Playing any AP champion next patch is going to be the crappiest feeling

Zenthon Prime·Oct 31, 2015·45 votes·1,744 views

Next patch, the only reason to pick any AP champion is as a deterrant for armor stacking. Not because you're playing something that's actually better than some AD alternative, oh no. As an AP mid or top, your sole "job" is just to be there, knowing the whole time that some other AD champion could be doing what your champ does way better.

Why? Masteries greatly favor AD champions (especially ADCS), Zhonyas gutted, buffs across the board to ADC kits, massively improved AD itemization (as opposed to the mild tweaking AP items got earlier).

Hell, you can even take the new Corki as your ADC and just forgo real AP champions entirely.

29 Comments

Emperor CynricOct 31, 201518 votes

Yasuos are going to be everywhere in season 6 (as if they weren't already everywhere in season 5)

SithesisLordOct 31, 20152 votes

Kayle item 3115

Keksimus maximus

Zeke MaelstormOct 31, 20151 votes

Crit Kayle looks like it will be better next season, honestly. Essence Reaver lets you ignore your need to build CDR and Hurricane is going to be bad on AP Kayle next patch anyway.

SithesisLordNov 1, 20151 votes

Nashor's and the new Guinsoo tho.

Either way, she benefits a lot more from AS than raw damage items. Nashor's is still a must for her.

PupelOct 31, 20155 votes

Bullshit ill play Teemo every game and watch as all thous squishy ass champs trip over my shrooms and die. If they want to duel me....well goodluck. basically if everyone starts playing ADC assassins will come back and have a field day

HentRexOct 31, 20154 votes

Birth of the ADC meta is truly, the start of Armageddon. As Teemo....I mean Satan shall rule supreme on the Rift.

Caitlyn Graves MissFortune Quinn These are his horsemen.

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20151 votes

Ehhhhhh. Already tried most of them out on the PBE. Only one who's over the top right now is Graves and his 100+ armor/MR steroid as a fricken ADC. People are taking him top and going tanky.

HentRexOct 31, 20151 votes

Heard he's also a jungler now. CC on every auto.

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20151 votes

Ooooooh yeah. On monsters and minions. He can jungle pretty easy with it. He's gone everywhere but the ADC role because of how beefy he now is.

BorblandOct 31, 20153 votes

It is in such sinister moments that the human being, desperate from what he can see, turns to other, much darker alternatives to survive.

HentRexOct 31, 20153 votes

Fiddlesticks falling even farther out of viability.

LankPantsOct 31, 20153 votes

Next patch, the only reason to pick any AP champion is as a deterrant for armor stacking.

Don't even bother. Any champ who could stack armour gets deterred from existence by the new LW upgrade.

You'll have more impact just by playing another ADC, which is fucking sad.

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20153 votes

What..? The new LW only affects Bonus Armor... And you'll max at 47% with it. IF you have a FH and a Thornmail, for a bonus of 190 and you have a base of 70, you're at 260. CURRENTLY, LW will bring that 260 down to 158.6. With the new LW (The full item, not the LW itself) you'll have 170.7. That's a 12 more armor than you currently get and that's if they have the full LW finished and IF your champion had 70 base armor.

For example, Xin gets up to 85 base. Current LW would make it to where he goes to 51.85. That's about a loss of 33 armor. The new LW WON'T TOUCH THAT. That 33 will stay there. 85 base armor is also 46% reduction. That's 46% that won't be affected by a LW. They'll HAVE to get an armor shred item, which with their builds, they can't afford to trade any of their items for a Youmuu's or Cleaver, which means they'll have to worry about their teammates doing such a thing.

There's also BotRK being nerfed from 8% to 6%, so tanks only have Kog and Vayne to fear (Vayne is being buffed to 12% true damage at the cost of the flats, something everyone and their mother has been wanting for... some reason... I mean, that 4% on a 2k health ADC is 80 damage when the flat used to be 60. Loss of damage mid game to get more late I guess? I dunno. People said they wanted it this way and Riot delivered) since Vayne does %health True Damage and Kog's W now has an AD scaling on top of doubling his AS and doubling the 2.5 AA per sec cap to 5 per sec.

