What if: long range/sustained damage mages took over the ADC position botlane?

Enemy team would build MR and your level-dependent mage wouldn't get nearly as much exp as they would if they were in mid, weakening their power curve.

ive always pushed for champions who have waveclear to just go bot and farm, and poke when possible. champions like morg/lux/ziggs/xerath, the problem is they are more susceptible to towerdives and ganks, and you dont want an immobile squishy champion all alone.

Most AP champs don't push towers as well as adcs and they have mana to worry about, but the idea is a valid one. Try it in norms with a team that agrees to let you mess with the meta. I've had success with goofy bot lanes in the past. It's not the worst idea out there by far.

To replace a marksman with another role, you need two things:

1. High sustained damage to enemy champions.
2. High sustained damage to objectives.

Since towers/inhibs can't be targeted by most spells, long range/sustained damage mages generally won't have the ability to quickly and safely take them down like a marksman could.

As long as there's an ADC on the team, it doesn't matter if they're in the bot lane, or even if it's a ranged ADC: melee ADCs like Yi and Trynd kill towers at least as well as Ashe or Sivir. I like this idea. Does the APC get a support, or does the support go somewhere else? My favorite variation might be double jungle.

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Yeh, just a question.

Not viable because they can't get levels in bot lane.

I could see heimer, malz, and ziggs doing this. I've done malz heimer, ziggs heimer, malz swain, and vel'koz xerath in normals. ziggs heimer seems like it's pretty effective while malz swain has great mana sustain if swain last hits the minions with malz's E on them

There are actually more sides to this coin, which makes moving teams away from a ranged AD auto-attack based champion + support bot difficult:

• The first, and the one already mentioned, is the need for high and focused sustained damage to efficiently take down big targets (Baron, Dragon, enemy tanks) and structures (Towers, Inhibitors, Nexus). High and focused sustained damage can, in principle, come from two sources: Low CD, spammable spells and continous damage-over time effects (Cassio, Ryze, Karthus, Anivia to a lesser extent - her focused damage is more bursty) and auto-attacks with their five-factor multiplicative scaling (AD, AS, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, ArPen) - thus, AD auto-attack based champions.

• The second important thing to note is that a build that is based on five synergizing factors is, by necessity, rather strict (it boils down to a more or less mathematical problem with the stats of the items, making additional utility a more secondary concern) and squishy (items have only a limited number of different stats - usually three to four - and any stat not dedicated to offense weakens you exponentially. This is THE single most impactful drawback of multiplicative scaling.).

• This factor, squishiness by necessity, is the reason why these kinds of builds are only implemented on ranged champions - simply put, range is its own form of survivability, and a very powerful one at that, too - can't kill what you can't hit (safely).

• Another factor that goes together with the survivability advantage of range lies in the fact that usually, a ranged champion is less level-reliant for survivability, as range does (mostly) not scale with extra levels. This makes ranged champions better for sharing XP than melees.

• Auto-attack improving stats don't scale as hard with levels as tankiness, either (the gold value in tank stats you get per level >> the gold value in damage stats). Same is true for base damages on abilities - you usually need upwards of 50 additional AP (1000 gold) to get the same increase in damage you'd get from an additional level in an ability. These two facts make sharing XP worse for champions depending on their abilities (=mages, including the aforementioned low-CD ones) or needing every bit of tankiness (= all melees).

• However, in contrast to its scaling with XP, auto-attack damage scales superstrong with gold (for example, on most Marksmen champions, a single BF is almost equal to ALL the AD you get from leveling your champion to 18).

• Hence, auto-attack based, ranged champions are better suited for sharing XP, but not gold. The fact that SR features only 4 gold&XP streams for 5 players means that two of them have to share (as it is impossible due to the laws of space and time to share equally between everyone at the same time). And, for the facts explained above, the person that can share his XP without losing out too much is a ranged, auto-attack based champion.

• The additional benefit of having a second champion with a rAABC is that it either enables both to make strong offensive moves (if both champions in question are strong early) or enables the combo to better withstand said offensive moves by their enemies (in case of the rAABC being weaker early).

All these factors combined result in every team featuring a ranged AD champion that builds offensively.

TL;DR: Need for focused sustained damage, base-stat scaling, SR set-up, resource allocation and basic rules of League's itemization together are responsible for ranged ADCs being the optimal choice for the partner of the support in the duo lane.