What is Quinn?

ITT: I talk about where I want Quinn to be after her upcoming “update”, and ask the Quinn community their opinions.

So I’ll start this off by saying that this will be a very, VERY, long, rambling post about the one champion that brought me back to League after a year and a half hiatus. Seriously, I’m going to talk about my opinions of Quinn in EVERY ROLE. If you’re not interested in reading about some random guy’s opinions at length, then TLDR is below <3.

Furthermore, I am by no means a great player now, and I never have been. I was gold S2, and would have been gold S3 if not for elo decay on the last day of the season. I am not currently a game designer, although I aspire to be, so I will skip looking at numbers and statistics, as I have no background allowing me to make any valid claims about balance.

All I want to do in this thread is look at WHAT Quinn is now, as a champion, and what she COULD BE.

WHAT IS QUINN? Quinn is an AD marksman with a strong 1v1, 1v2, and 2v2 duel. Quinn is a lane bully with an aoe blind and a knockback/slow initiate/escape, who has strong burst potential with her passive combo, and strong extended trade potential with her auto attacks and passive. Quinn is an all in-ing, roaming melee burst assassin with great initiate but poor disengage. Quinn is a melee brawler who excels at latching onto a target, and has a built in AS steroid for strong extended trades against other ad auto attack champions. Quinn can build ADC, assassin, bruiser. Quinn can top, mid, adc, jungle, and I’ve even won a game as Quinn support (although I don’t recommend it).

I hope that you understand my point: Quinn can do anything, but she doesn’t really “fit” anywhere. I feel like that is simultaneously one of her best qualities, and also one of the biggest obstacles towards her becoming (and please don’t get hung up on this word) “viable”. Quinn is a strong champion, I don’t think anyone will argue that point, but there is a reason that she is almost never seen, at any level of play. I think most would agree that she’s a rarity in game because she doesn’t excel at any “role” in a team comp. As such, I’m going to go ahead and ignore her laning phase, as I think that is in a good place, erring on the stronger side due to her roaming strength (hold your complaints for later, I’ll address her laning strength at the end).

ASSASSIN Take her assassin mid/top? Quinn’s 1v1 and assassination strength stems from her high burst, and her excellent mobility. Catching an enemy out of position as they farm, move in the jungle, or while they try to position before a teamfight will frequently net you a kill, and leave the odds 5v4. In this regard, I place assassin Quinn up with champions like Twisted Fate and Nocturne, who’s ults cause serious map pressure any time their position is unknown. But unless you DESTROY the enemy laner, you will almost always bring less to a coordinated team fight (and by this I mean both teams play cohesively, and are at least attempting to protect their carries). Assassin Quinn suffers much more than other assassins during teamfights in that she has little to no escape/disengage. Zed can hop to shadows, Ahri has her ult dashes, Talon goes invisible, Fizz is an uncatchable PoS….. etc. This, in combination with the fact that assassins are erring on the side of weak in the current meta where champs like Lulu, Alistar, Ori etc are popular and are very good at shutting down assassinations, makes Quinn a very tricky and dangerous champion to play. If Quinn uses her ‘e’ to engage and kill a carry, she then has no means of escape other than flash, which frequently results in Quinn becomes a suicide bomber, dying immediately after getting a kill. The other option she has is to simply wait back behind the front lines of her team and act as another adc, using her ult to clean up, or again, punishing out of position enemies. This is the much safer, smarter way to play if you can’t catch an enemy out before they group, and so in my experience, this situation becomes much more common the longer the game extends. But if you just want to act as a secondary ADC with cleanup ability, then a Vayne or Tristana would be much more efficient, both having better scaling when acting as a late game ADC, better disengage/team utility, and (while not as strong as Quinn’s) the ability to chase and clean up stragglers after a fight. If you’re not looking for adc damage from a mid laner, then why not take a champion with similar damage, but much greater impact on teamfights? Azir, Orianna, Veigar… etc, all can HUGELY impact a fight, while staying safe on the back lines and dealing damage. Overall, it just isn’t safe enough to actually play Quinn like an assassin once teamfights start happening.

BRUISER If instead you build Quinn tanky, and abuse her built in AS buff as Valor to deal damage, you are able to take full advantage of Quinn’s great engage capabilities. Valor form with ‘w’ maxed and T2 boots means Quinn has enough speed to position as needed and get into the enemy team to the backline quickly, to start wrecking havoc. Her base damage is quite good, so building even a single damage item like Black Cleaver gives her the armor shred and damage she needs to be a threat to squishy champions. But her base defenses are low, and the only “defense” in her kit is her q, which only really matters IF you can land it on the enemy adc. She has no hard cc, no meaningful aoe damage, she has no passive as Valor, and her execute REMOVES her bonus MS and AS buff. As a bruiser she plays a bit like Gnar, poking from the outside of a teamfight, and then ulting and diving when the time is right. The difference between Gnar and Quinn is that Gnar’s ult gives him considerable survivability and damage buffs, aoe, and cc, something lacking from his normal kit, while Quinn’s only gives MS and AS. Again, it’s another case of “but anyone else does the same job, better”. Pick Darius to harass enemies, tank, and execute, pick Gnar to poke and dive, pick Lulu to poke and protect the adc, the list goes on and on. As a bruiser her damage isn’t high enough to justify her lack of survivability or utility.

