Yaaay assassin meta is back...

...said no one. Seriously, it seems to me that we are back to the dark days of assassin reign.

mid is currently the most popular pick... and after playing him in ranked(platinum) and actually winning supposed counterpicks like and multiple times, I gotta say he is pretty broken right now(this whole champion pages tease thing better be about a goddamn rework). I mean the lane is completely in your hands. All you gotta do is spam W-E-Q and wait for opponent to blow some major cd and jump to this w shadow that you poked with earlier and kill him.

is currently the terror of soloqueue with his ~2k dmg in ~1sec nukes that jumps out of nowhere. I actually tried in jungle and I think that people should really stop asking for his buffs. He snowballs like crazy and by midgame with his Q evolved can drop 1k nuke after/during humongous evolved E jump with E getting a reset and Q having ~1.5sec cd.

Ap assassins are only slightly below on the power curve compared to ad assassins for the most part thanks to that got a pretty serious buff for its increased cost unlike pretty much every other ap item that got a nerf on top of increased cost.

Traditional ap mages(non assassins) are total trash now and only viable as supports due to their items being super expensive and most of their parts suck compared to ad itemization where almost everything builds out of cheap longswords and there's an early and easy access to armpen and cdr with these: . You can go for frost queen in mid but why would you? You can just pick any ad mid and have a much easier time in your lane and use your ap mage as support and don't lose out on pretty much anything.

The big reason is obviously masteries, that can give you up to ~15% dmg increase in total, and only 4% decrease for tanks. Tanks seem to be very much optional now and mostly they consist of offtanks that have hp regen in their kit,which, again, is countered by 1 item and our "healthy assassin" can apply it to the whole enemy team with his 1 usual WEQ combo. I'm sure pro players will still use them as engage, but prepare for assassin filled fun and "ouplays" that is coming to the soloqueue games near you. Unless rito gives tanks other masteries options and mages a more appropriate itemization. But it seems we will go further down the rabbit hole with new assassin item.