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Why pick draven?

œœœœœœœœuœœœœœœ·1/2/2016, 7:03:23 PM·2 votes·1,054 views

Ok, so i picked up draven during the month of august last year, at this time i had transferred to the LAN server for the better connection. It was there that I "mained" draven until i hit gold, obtaining 250k mastery points within a month(irrelivant). Anyway, onto my topic. During my climb on LAN I played a straight offensive draven, by that I mean i rushed sword of the occult(rip) essence reaver and other staple crit/ad items. I never built a ga nor a scmitar and relied solely on aggresive early laning play, and positioning within teamfights to survive. Now yes, i know draven is(was) a huge lane bully. "omg wtf half my hp with 1 axe at level 1 nerf pls" I will admit at times i felt really bad scoring first blood within moments of stepping into lane. To me that was dravens character, the adc who is all bite no bark, oh you try to counter with cait, i abuse you level 1 and get a lead. Basically the only time you had trouble botlane was against a smart support. After my few months on LAN i vame back to NA where i also did manage to climb back to gold easier,using the same straight offense strat. Now, within the pre-season "adc" meta. Draven to me has completely lost his identity as the lane bully/adc you do not want to trade with at early levels. Draven's axe's give him significant damage early on, but at the cost of:

  1. you drop them you lose the trade and die
  2. you juggle them badly and have to go into a creep wave you die Now yes, once you learn draven these things should not affect you at all and you should still dominate lane. However with the recent adc changes/buffs this is hardly true. Draven is a high risk/high reward champ, you get stacks get a kill people normally think oh GG draven is fed. You don't get a kill before the 10 minute mark, you are simply "outscaled" by the enemy adc. "how do you outscale draven, he does 1k damage crit with items" this happens only if the draven player manages to score a few kills before the 20 minute mark, leading to them possibly being an item ahead. If this does not occur, the enemy adc literally is more usefull than draven. This usefullness is in terms of utility: caitlyn is behind? please i have traps. quinn behind? i can zoom around the map plant wards and blind the enemy. mf behind? massive aoe ult+aoe slow. kindred? team u no die2day. draven? ... A draven that is behind is practically dead weight to his team, as he is either forced to afk farm and hope his team holds out 4v5, or join the teamfight and do less damage than his top lane tank (over emphasis) "Draven is still the biggest lane bully and his passive lets him snowball!" Yes he is a lane bully but now at what cost, you go for a trade more than likely the enemy adc outrade you simply because of their better synergy with the new masteries. , or because heals "op". just mentioning mf can take half your supports HP with only a bf sword, while farming a minion while halfway down the lane.
    Snowball??? with the bounty implementation, every (feeding) champion practically has a free draven passive against the enemy laner. Oh quinn got 2 kills off me and my support 150 gold meanwhile draven. *loses half his stacks + is set behind further due him being "the snowball adc". If he can't score the bounty on the enemy adc its even worse. With the removal of occult + the IE passive (critical strikes deal 250%damage to whatever tf it is now) changes and now every adc being crit based... Draven has somewhat no identity other than "don't let him get his stacks. Other adcs provide more utility even when behind. Almost comparable damage when ahead and late game is simply worse if you don't go straight offense and hope you kill vayne before she ults. Why should i even bother playing draven while practically every other adc now simply does his job better?

11 Comments

Aeolian Melodies1/2/2016, 7:04:21 PM2 votes

Because it's his league.

Draven Draven Draven Draven

ValyrianBlade1/2/2016, 7:12:44 PM2 votes

Please don't mention Caitlyn in the behind category... she's got it worse than Draven and needs buffs before he does.

Otherwise though I entirely agree with the sentiment but I think the argument is a little backwards.

We need small numeric buffs to some ADCs: Caitlyn, Draven, Ezreal, Sivir, Kog'maw, (Urgot?)

We also need real nerfs to some ADCs that were simply made too strong with the rework: Miss Fortune, Corki, Quinn e.g. I supported for what appeared to be a first time Miss Fortune the other day. She did no regular poke at all, just her double-shot whenever it was up. The 5th time she used it, it killed the enemy Sivir. Seriously, that's broken. Way too much damage on her, reliable and safe from long range damage, for how well she scales. Her "identity" as a wombo-combo adc should require her to hit 6 for her power spike, however she's the strongest from level 1 (as evidenced by highest win rate of all ADCs despite having the FEWEST average games played of all ADCs other than Kindred [by a large margin]).

In actuality, these three ADCs sort of invalidated the previous "lane bullies" of Draven and Caitlyn (and to lesser extent Jinx although she at least scales well) because they are much better bullies now who also offer so much more to their team in utility and scale better and do better when behind.

Tristana, Vayne, and Lucian all see a lot of play and feel like they need a hit but their win rates don't justify it right now. Perhaps once the big three get sorted out they'll show up more. Overall ADCs otherwise seem to be the most balanced, we just need to make Caitlyn and Draven the real lane bullies again. Make Kog'maw the true hypercarry. Give Ezreal his caster identity. Make the big three not the strongest in everything.

Dreadlocks1/2/2016, 7:07:17 PM1 votes

Man I would love to be a good Draven player... maybe I just have to get past his learning curve, but damn is it a tough one.

venomous frost1/2/2016, 7:10:30 PM1 votes

ever heard of paragraphs while writing a long post?

Sirsir1/2/2016, 7:54:51 PM1 votes

Jeez thats a long post...

As Valyrian said right now there are a couple of marksman that do his job, heavy early damage to snowball, better. When MF and Corki get their respective nerfs he will be in a fine place.

This usefullness is in terms of utility: caitlyn is behind? please i have traps. quinn behind? i can zoom around the map plant wards and blind the enemy. mf behind? massive aoe ult+aoe slow. kindred? team u no die2day. draven? ... A draven that is behind is practically dead weight to his team, as he is either forced to afk farm and hope his team holds out 4v5, or join the teamfight and do less damage than his top lane tank (over emphasis)

Draven never does that little damage (unless he misses his axes). And he has way better in-teamfight utility than Caitlyn with Stand Aside, while Cait has better zone control around objectives

Snowball??? with the bounty implementation, every (feeding) champion practically has a free draven passive against the enemy laner. Oh quinn got 2 kills off me and my support 150 gold meanwhile draven. *loses half his stacks + is set behind further due him being "the snowball adc". If he can't score the bounty on the enemy adc its even worse.

you do know what 'snowball' means right? Either get ahead and stay that way or fall behind and stay that way. Compared to a lot of snowball champs Draven has a pretty solid method of becoming relevant again, freezefarm bot lane, stay safe, and eventually get a kill.

With the removal of occult + the IE passive (critical strikes deal 250%damage to whatever tf it is now) changes and now every adc being crit based... Draven has somewhat no identity other than "don't let him get his stacks."

Occult was always an iffy purchase, it snowballed him even further into oneshot territory. Not a big loss IMO. IE didn't lose its passive it lost stats, which are remedied by purchasing RFC or Shiv.