RANGED ADC This is the role I have the least experience with, and as such will try to refrain from making assumptions. This is mostly based on observation rather than personal experience, so feel free to disregard this section if you find you disagree with my conclusions about ADC Quinn. Simply put, Quinn doesn’t have the late game damage of a Vayne or Kog’Maw, the survivability of a tristana or Kalista, or the team utility of a Sivir. While she has some strong matchups in lane, her kit just doesn’t do her any favors in team fights. Her ult has minimal uses during teamfights, her range is short making her easy to poke or dive on, but her damage doesn’t warrant a “protect the adc” team comp. Her survival tools, again, are strong in lane vs another adc, but her ‘q’ blind won’t stop enemy spells, and is very difficult to land on an enemy adc. Her ‘e’ is a strong single target disengage, but doesn’t create any distance if two or more champions are diving her. Using her ultimate to run or reposition wastes both the ults execute damage, and essentially stops all of Quinn’s damage output while its active, unless you stop to melee a target (and why would you do that if you’re using the ult to run). In general, while she is “playable”, she isn’t a safe pick, and she isn’t a “strong” pick.

WHAT QUINN COULD BE So now I’d like to think about what Quinn could become in the future, and what I personally would like to see for her. As I said at the beginning of this thread, Quinn’s ability to go anywhere is both a wonderful, and damaging, result of her kit. While freedom of choice and playstyle needs to be encouraged to keep LoL fresh and interesting going forward, too much freedom can lead to a severe lack of focus, which is what I believe has happened in Quinn’s case. I believe that for her to become a better champion (without becoming too strong and being nerfed back down again) what really needs to happen is to look at her strengths and weaknesses, and focus on either A- changing them around, or B- exaggerating them.

What I mean is this: if, for example, we gave Quinn an escape mechanism to use after she assassinated someone, this would fix a major weakness in her play as a top or mid lane assassin. At the same time, this would make her an assassination monster, flitting in and out of an enemy team at high speed, destroying squishy enemies any time her ult is up. Combine that with her great 1v1, and her strong lane and roam, and she would be a ridiculous threat at all stages of the game. People would pick her like they picked release Ekko, who could gib an enemy carry and then press R to disappear and regain health, only to return in a few moments with his spells off cd, to pick another champion off. Instead of simply “fixing” what is broken with Quinn, we as a community need to decide exactly what we want her to be strong at, and realize that in order to achieve that strength, she will have to lose power somewhere else in her kit. We then need to vocalize these opinions clearly to RIOT, and hope that they take notice. So, ignore all the QoL changes and bug fixes that Quinn (desperately) needs, and focus only on Quinn’s playstyle and role, and how you would like her update to affect that. This thread isn’t really an “ideas of HOW to fix Quinn”, more of an overall “what the end product should be”. I’ll list what I think are Quinn’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as which aspects I would like to see rebalanced/focused on, and which I wouldn’t mind becoming weaker.

MY OPINIONS TIME I play Quinn mid(and top, mid prefered for better roaming) as an assassin. Assassins move in and out of power in LoL because they can have the strength to delete a target instantly, and that is seen as bad gameplay(understandable). Currently, RIOT has countered this by making strong juggernaut and utility champions, which has moved assassins back out of the spotlight. That said, Quinn lacks CC, aoe, and survivability, which I personally believe is enough to warrant her strength, considering how much team fighting power you give up by picking her. I feel she can remain mostly unchanged, just trading out some of her early game power for better team fight power of some kind.

Strength: Burst/Trade Damage Strong Early Game(High Base Damage) High Mobility (when ult is up) Strong “Anti-ADC” Assassinate Fantastic 1v1 Dueling vs AA champions

Weakness/Counterplay: Short Range Squishy Minimal CC Minimal AOE Damage Minimal Team Utility Engage/Escape share same CD Wards - shes fast, but she has no long range gap close like Noct/TF, so good warding and map awareness can mean a wasted Quinn ult General Assassin Weaknesses (utility comps/items counter her, falling behind counters her, etc)

For me personally, the two aspects of Quinn that I enjoy the most are her 1v1 dueling, and her incredible roaming. Because roaming isn’t as important for a traditional ADC as other features, I would like to see her focused more around her solo lane play, and her ability to catch and assassinate targets. To facilitate being an effective assassin, Quinn would need either better survivability, or a secondary escape mechanic. Because her roaming can be prevented by lane pressure, or nullified with ward coverage and map awareness, I feel that there is very little need to weaken her in another area to create counterplay for this. Instead, to make up for her somehow increased survivability during assassinations, I wouldn’t mind seeing lower range while Quinn, or higher mana costs, to make early laning more challenging.

But this is just my perspective on Quinn, and what i want to see done with her. What I really want to know is how the Quinn community, although small, feels about where they want to see her when her update comes out. So please, let me know what you think are Quinn’s strengths and weaknesses, and tell me if you disagree with anything I’ve said about her playstyle. However, please try to resist the urge to talk about specific changes that could be made to Quinn, there are plenty of “fix” idea threads out there. I’m more interested in just the lanes/ roles/ playstyles that people use Quinn for, and I think hearing some feedback that looks at Quinn and her position in the game overall might be useful for Riot Repetoir to hear.

TLDR: Quinn fills any role, but excels at none. For Quinn to become a better champion, her strengths and weaknesses need to be changed or exaggerated. What lane/role/playstyle does the community want Quinn to lean towards after her (soonTM) update.

Finally…. please buff Quinn with underwater powers, fishbeard’s Scuba Quinn idea is too cool for me to handle, Rito plis. http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/gAUbAdb0-jurassicscuba-quinn-and-valor-art