Ranged champions have a disproportionate advantage over melee champions, let’s address some items

People are complaining about Viktor Top and personally, I don’t mind it until he completes . This is because once he completes it, i no longer have a choice of whether I want to fight him or not. If he decides he wants to run me down and keep me perma slowed, he’s going to. But I’m not going to be able to stick to him because he will kite me infinitely as a melee champion. This is an illustration of the classic problem with melee vs ranged interactions.

By virtue of having range, ranged champions have an inherent advantage over melee champions, even melee champions with gap closers against immobile ranged champions. Why? Because the burden is always on the melee champion to engage on the ranged champion and this usually means they’re going to eat quite a bit of damage just to do this. The ranged champion will get off unprovoked damage before the melee even lands their damage and that’s dependent upon if they even can. Not to mention, even immobile ranged champions have tools to deal with mobile melee champions, often in the form of hard CC (and if it’s skill shot hard CC, you’re often awarded long ranged abilities as a result; if you’re not long ranged, you’ll generally have point and click CC). Of course these are generalizations, so there are obviously examples that contradict these but they are few and far between, thus insignificant to the discussion.

So what is the problem? The problem is that, as I’ve mentionef, ranged champions already have tools to deal with melee champions diving them. In Viktors case, he has his cage that he drops and general longer range. And I don’t mind that, it is a good interaction. If Viktor drops his cage properly, he wins. If he doesn’t, he loses. It depends on the gameplay. What changes is that viktor buys and you’ve suddenly removed a great deal of skill that it took for Viktor to work. Let’s be honest, Viktor wasn’t even a top tier champion prior to this. Now he is going to get nerfed and become even weaker in mid lane for abusing an item interaction that Riot refuses to address.

This interaction is ranged champions using items that were clearly intended for melee champions: ; and even falls into this category because mages really do not need this item. Whenever it has been good, it has been abused to allow mages to avoid actually needing to land skill shots and simply perma slowing shit to death. Ranged champions abuse this interaction do hard and ultimately end up getting their intended play styles nerfed and the items themselves nerfed, actually hurting both the champions these items were designed to help as well as the champions original play styles. Let’s be honest, there has never been a playstyle where ranged champions using these items as off-builds (and in some cases, normal builds) has been fun - it’s always been incredibly toxic. And I am not interested in preserving blue Ez because that shit is one of the most toxic playstyles in the game.

So I’ve presented my case and I’ll make it simply. Make these items melee only. Ranged champions already have inherent tools to deal with divers, why are they allowed to abuse items intended for melee champions to circumnavigate that interaction and thus reduce their complexity while further increasing the complexity of melee champions? This is why champions like Aatrox, Irelia, Zed, Riven and Jax have to exist: it’s the only consistent way to keep this bull-shit gap closed and even then, it’s not closed because they all get nerfed into oblivion for doing what they were intended to. It needs to change.