The toplane problem

So finally by the random Soraka and Sona appearance at top made the community realise that nothing good was done for toplane despite being promised for preseason. Obviously a literal nerf to Conquerer AD users buff on mages, removal and +10 conditional hpreg on and the new dragon souls were a nerf if anything to toplane impact. Although it became bluntly obvious with Soraka/Sona there are still some people who keep spamming that top is fine. They are usually not top mains attacking top and they do that because temporarily it makes another lane easier to deal with for them, I see it all around the forums it happens for other lanes but I'm writing this now because top is in such an insanely terrible state right now it's starting to mess up the whole game's balance, starting to mess up other lanes like it happened with jungle in preseason. As I stated they didn't face the real powercreep issue with top rather nerfed junglers so maybe that would help. Now we see that it did not, only caused more problems elsewhere.

You can't keep any lanes underpowered, you might have better carry potential at mid/bot temporarily, but in the long term the effect of it will reach your lane eventually (maybe mid is an exception because that lane has never been weak since s1), as I said that's what happened to junglers.

Also there are some general misconceptions about role impact and other role specific things: Taking the recent jungler example, last time I counted 91 out of the 200 challenger players in EUW were junglers (this changes day by day, counter it early january) meaning that not just that they had fine impact but they had by far the best. Junglers felt less impact because the main impact of junglers is playing the map and not fighting, and fighting was less relevant while being underleveled compared to lanes who have much less map impact. (I know that the story is wider and that some jungler champs were effected hard while others got even better than they were, comparing to other junglers.)

Toplane the sololane/duelist role. Now I believe this is one of the most controversial roles because of being the duelist role. I can't count the times a non ADC tried to 1v1 a lvl16+ 3+ item and started spamming chat how broken Jax is. And this is from my diamond games. But a properly played easily duels a Jax, so do properly played mages like with can permaCC Jax while also being able to kill him with one rotation of his spells. is a nightmare for Jax nowadays, Veigar is safer on lane, scales better, has better waveclear(which he doesn't even need an item for), has aoe CC, aoe dmg, burst dmg and outduels.

ADC used to be the scaling role that is the backline requiring a frontline to function. They are by default a less impactful role as you use autoattacks and lack CC or burst damage abilities and autoattacks are predictable. They also supposed to require a frontline so they function where those abilities have more impact. It's not hate on ADCs or anything but I don't see how an ADC type champion can be impactful in a MOBA environment other than being overpowered just from the technical standpoint. The scaling/being the backline turned somewhere upside down lately. Tristana a champion known for her supergood scaling was picked as an earlygame lanebully lately, Lucian, Quin were picked for their earlygame bullying, Senna was strong because of being a lanebully, was made who is much more frontline-like than any other ADC.

Supports are changing every single season. First they started of as being a large minion but back then barely anyone played support. Then they became the stable vision source of the team while everyone having the option. Then only support could have stable vision source (back in the day everyone could keep 3 wards + 1 pink up). Meanwhile they also started to become a heavy shield for the ADC. Lately Riot created and which moves away from being a standstill shield for the ADC which personally I like. I also started seeing supports roaming to other lanes at the end of last season which didn't use to be the case in soloque. To look back in time their impact definitely went way up

Mid used to be the glasscannon role. Mages used to have high damage, high range while being extremely fragile + immobile like and little later assassin didn't have the range but had high mobility in return. Also worth to note that back then only assassin were able to oneshot with a perfectly landed combo, those were the golden ages of . And later started appearing the burst mage meta with who acted more like assassins. Assassins are naturally high impact champions and having the most important lane also made them very impactful and remain that to this day, and it feels like they are the main ones talking against any lane getting any improvement to retain their dominant status, not caring that the game is bleeding day by day to the problems.