ADC Meta Concerns
Ever since the ADC changes in season 6, we've been down a bit of a rollercoaster of bot lane meta. Every single adc in league (with the exception of Urgot) was considered god tier at some point of the last two seasons. This signifies in the very least, a huge shifts in powers going back and forth across the position. However the situation at hand has shown a troubling pattern. After these champions get their limelight and later their nerfs, we see a much less desirable outcome from these pool of champions.
Typically, and this is going on right now, you will have one supreme adc that hopefully gets banned, and then three or four tier 1 picks that almost never change (Lucian, Ezreal or Jhin, Ashe or Miss Fortune, and Cait), and then a huge pool of garbage that is barely worth the pick. And whilst this partially comes with the dilemma of such a specific role such as adc, it has been these last two years; been detrimental to game health.
When voids of the supreme adc crop up, and none of the tier 1s have enough advantage to put them over the rock paper scissor nature of their power, we see huge fuckfests in pick potential. Bot lane Ziggs is the biggest example there is of this situation, with no dominant adcs, we saw a glimpse of the reality in a world in which marksmen are being replaced by mages who do a similar job to marksmen. While a mage marksman in of itself is not bad, the presence of one because the meta was so shot is troubling news. Because while riot is not obligated to keep in charge of WHERE a champion goes, but WHEN it is picked. If a champion is being picked too much, it receives a nerf to that reason. If a champion is not being picked enough, they'll usually try to fix that.
So if the marksmen pool ever falls off, as it seems to be doing, we could see a situation in which marksmen no longer call the bottom lane their home. This would most likely mean most would NEVER see pick potential. All the other lanes are very eager to punish a marksmen's weakness, no capable defense. So that would mean Riot is left to rework the items in the time that these marksmen are left to collect dust in the purchases of accounts.
And they would hopefully rework items because it the cause of this shift in meta is most definitely a result of the new items available to marksmen. Before, marksmen were easily differentiated by mages because they used crit to create a power limbo, in which they were building a huge power spike, without hitting any decent amount by three items. They were effectively the slowest role in the game in terms of power, however they provided tower shredding after teamfights, and huge, game defining positions late game. However with a change to crit, which created less raw damage and more utility focused effects being favorable, we saw a huge change in the position.
They are now defined by early game snowballs, each item is now by itself is individual and a power spike and puts them in a very similar box to assassins or mages, expect theyre ranged and\or do their damage mostly through autos. It is the death of the adc's personality, and so it endangers any champion that cant function on whatever item is being abused for early game powerspikes. And while crit appears every once in awhile, it no longers functions similar to the 80% sniper we're used to. It's the 50% lucky dog, praying that personal modifiers on top of the crit get you for an extreme damage and cheese a kill. It's not a reliable means to increase damage, but a roll of the dice to try to end the game as fast as possible.
And so we end up with more of the snowball shit we've been seeing plaguing this game for awhile. While it cant be said for sure if these items are a direct cause of the game as a whole speeding up; it can be be said it sped up adc. If we change crit items to be once again build and rely on each other, rather than two power buys and four defense tech items; we could help slow down the game and make a more skillful playing field.
tl;dr the adc changes and items sped up the role and by consequence the game and this is bad because fast is less
