’m looking at you, adc’s that aren’t Graves. She’s weak in the midlane because she gets outpoked and outtraded by almost every ranged caster and gets outburst by all the “real” assassins in the late game. She’s a poor toplaner because the meta exists in such a stage that it makes perfect sense to rush Frozen Heart on most of the champions she’ll be laning against. She’s a poor adc because, let’s face it, Graves does almost everything she does, but better.

How Can She Improve?

Let’s look at it this way: I like Quinn. I like her kit, I like her adc/assassin hybrid playstyle, and I like her as a personality. She interesting; she’s fun, and she’s difficult enough that playing her doesn’t get boring because how you play and what you build changes with every single game. I don’t want to think that she can be improved upon. I want to sit here and say “Well maybe they should just nerf everyone else and leave her be,” but that feels immature, and the sentiment is surely improbable. That being said, why don’t we take some time to look at her kit and capabilities, compare them to other champion’s, and find where the solutions lie.

Let’s start with a brief list of things that could make Quinn more viable in the current meta.

A brief comment on my view of the meta: I notice a heavy favoring of tanks and tanky-bruisers that can raid-boss an enemy team while also dishing out a significant amount of CC.

• Replace the +50% bonus AD scaling on Harrier with a 50% armor reduction to Harriered targets. This will reduce her early game burst significantly, but make her a much more viable tank-shredder like Kalista and Vayne in the late game while also helping to preserve her current late game burst potential. This could also be done by removing the AD scaling and making damage dealt to Harriered targets True Damage. An alternate route would be to make Harrier damage scale with the target’s maximum health by 4/6/8/10% (at lvls 1/6/11/16).

• Separate the cooldowns between Quinn and Valor. This would significantly increase her burst and assassin playability and would be nothing more than a flat buff to the champion, allowing Vault to be used twice consecutively to both engage and disengage from a fight. Frankly, I think this buff would put Quinn over the top, making her single target burst utterly OP. A time reduction to the blind effect of Blinding Assault would be absolutely necessary to prevent this from making her broken. She’d just become an AD Nidalee with less poke/siege and more roam.

• Increasing her attack range to 550 or 575 would allow her to more safely make those trades in the midlane against ranged casters while also giving her the slight advantage she would need to possibly beat a Graves of equal skill in lane. This, however, would only support to increase her advantage over the other adc’s of the game, and would make a brokenly strong lane bully in the bottom lane. Sadly, she’d still suffer the same disadvantages that she does now when it comes to her late game capabilities.

• Reduce the cooldown on Heightened Senses’ active, add truesight to the ability, or both. If we compare Heightened Senses to Ashe’s Hawkshot, then this change becomes more understandable. Hawkshot allows Ashe to check parts of the map akin to how any other adc would use a Scrying Orb; it’s built into her kit, allowing Ashe to upgrade her yellow or red trinket instead, a distinct advantage in the vision war. Not only does it reveal the target area for five seconds, but it also reveals everything en route for two seconds as the skillshot travels. Heightened Senses only reveals everything within a radius of Quinn for two seconds. She still has to buy wards because the cooldown isn’t significantly low enough to really keep her safe in lane. If I had to be honest, the amount of times I’ve gone full games casting Heightened Senses less than five times is probably phenomenal.

• Someone on the PBE boards suggested that Quinn’s ult be given a passive “flight” which would allow her to ignore natural terrain barriers. It’s a great idea, but the only way to make it viable would be to add a global sound effect to her ult, similar to Rek’Sai and Sion. Frankly, it seems like an overpowered idea, and would also require the removal of the movement speed buff Valor provides to the duo.

• Reduce the cooldown of Tag Team by three seconds for every activated Harrier mark. This will, simply enough, increase Quinn’s roaming potential with her ultimate without doing much to make her overpowered. This could also be applied to Vault, reducing the cooldown by 2 seconds for every activated harrier mark. If played properly, this could reduce Vault's cooldown by 4 seconds.

• Simply reducing the cooldowns of Blinding Assault and Vault to 8 and 7 (respectively) at all ranks would do her quit a bit of good and allow her to trade with more midlaners and burst down those pesky tanky tops. Sadly, I’m afraid that this too would make her too strong of a lane bully in the bottom lane, even stronger than Graves is right now. It wouldn’t change her late game much, but it would certainly help to emphasize and assist her current win conditions: snowball and win before the 30 minute mark.

• Upon activating Tag Team or Skystrike (both through physical activation and Tag Team’s expiration) Quinn and Valor should be stripped of all non-cc debuffs, be it exhaust, ignite, Death Mark, Assault and Battery (before impact) etc. Thematically, this makes sense as Quinn and Valor are two separate characters with separate in-game icons. This would also mean that Quinn cannot activate Tag Team while rooted in place as Tag Team would have to qualify as a movement. This would give Quinn more potential for escape after an assassination.

• Blinding Assault can be changed into an ethereal skillshot with a flat range and an AOE detonation. Rather than simply being a collateral skillshot that crashes into the first thing it hits, Valor would pass through, both damaging and blinding all targets en route, minions and champions before reaching a set distance and doing the same AOE sweep that it does today. This would improve Quinn’s wave clear significantly and give her more strength in teamfights.

• Casting Vault as Valor could mark the target with Harrier. Harrier can then be activated by Skystrike. This would give more burst to her post-six combo without making her brokenly overpowered.

These are a few of the things that I’ve come up with that might make Quinn at least the smallest bit stronger as a champion. Some of them are probably too much, making her stronger than she needs to be, but I think that they promote the right kind of thought into furthering what I think Quinn’s greatest strength is: being an adc/assassin hybrid.

Quinn’s greatest tool and greatest setback is Tag Team. It must be utilized correctly to gain success, and must be understood on a different level than almost every other ult in the game. It’s not straightforward and it’s not easy to understand. I don’t think that she needs to be reworked, and I certainly don’t think that she needs to be turned into another Nidalee or Elise.

Conclusion:

I want to know your thoughts and opinions on the matter. I’ve put quite a bit of thought into this during the last three months and genuinely want to help Riot make Quinn a better champion that more people want to play and are willing to try. I’ve just made my PBE account and am fully willing to work my ass off so that Riot can get all the statistics they need for Quinn as they work on improving her. I realize that a lot of what’s been said has obviously come from a midlane player. I have played Quinn in every lane, but I have had the most success with her mid and I think that is where she has the potential to thrive the most. Please understand, to all those who play Quinn elsewhere, to those of you who main her top or adc or jungle, that I don’t want to enforce the idea that my Quinn style is the best one. I want to hear from you the most. What would make her a better toplaner, or a better adc?

I want to discuss this with you, my fellow members of the League community, in the comments, and read your opinions. If you have anything you think should be added to this, then please let me know.

TL;DR Go read it if you want to participate in the discussion. It's just my suggestions on Quinn and my attempt to initiate a genuine discussion about the champion.