To Riot, From a Caitlyn Main

Alright, so let's just get this out of the way first. Yes, as of the making of this video I finished Silver 4 in Ranked. I jumped into Ranked late last season not realizing how close the end of the season was and then did not bother trying to advance when they announced I only had a few weeks to do so. I'm not some high elo player and probably don't belong anywhere outside gold at best right now. I am not hyper-skilled, but I do have a reasonable understanding of the mechanics of the game and put the time in to try to get better, analyze my weak points, and learn everything I can about everything. I also have played Caitlyn a lot. For a long time. She's been 80-90% of my adc games since I started playing.

Now let's get on to the TL; DR of the rest of this stupidly long post: With Jhin coming out Caitlyn once again has very limited gameplay identity and is essentially an inferior Jinx or Jhin, bringing pretty much nothing but poor scalings to the game. Her traps being nearly impossible to trigger is a major issue.

Going into more detail, Caitlyn's weak point has always been the fact that while one of the simplest champions to play mechanically she has always relied on shutting the enemy down early. If she doesn't do that she scales horribly in comparison. The difficulty in playing her comes not from anything in her kit, it comes from her being worse than many other ADCs. This would normally be perfectly fine and I have no issue with it really. However, when coupled with another, persistent issue (ironically always coming from gypsylord) it is problematic.

Pre-rework there was a big problem with Caitlyn's gameplay identity. It was called Jinx. Jinx was practically everything Caitlyn was but with better scaling. Long auto-range? Check. Long range poke move with a wind-up? Check, though Cait's passes though minions. Trap for zone control? Check, though Jinx trades duration for speed and greater area coverage. Long range execute ultimate? Check, but Jinx's is an AoE skill-shot with longer range. Pretty much the entire kit served all the same purposes and you could play them pretty much the same way. The only major kit difference was that Jinx has no net to escape. However, the Caitlyn rework gave Cait a clearer identity and defined what she brings to the table.

And then Jhin enters the scene. Now don't misunderstand, Jhin is fine. I have no issues right now with the champion itself. I ever understand that it's okay for there to be multiple snipers in the game from a conceptual standpoint. However... why the hell would you play Caitlyn anymore? Her kit? Jinx has the same kit other than the trap interactions. Being a sniper? Jhin fulfills that fantasy better than Caitlyn in every single way. Zone control sniper? Jhin does that too, not as well, but not comparatively bad enough considering he has fewer weaknesses. You can argue that his traps don't root without a skillshot, but neither do Cait's because her traps are terrible.

My main point is that Caitlyn doesn't really seem to offer anything that other champs don't do better. The only thing she has of her own is a long auto-attack range and a net-gun. She just doesn't have much identity anymore with Jhin coming out and Jinx already being in the game.

All this would probably be tolerable if her traps didn't suck so much. I would be totally fine with power nerfs if the trigger range wasn't so stupidly narrow. It doesn't even have to be as large as it used to be. It just needs to actually exist. I've trapped paths so that the trap model fills literally 90% of them and watched people walk right through. I've built trap forts filling 90% of the lane to provide teamfight advantage and had none of them trigger in a teamfight taking place right there.

I've played Caitlyn for years and I'm wondering why I should keep playing her.