Boards›Gameplay

AD senna is stil being played because riot has not addressed any of her core issues

Hibeki·2/9/2020, 8:28:19 PM·11 votes·2,658 views

#1) She outranges every laner in the game and forcces them to make bad trades or lose

a 600 base range with a range increase is only 50 shorter than caitlyn, then quickly becomes the biggest gap. Her Q target range is far too long for everything it does when it gets range beyond the target, as seen like Lucian.

When you couple Glacial Augment with movement speed stealing and stacking mechanics, when she hits you you can't fight back. The range is too long and the movement speed gap is too heavy

#2) Her kit is designed to auto win trades

% hp damage, healing, and free steroids from just Auto + Q is flat out better than literally any other AD can offer in such a short window. The only other stacking mechanic in the game that works from hitting champions is Veigar, and he has to KILL creeps for the other half, meaning hes missing out on stacks if he harasses with it (Unlike Senna who has better stack drops when she doesn't kill creeps). On top of that, stacks give her literally everything an AD wants. Lifesteal, Range, Crit, whatever you want.

Her 'Wind up' is non existent, the feature is pointless if its so fast and still hits if targets walk out of range.

Her Q heals herself just for using it, regardless of whether it hits an ally or not. We've nerfed heal intense AD's in the past with Kaisa with Deaths Dance, Fleeted footwork as a whole etc. But for whatever reason Senna gets to do what weve repeatedly nerfed other champs not to do and gets a free pass for it.

We nerfed Jhin from getting an insane amount of power from his items for virtually free while Senna just flat out has 20% extra AD, on top of all her other steroids.

Do you know what 20% AD is Riot? Thats about 40 armor pen, for free, right out the gate.

#3) Her Safety and power budget is far beyond any other AD in the game

Even if shes not as good in some aspects as other AD's are, her survivability and reliability make her an ideal pick. Cloaking herself and allies with a movement speed boost, stealing movement speed, healing herself and having insane range INNATELY without items makes her an extremely valuable consistent damage source. There's no reason to split that role with a second AD if you can just keep her unkillable the whole game.

#4) Senna could have 0 minion kill stacks and she would still be played as long as she gets stacks for trading.

Thresh has a similar mechanic and doesnt get stacks for trading, and the stack benefit is strictly worse. It doesnt alter his abilities, sphere of influence or overall power so extremely. As long as senna

Its astounding to me how youve stuffed Yasuo Yasuo Yasuo worth of free stats and trading tools onto one pick and wonder why shes only shining in a trading role.

52 Comments

Knight SoIaire 2/9/2020, 9:27:25 PM4 votes

The thing is that Senna will never be a support unless she becomes unviable overall

she is a ranged nasus, stacking both damage and range... why would you pair that with another carry when you can pair it with a support

and if you take into account the actual power ballance of botlane she makes even less sence as a support. an average adc is weak early... an average support is quite good early... senna is extremally weak early to compensate for stacking, and even more extremally weak early if she doesnt take that 80hp that dorans blade gives

which means that if you take senna support you invite enemy team to snowball on your extremally tiny hp bar... while as adc your support can actualy look dangerous enough to deter the enemies from abusing that... and you have 65 hp more at lvl 1 to boot which makes a visible difference

You cant make something synergize so well with a support and so bad with an adc and expect it to be played the way it loses

JavelinJoe2/9/2020, 9:08:10 PM4 votes

She has drawbacks which many ADC's do not. Keep in mind, she is close to Jhin in design too so her being able to deal a lot of burst-ish damage is expected to an extent.

  • Her biggest drawback is her AA delay. It is massive. One of the longest in the game. And arguably what makes it even worse is that it requires you to become "rooted" during it. This means she has almost 0 ability to kite enemies.
  • Her E does cloak her, so targeted attacks wont work, but she is always going to be in its center, and is still vulnerable to AOE and skill shots.
  • Her Q is targeted. So only if you are either in its range, or grouped behind something that is will it hit you.
  • She has 0 instant damage in her entire kit. Everything has a delay. If you time your cc, you can interrupt it all (except her w, which is slow moving, delay activated, and dodgable). She also cant out sustain with her kit in the early game without burning most of if not all of her mana.
  • Taking either a hard engage champ or a spam harass champion into her are good ideas. Champions like Nautilus, Braum, Leona, can chain their CC to interrupt her damage. Champions like Lux and Vel'koz can out poke her forcing her Q to be used to heal, not trade (if you position right).
  • Outside of flash, she cant evade enemies once they are on her. She can W or E, but it wont save her from a burst champion like an assassin.

She was already hit hard with the soul collection. Now almost all of them will be from trading, especially if played ADC. Personally I believe this hit support Senna too hard unintentionally, but we will see in time.

As for her %health damage... If she didn't have it. Picking anyone who builds health/tank into her means she is screwed since she has poor DPS with her almost non-existent Attack Speed benefits.

Her range is alright. Having no mobility in the form of a displacement, makes her one of the few who cant escape or trade by getting quickly in and/or out of range. Sure it scales, but it wont ever get out of hand normally unless she gets to free hit enemy champions who play poorly positioning wise.

Dotty LB2/10/2020, 2:08:44 AM2 votes

I know this is going to be downbvoted but this needs to be said. The intent was never to stop AD Senna from being played(they want her to be a dual role champions) and there is nothing inherently wrong with that (there are several champions like that already). What they do not want is for ADC senna to be the far better pick which the different right now is less than 1%. If all the points you brought up were the reason then Supp Senna and ADC Senna would have massive WRs which they do not. The nerf to souls made it so she doesnt get that range as ADC till way into late game(like 40-50m+) however late game when she would have that range her WR drops. They are tuning her properly and her WR is actually dropping by the day in that lane. At worse she just need some hits on direct damage or stat scaling.

