If the role of an assassin is to kill the squishy high priority target...

Barnabas Quimsy·7/8/2016, 2:47:33 PM·52 votes·12,993 views

Then why do so many of them have so much aoe damage?

This isn't a post complaining this makes any of them are op, although some probably are, but questioning why so many of them get to do so much damage to multiple members of the enemy team.

To a lesser extent maybe:

Those without lots of aoe damage we've seen get built as tanks or fighters instead:

I guess my honest question is what is design reason for assassins to have so much of their damage loaded on to aoe abilities? I thought the reason they existed is that there needed to be a way to kill the fed , etc.

I would think that mage = immobile, high damage, aoe where assassin = mobile, high damage, single target

161 Comments

The Yetii Rider7/8/2016, 5:04:58 PM31 votes

Ahri is not considered to be an assassin by Riot.

LeBlanc's Distortion is only a small portion of her damage. Much more of it is single target than non. Also, it's not like Ezreal's E where it makes sense to fire off a homing shot after you've moved. How would her W deal single target damage?

If it dealt no damage at all, she would ONLY use it as an escape, and that's worse design than giving her AOE.

Zed was the first attempt to give a mid lane assassin some utility. So he got wave clear so he could split push.

Talon and Katarina are THE team fighting assassins. They are significantly worse at CSing and are much less safe with their single target patterns than other assassins to compensate. Compare how Kat kills someone to how Akali kills someone and it's very very obvious.

Yasuo was created to be an assassin who plays bot lane with a support. He was Riot's first attempt to break the marksman/support meta, and his highest win rate was indeed bot for a while. Because of that, Yasuo needs to be able to clear waves to help prevent him from getting three man dived.

Also the assassin who has the lowest AOE damage, Shaco, never gets built tank. So your third point isn't exactly strong. What makes assassins get built tanky (the fact that you didn't include Elise in that list is shocking and makes me question how long you've actually been playing the game if you don't consider Elise to be a tank assassin) is their utility. Assassins have high base damage by necessity, to give them the edge in trading so that they can fulfill their fantasy of getting kills even before they have items built. Assassins that have powerful crowd control like Ekko, Rengar and Elise therefore can kill people without building damage, so they build tank to get multiple uses of their crowd control off in a single fight.

RiotCertainlyT7/9/2016, 8:30:13 AM24 votes

Good question.

We have definitely have "too much" AoE in our game relative to what every champ strictly needs in order to team fight. A few reasons come to mind:

The game isn't just team fighting. AoE lets champions clear minion waves so that they can roam the map. We really want assassins to be freed to roam on occassion.
AoE is a great tool for making a number of engaging targeting types work.
Champs aren't purely about their class identity. The game would be pretty dry if every assassin was built according to a rigid checklist of properties. With any design, we intentionally break some of the "rules" of class design. This is important if we don't want the question of "which of these champs is the best assassin" to be easily answered.
To your point, we are sometimes too liberal with putting AoE onto kits. For example, Talon often functions as more of a ball-of-ambient-damage than a surgeon with the blades.

AMYS GRAVE7/8/2016, 3:11:19 PM23 votes

then why do they get %maxHP damage? Zed

invisiblecat17/8/2016, 4:49:59 PM15 votes

Ekko has an AoE stun, multi hit on his Q, and an ult that deals massive AoE damage, so why he is he on the little AoE list?!?

Abyssphere7/8/2016, 5:27:36 PM15 votes

Katarina "AOE assassin" is her thing Talon Extremely old champion - you can tell his abilities are AOE because that's how they thought they'd look coolest, not because of gameplay concerns Zed His kill combo is single target? Zed's abilities are rarely particularly impactful on more than one person at a time and the AOE factor only comes into play in the laning phase. Leblanc Similar to Zed, the vast majority of her damage hits one person. Her W is her only AOE skill and you kind of need to be standing on top of her target to get hit by it as well. She is firmly single target. Yasuo Not an assassin. Ahri Not an assassin.

In any case the basic answer is that champions need to differentiate themselves. There are only so many different ways you can make "4 abilities that do lots of damage to one person".

Critkeeper7/8/2016, 2:51:07 PM14 votes

Yasuo is a skirmisher, not an assassin.

venomous frost7/8/2016, 3:08:33 PM9 votes

because there are over 150 champions, and riot has to keep their design and kit unique.

also before league became huge, riot just slapped random kits onto random champions without thinking about it, that's why a lot of old champions have weird ap/ad ratio's that dont fit them.