Marksman Damage Profiles

FDS Desperado·9/19/2017, 11:49:18 AM·1 votes·398 views

I'm aware many people on these boards are of the opinion that supports and tanks or at least just supports/support itemization are a big problem if not THE problem with Marksmen currently. Also seen the itemization reasoning hashed out, that marksmen are strong because zeal/crit items are too cheap for what they provide.

All of that aside I'm thinking purely of how marksmen themselves work. One of the big concerns I see is that Marksmen, particularly too early in the game, can Crit huge and essentially burst people out early on in the game. Thematically this doesn't make any sense because they've supposedly always been late-game monsters who take time to scale up but inevitably provide the mass majority of sustained damage over time in team fights.

I had a crazy idea that is essentially along the following lines: What if Critical Chance had to be stacked up? Or instead of Critical Chance marksmen were given some other damage amplifier that stacked up with successive auto-attacks.

By "stacked up" I don't mean gradually throughout the course of the game necessarily, but that they have to land multiple successive auto-attacks to build up to whatever damage amplifier, like Critical Chance that they are given.

This would stop ADCs from bursting assassins and other squishies with huge crits in the mid game, unless of course the assassin stood around and took successive shots to the dome. It would also still allow Marksmen to be the "Tank Busters" and sustained damage dealers they are meant to be and still do huge damage to objectives. Because over time in a fight or on an objective their damage amplifier would build up to full, whatever that is, and they would still do a ton of damage particularly late game, just over time now, not up front.

To me this makes sense because when you think of an assassin/burst mage, you think of the damage profile being huge upfront damage followed by valleys while skills are on cooldown before they have another big spike of damage. A Tank or bruiser might have a similar damage profile where there are spikes when abilities are used but in general their spikes and overall output would be lower.

Then ADCs would be very different, think of an almost exponential shaped curve, but one that leveled off. Where it started low, and ramped up fairly steeply over time to a certain point. If you ask me this would make for much more beneficial interaction between ADCs and other classes and help stop some of the bullshit everyone feels when they get point-blank assassinated by a Tristana/Vayne/Twitch.

1 Comments

Unreformed Shaco9/19/2017, 12:20:39 PM2 votes

I skimmed over it, and it sounds similar to what they did to Marksman Hunters on WoW.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with WoW, most people are, but it used to be a case of casted long range skill with high damage chained with an instant long range skill with high damage. Both hit at the same time usually killing most targets with ease.

They were then changed to have more of a "prodding" style of play. The design is that they have a weak but spammable ability that has a chance to mark a target as vulnerable, unlocking a seperate, harder, crippling ability. Think of it as shooting different parts of a target until you find a weak spot to exploit.

Making Marksmen in LoL similar would do well I think,or at least as you suggest, start of low and ramping up.

It would fix the issue of a marksman getting two lucky crits to open and obliterating the assassin before they even get near, and it would also make them play a bit safer until they have ramped up.

Something like crit damage scaling with time in combat. Starting off at 125% and ending on 250/300%, which makes sense thematically since the longer you fight someone, the more obvious their weaknesses are.