ModKnightsKemplar2/10/2020, 1:24:18 AM2 votes

The range increase is just... terrible design from the get-go. At bare minimum, that has to go. It makes so little sense.

Waka FIocka2/9/2020, 11:27:14 PM2 votes

senna is nuts. not only herself kitwise but also the items she benefits from like umbral glaive and runes such as glacial augment/approach velocity.

She has peel with her super long range aoe root ability + glacial and gap closers with approach velocity + aoe camo/ms ability. Also this ability works very well for an escape and her passive gives her free stats that other champs need to shell out thousands for, one of which being increased range which can only be obtained with RFC while energized so there's really no determinable price on how busted having + permanent range is for doing nothing but rclick some souls from a safe range... has a long range damage ability that also just so happens to collect souls from a safe spot... oh yeah it also heals allies and damages objectives/wards/enemies while also healing herself and allies... lol global ult that can change the course of any fight or secure kills in the aftermath of one. also provides vision so even if you cant ult that drake or baron you can hurt everyone doing them and your team hops in to clean things up umbral glaive for safely oneshotting every ward on a whim and 2 shotting (aa+q) control wards while zooming around in movespeed camo her aa isn't that slow when you can aaQaa reset to instaburst someone into a peel that often times ends up with them dead as fuck while you're healed up from whatever dmg you took at the start of the trade

she's just 1 champion so there's gonna be someone with her to make sure that she doesn't get ccd or her enemies are locked down-- or both (Morgana, Naut, Leona, etc).

Is she killable? Yes. Does that make her balanced and fair? No.

Darkdemon6532/9/2020, 11:28:33 PM2 votes

She's supposed to be AD.

Pika Fox2/9/2020, 9:20:28 PM2 votes

She falls flat as an ADC. She lacks DPS and objective power. Jhin gets around this by having good objective control and utility, but senna largely lacks this, given her ult cannot damage non champions, requires too much windup and leaves you without a DPS.

Lacking DPS is a very big deal for ADCs, and her free bonus stats dont really get around her lack of DPS. Its why jhin loses hard late game; Tanky targets are too tanky to deal with and are all you have access to hit. Senna gets hit double here, given her damage is quite a bit lower than jhin's in exchange for her healing support and reliable hard CC (even if its on a delay).

She also suffers from a lack of self peel (reliable CC doesnt help if it cannot save you from someone already ontop of you) where as jhin at least gets movement for a crit, which is solid peel for what it is (senna's autos are extremely slow, so you dont actually gain ground from the movespeed on auto where as jhin does). Ulting is also not an effective defensive tool for yourself, given its delay.

All around, senna is just a worse ADC than jhin as a single selection. You can make her work in a teamcomp where you can use the extra utility from the slot, but you need to bring the lost DPS back somewhere. And even then, unless you make good use of the heals and shields, shes just a worse jhin.

chipndip12/19/2020, 12:39:52 AM1 votes

The reason she isn't played support is because support Senna's fucking trash after 20 minutes.

Sewer Side2/10/2020, 1:37:10 AM1 votes

600 base range is 50 range shorter than Caitlyn - meaning she only outranges her at 60 souls.

She matches Ashe’s range.

Maybe start your posts with facts

Also, you seem to mistake the that Riot doesn’t want her to not ADC. Correction: they don’t want to make her ADC too good, which was the case in Diamond+. She doesn’t get nearly as many souls from ADC as she does support.

Also, support Senna wasn’t performing too hot, so uh, I really don’t think her kit is inherently the issue.

What a bad, misguided post. Putting things in bold/listing her kit doesn’t make your points valid

Reksee2/10/2020, 1:47:41 AM1 votes

They just desperately need to reduce her base attack range. Her late game is insanely powerful so she NEEDS to have a weak lane to compensate.

PinkPowerCoin2/10/2020, 2:37:03 AM1 votes

Her dps, compared to other ADCs is kinda trash, but her utility kinda makes up for that, especially when laning with "another' support with hard CC (also another teammate who makes up for her lower damage). Some possible changes they could make:

  • Have her Q's damage portion scale on AD only, and her heal portion scale only with AP. This way when either support or ADC she has to decide does she want to be another damage dealer or a better enchanter. Most likely would have to tweak the AD scaling since she will be getting free AD as the game moves on
  • take away the stacking AA range on her passive, since its already pretty long and she doesn't really need it
  • maybe make the E's bonus MS scale on a %AP(?) since its another utility based ability. Have the base bonus be low so if you don't build any AP the bonus MS is virtually nonexistent

Im a support main, and the highest Ive been is G1 so take all this with a grain of salt (obviously lol).

Jaehyuk Choi2/10/2020, 5:26:33 AM1 votes

well for laning, you back off when she has her soul passive on your character, try your best to dodge her q, bait her e or dodge it. Ping her ult if it's up so your team knows and hopefully dodges the middle at least. Senna can be easily poked out. Poke her when she goes for minion, but she will probably q you while she's taking cs so dodge or out poke her. Ask for ganks if anyone has cc to gank her. She's very squishy so can be bursted if you and your teammates can time it right. There might be champions that are stronger than others but there are always ways to counter it. Just gotta think well and play the game as a team since no one plays as an actual 5 man other than the pros or maybe 5 man queue

Kazekiba2/9/2020, 9:00:36 PM1 votes

She only gets life steal from her passive if she buys crit.

Thresh E ramp up damage and W shield strength both directly scale on his Souls count as does his R 100% AP ratio means he gets 0.75x souls -> 1 point of damage. For a champ that builds Tank that's huge. You want to see Thresh come back as cancer as Senna? Bring back Banner