The Mordekaiser rework shows you how absurd the ADC class is

It shows you what melees need in order to ever properly lane against ranged ADCs:

•Absurd Sustain

•Natural defensive steroid to help deal with constant poke and minion aggro since a ranged ADC never has to deal with extreme amounts of minion aggro whereas anytime a melee gets on top of you, they're eating tons of minion aggro, which is huge in early laning

•Ridiculous upfront damage - obviously his Q isn't completely upfront, he needs to charge it but he trades typically with a charged Q. This is essentially mandatory because you won't stay in range of them for long where you just get kited into oblivion

•Mobility - morde does not have this obviously. But this has been the generic answer in the past for melees to deal with ranged champions, especially in a game where so many ranged champions have hard CC. Morde does make up for this with his W and the fact he has a support that will likely have some sort of hard CC.

•Having some sort of CC - again, morde doesn't have this. However, typically a combination of mobility + CC is required for a melee to fight a ranged champion because otherwise they jump to them and get kited, it's the only successful method that's shown any consistency for melees vs ranged champions, which is why so many melees are loaded with it.

These are just general cases for what is required for melees to be able to have any sort of hope to deal with ranged champions in lane. This is compounded significantly when you have 2v2 lanes with a support, where very few melees (if any not named morde) can actually successfully 2v2 with a support vs an ADC.

In the past, you'd basically have to run a kill lane to win, but the burden is on the melee + support kill lane to actually get kills or they just slowly get outscaled and their team comp falls apart 20 minutes in if it hasn't snowballed to absurd levels.

This has never been considered a viable strategy in pro play, just pick one ADC and another and have safe scaling in tact. It's also why ADCs are rarely pick/ban in pro play or solo queue, the class is so generic in its design that there's no point in banning one right click bot when you'll just get another. It's an inefficient ban considering that. The only exception is when it's something absurdly overpowered or overtuned, or a case of inevitability where the ADC in question gets 1-2 items and the game is basically over (classic protect the Kog comps in s2; Vayne fotm etc).

But what's even further proof is how riot had to add unique mechanics to the game to help a melee botland carry make up for their lack of ability to siege - Mordes drafon ghost is aimed at helping siege, not to mention other objective controlling. His duo lane W that grants him and his support sustain, which is unique because it's AOE sustain placed on a NON-support champion.

This is why it's going to be months before we know if the morde rework was even a success. There are so many tendencies and metas that this approach is attempting to break and shatter, ancient things like ranged ADCs being mandatory, and we need to see if you ever actually see a morde bot lane in competitive or if it's having unprecedented success in high elo.

My short guess is it won't be and that's not a knock on Riots rework for Morde, I think it's fucking awesome that they went way outside the box to try and make something other than ranged ADCs go bot. But the issue is that I doubt they can ever make a change to a champion that will make people ever find it compelling to take over a ranged ADC bot lane because of how ranged ADC + supports have powered creeped everything else out of the lane. Simply put, I think the task is too tall for them to tackle it.

You'd have to make some serious changes to ADCs directly and their itemization, otherwise you'll never see anything other than ADC be optimal for the bot lane carry role.