I Honestly Never Understood Mobile, Self-Peeling ADCs

Steel Blossom·2/5/2018, 6:41:51 PM·66 votes·3,816 views

Honestly, I just always thought that if you wanted to hit someone from really far away, you couldn't also have the ability to run super fast once your enemy finally catches up to you. Also, if an ADC can peel divers independently, what's the point of League being a team game? What's the point of having the macro level of play, if an ADC can be caught out by an assassin and survive with their kit alone? And in all honesty, I don't think any of the mobile playmaking carries have worked out too well. I mean, have all felt pretty feast or famine to me in terms of how balanced they are. It's either their playerbase bawling for buffs, or everybody else in the community going stark raving mad from having to deal with them. And don't even get me started on and how he legit just ruins every single new on-hit item that comes into the game...

78 Comments

Verxint2/5/2018, 8:36:10 PM24 votes

In theory, they should have one of two weaknesses

They're early game focused and give up lategame damage for that saftey
They're lategame focused and can't do damage until 35 minutes Neither of those weaknesses are a thing anymore, especially the latter

DuskDaUmbreon2/5/2018, 7:36:33 PM13 votes

Most of the reason they have self-peel is because they wouldn't function without it.

Let's look at Vayne in particular. What's her range? 450? 500? It's stupidly low. Without her Q, she wouldn't survive three seconds in a fight.

Kaìju2/5/2018, 10:43:20 PM10 votes

Part of the issue is players themselves. If ADCs had 0 self survivability in their kits, in low elo like deep bronze 5 and such, they would likely be nearly unusable since both teams are terrible, but neither teams carry would get any support and both teams would have a feeding carry every game. I would imagine.

vgamedude2/5/2018, 10:00:46 PM9 votes

The problem to me is that whoever had the idea to make adcs the strongest team fighters, objective takers and scalers while basing essentially every champion in the role around unmissable autos had a very bad idea.

That's the main issue to me. Not to mention they get mobility, sustain and safety / peeling all while having everything else.

saltran2/5/2018, 11:05:03 PM8 votes

"What's the point of having the macro level of play, if an ADC can be caught out by an assassin and survive with their kit alone?"

Ok go play a game with Kalista, Ezreal or Lucian and tell me if you can run away or fight 1vs1 an assasin in equal conditions.

Spoiler: you are going to die if the assasin isn't braindead. And I'm not complaining, adcs dying 1vs1 against an assasin is healthy and it's supposed to happen.

But seriously if you think that Kalista can survive alone (without being really feed) against an assasin go play Kalista for one game and go farm alone in a side lane and you'll be dead 99%.

no to toxic2/5/2018, 9:44:36 PM6 votes

Only reason most of those champs are hard to balance is because they all are able to abuse something. Ezreal and Lucian are good at abusing items due to their abilitys. While Vayne Kalista and Tristana are able to abuse their kits. You may notice how the male adcs abuse items while the female adcs abuse their kits. This is a symbolic representation of domestic abuse against woman. The man use their items (fists) to force dominance upon the woman who got nothing but their badly designed kits with lack of counterplay and generally unfun to play against playstyle to defend themselves.

ISLAMICWARRIOR992/5/2018, 10:53:01 PM5 votes

ADC can survive on their own and don't 100% lost every game their team is bad? UNACCEPTABLE

Mages can build zhonas, ap items that give hp, and almost all have cc? Balanced

Tanks have tons of defense and still do shitloads of damage? Working as intended

Melee supports 1 shot squishies and enchanters mash e to make someone invincible? Works for me

Basically boards rn

Ahri Baka2/5/2018, 8:17:25 PM4 votes

You can't complain about Lucian Ezreal Lucian is in a very very bad spot right now and he really needs buffs , Ezreal Is only temporary there and he will be out soon and people will ask to buff him again , he is more like a mage in my opinion , he is bad against Tanks Kalista isn't a self peeling champion , she can't do much alone , even with her passive the real problem is about Vayne Tristana Vayne Has stealth , perma tumbling ability , and her E to kick enemies away from her and has her W can reset easily and her Ult is one of the most annoying abilities ever , yeah those two champions got so much self peeling for being marksmen

RainbowIcee2/6/2018, 4:31:26 AM3 votes

idk where she lands exactly but doesn't that fit Quinn too? yet she's not performing like them. Might not be the idea that's the problem but the kits themselves in those champions or how they work.

paisy2/5/2018, 8:07:45 PM3 votes

But Vayne Lucian Kalista don't have that much range. Lucian 's range is really short, his auto range is 500 and they nerfed his Q range. Vayne 's auto range is 550 but all her abilities just enhance her autos (besides E), so she's fairly short ranged too. Kalista 's Q isn't anything too special, they also tried nerfing her auto range but there was a lot of backlash.

INoble KnightI2/6/2018, 8:26:36 PM2 votes

Well Ezreal was supposed to be a mage but people brought him bot as a adc if I remember correctly.

