ADC: A shitty gold player's perspective from OTPing Tristana for a month.
If you actually clicked on this, have a cookie, it's going to be a doozy:
I'm going to analyze how it feels as playing a presumedly low impact champ in a semi-low elo, feel free to counter argue as long is its reasonable and civilized, I don't really need someone coming on and saying: "U so dumb, Tristana is ass, Cait OP, play a real adc."
TBH, I actually found bot lane being pretty easy to pick up on in comparison to toplane and midlane, my previous main roles. It's all micros, not a ton of macros. I have a huge deal with macros as they stress me out more than they should, also playing champs that are generally strong early, I didn't look too deeply on what made them strong and auto piloted half the time. Micros are small things that build up, generally just hone on them and then you generally do well.
If you main ADC, you should be familiar with all of these:
- Minion/CD trading, punishing enemy for using main abilities on minions/going to farm minions.
- Push to get level 2 first for lane dominance, 9 minions = level 2 in bot lane.
- Orb walking/kiting.
- Powerspikes.
- Freezing.
Every single one of those is to gain lane dominance, having good micros lead to better lanes which matter a whole lot more in bot lane where there is less room for outplay, and a ton more room to snowball.
Tristana.
-E makes it next to impossible to freeze a lane, which confuses me more on how to freeze in the first place. -No "Instant" abilities to better last hit under tower, requires careful planning if getting shoved and abused. -Auto attacks are actually surprisingly long ranged despite her passive, only Varus, Ashe, and Caitlyn out range her alone, excluding range steroids like Twitch R, Kog'maw W, Jinx Q. She shares a level 1 range of 550 with most other Marksmen. -Spells are all largely Auto attack based, base attack speed is AVERAGE in comparison to other adcs. Max base attack speed is low, only Jinx, Graves, and Sivir have slower at level 18. Hardly noticeable. -Strong level 2/6 power spikes, however it requires going all in and putting yourself at more risk. -Auto attacks are feel clunky. -E passive also makes it harder to last hit minions just in lane, can often end in lowering a minion to a point it dies before you can attack again. E passive can also be used to punish laners while last hitting, 2 for 1. Minimal damage. -Hyper carry that can be largely self-reliant due to self-peeling skills. Still not a un-killable god.
If you want a TL;DR, She just lacks a lot of control other marksman have early, her E passive makes it pretty chaotic and basically removes any possibly of freezing, and having no low mana instant damaging skills, she cant correct that either like Lucian, MF, Ezreal, or Ashe. Having very little control can be odd and often can be exploited in multiple fashions, depending on the Tristanas skill level. If you are ahead, and think you can just farm up and don't need to help your team, you can just freeze if you have an advantage, hell, you could freeze if you didn't. If you are even you can just shove early and back to get a bigger ticket item than her and then have lane dominance because lane is shoved and you don't miss much.
Control is something ADCs need in this game, early control even more so because the more control they have, the better chances they have scaling into late game to become the monsters they aspire to be. The less control you have, the more chance to not be able to effectively transition into late game.
What I mean by control is basically just pressure, controlling the minions, damage, pressure, poke etc.
People in my elo can go either way, knowing how to handle or not to handle a low control ADC, from just letting me peacefully farm and giving us good engagement potential to being virtually unreachable, quickly spitting out damage before retreating, and pressuring me off farm, however, higher up players hopefully understand this, which is why she is such a low tier champ in a meta that does not favor hyper carries, but high control carries like Cait, Lucian, and Xayah.
I have not even mentioned support, but I will now:
Supports are game changers, they are called support for a reason because they add empowering variables to a weak marksman early game.
There are four things that really define what supports do:
Engage, Disengage, Sustain and Poke
The cycle goes like this Engage > Sustain > Poke > Disengage> Engage, a big circle chart of power. As you can imagine, each one has different aspects of control, and different supports can cover multiple areas, some better than others.
Early game: Poke supports give damage pressure, very strong to ward enemy adc off farm. Works best with utility/poke ADCs Engage supports wait for a chance to all in, other wise just wait around procing coin or shield, they give kill pressure. Works best with burst/all-in/utility/snowbally ADCs Disengage supports... well if the enemy all-ins they disengage. Simple but very weak and don't really give any pressure, only some protection. Works well with hyper carry ADCs Sustain supports, similar to disengage but better because they can give trade potential and poke protection. Works well with burst/utility ADCs
I'm going to make a quick disclaimer that most supports just cover two of these categories, most common being: Poke/Sustain Sustain/Disengage Engage/Disengage Lulu(I could not resist.)
Currently, the meta favors pressure over protection, where protection can be invaluable in an organized team, more often than not pressure works so much better in solo queue for making catches that can end a game. Pressure supports are engage and poke, and control ADCs are utility/burst/poke.
Conclusion: In an unorganized environment, a strong independent bot lane will fair way better than a dependent bot lane, offense is the best defense fits this picture perfectly. Dependent often needs other team members to fill the gaps they leave in exchange for absurd power in certain areas, while Independent have little to no gaps in strength but are generally weaker overall, the control they have can lead to snowballing and becoming a powerhouse that will fall off if they don't end the game, which is pretty easy with all the methods of snowballing. (And if you don't get it, having a late game hyper carry is way better than having a late game generalist)
But yeah, hopefully you feel okay after reading that, sorry for the wall of text, heres a picture of a kitten:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/af/b9/cb/afb9cb25f3e68bf315dbab888ebfe07a.jpg