Iffy Jarl2/7/2018, 12:47:52 AM2 votes

Whenever I gank I don't really have a problem with Kalista Ezreal Lucian or anyone in these short dash domains really The difficulty I have is with Tristana Vayne If I get lucky enough to find them without a ward I usually come out the fog and either Trist will immediately do a full W to a relatively safe range or vayne with E me then Q away. Im not even gnna lie this is partly the fault of my laners not engaging a fight before I get there but it's really frustrating to deal with that.

They could make vayne's condemn a skill shot but that would make it so desirable targets would just stand behind undesirables so I think we'd have to make it function like trist's ult where it can knock back multiple people which people may think is worse but there has to be some give and take can't just pitch an ability to be strictly worse. Trist's ult is fine because it's an ult,and as a jungler(or a laner even) i can tell when it has been used and act accordingly knowing it won't be used on me, As far as rocket jump I wish there was a better window to be able to interrupt it, but I'm not even sure about that because most pro level players can routinely hold their abilities and interrupt it.

I Main Swain2/6/2018, 3:03:46 AM2 votes

i dont mind having a slippery adc so long as their offensive power is weak. imo it should be strong offense but weak defense, strong defense but weak offense, or decent offense and decent defense. for an adc to have strong offense and strong defense like tristana is just ridiculous

RainbowIcee2/6/2018, 4:27:35 AM2 votes

idk where she lands exactly but doesn't that fit Quinn too? yet she's not performing like them. Might not be the idea that's the problem but the kits themselves in those champions or how they work.

ZephyrDrake2/6/2018, 10:49:02 AM2 votes

i never understood comments like this that can be applied to a billion other things but specifically target ADCs like they are the only ones who suffer from this and that somehow they just wants ADCs to be complete worthless champions that are unable to do anything on their own and then also complain about things that only happen when it's a fed carry vs someone that is behind in items and lvls 90% of the time

Teridax682/6/2018, 3:45:36 PM2 votes

For me, the problem occurs when a champion, any champion, becomes too reliable. This happens especially with marksmen, imo, because they're frequently designed in such a way that little to none of their power can ever miss (Vayne is all point-and-click power, for example). This could be fine if, for example, they instead telegraphed their intentions or presented opportunities for them to mitigate the effectiveness of their power, but this has become increasingly difficult in a damage-saturated environment, where those windows of opportunity and counterplay have diminished to the point of sometimes disappearing outright. It's not simply that marksmen get far above-average access to free-targeted mobility and point-and-click CC, but that they get to do so on top of a kit that is already supremely reliable. Perhaps the way to punish marksmen is to kill them if they misposition, but that in itself is severely mitigated by a creep in personal defenses and support protection designed to hold up to an entire team's worth of focus, thereby making marksmen exceptionally forgiving when played against pretty much anyone except the enemy marksman-support duo.

Point being, mobility and self-peel could perhaps make sense on a champion, provided they offered exceptional amounts of counterplay and risk elsewhere. If Tristana, Vayne or Kalista had to spend a sufficient amount of time in close proximity to the enemy team, then it would be justified for them to have so many tools to get out, but as it stands these are all champion capable of hanging back and eating through any opponent that comes their way from a safe distance (this includes Vayne as well, in spite of having no ability beyond 550 range). Effectively, it feels like it's always significantly more difficult to kill these champions than it is for the latter to kill most of their targets on average, and this is all the more frustrating when these champions are also far stronger than their reliability should normally allow. Reliability is a form of power, and the fact that marksmen have by far the highest reliability in the game, plus the highest raw DPS output in the game by a mile, is what makes them feel especially unfair.

Elohaven2/6/2018, 1:28:28 AM1 votes

Kalista is essentially being severely nerfed due to pro-play.

Ezreal abuses something every season.

Lucian requires a lot of mechanical calculation to kite and also deals very little damage compared to other ADCs. He's relatively weak and this is a reason why you do not see him.

Vayne has the shortest range of all ADCs/Mages/Assassins due to her kit not allowing anything outside her range, to extend her range, or to sustain. She has the largest risk in the entire ADC roster and sucks when she is shut down early. She's at a 49% WR and her most recent fiasco was literally due to a game core rework that essentially nerfed all her counters, gave her ideal runes for her kit, and she wasn't stat-checked like other ADCs due to how easily you countered her in S7.

Tristana, Lucian, Caitlyn, Ezreal, Miss Fortune, Jhin, and Kalista are all ADCs that have abused a S7 event.

Tristana is the biggest problem right now.

TBH, ADCs other than Ezreal are really easy to balance. Look at how Vayne nerfs still made her viable but not meta anymore. Only her mains are competent with her.

The Caitlyn runaans nerf was amazingly well done too.

Lucian's consecutive nerfs were hard but needed, making him mana-hungry and only an early-game threat.