LankPantsOct 31, 20151 votes

What..? The new LW only affects Bonus Armor... And you'll max at 47% with it.

You're looking at the wrong half. +15% damage against high HP champs.

Any champ who builds armour is going to have at least one HP item, meaning you're going to have +500 HP on them and they get 15% bonus damage against you.

I've played this out on the PBE from both sides. I can tell you tanks are incapable of tanking on the PBE. The 3 ADC comps will melt you in a second flat even with 300+ armour. ADCs are so strong on the PBE that they don't need BotRK to melt tanks. (not that they ever did, IE's always hurt tanks more)

Merc Scimitar is ludicrous, it basically allows ADCs to completely ignore tanks, the MR and lifesteal make their damage irrelevant and the CC cleanse means you can't CC them down.

Lord Dominik's Regards punishes building every single tank item in the game. You lose 40% of the value from any armour you buy and any HP you buy makes you take more damage from the ADC. To make it even worse the components for this item are also incredibly powerful. You can just sit on you 1300 30% armour pen item, you kind of just buy it when you have gold and as long as the enemy has one armour item it's incredibly efficient, same goes for Giant Slayer but for HP instead of armour.

Also you mentioned masteries, have you seen how crazy the ADC ones are? Sure tanks have a decent one, 8% damage reduction is nothing to laugh at, but it's honestly not as good as two of the ADC masteries. Warlords Bloodlust is utterly absurd, heal for 15% of a crits damage and gain 20% attack speed, I think it's honestly the strongest mastery right now. Slightly less talked about and a bit more situational but Fervour for Battle can get insane. When it's fully stacked it deals 80 on hit Phys damage to each auto. If you keep this stacked it's greater than the 8.8ish% bonus damage you need to overcome 8% resist.

RebonackNov 1, 20152 votes

Mages are getting nerfed!

Mages get their CDR cap increased to 45% and a free Luden's Echo passive.

Neeeeeeerfed!

CanastusNov 1, 20152 votes

Cassiopeia is going to be even more useless than she already is.

She always was a worse version of a marksman, now she'll be entirely outclassed in every sense with her inferior sustain and unreliable play pattern, also her items are going to suck aswell. And still no compensation buffs on sight, as usual from Riot.

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20151 votes

Well, considering LW only affect bonus armor now and most tanks have about 70 (Sion) to about 104 (Rammus, with Braum at 103 behind him) which is about 40-50% damage reduction that can't be affected by the LW and has to be reduced via Kog's, J4's, or Wu's Q or a Cleaver since I believe even Darius's E is being changed to only affect bonus as well. You'll need flat ArP or % reductions to eat away at a tank's innate armor while a LW might ignore almost half of the bonus armor.

I should note even squishy champs like Ahri have a base of 80 armor, which is around 45% reduction. Yeah. AD champs actually got boned unless they start used Youmuu's and the 19 ArP from runes, plus there's the 8ish you can get from Masteries.

Sooooo.... Yeah. While every single AD item took a nerf in AD like IE and ER lost 15 AD, Bt lost 5, BotRK lost 2% current health, Shiv is 50-150 now so a ton less damage when finished and a little more later on, all the AD items are over 3k, so they'll be the same cost as the AP equivalents... I mean, overall... All they did was put AP items on par with AD. They bumped up the cost of a lot of AD items while nerfing a lot of the high cost ones.

LankPantsOct 31, 20151 votes

all the AD items are over 3k

This isn't remotely true.

All the Zeal items sans Triforce are sub 3k.

Rageblade is an underrated item on ADCs right now. It's great for AA based carries with even decent AP ratios. Guys like Trist and Varus love this item, Kog's utterly insane with it. As it turns out 15% of your AD as magic damage can wind up being pretty good.

And of course there's the LW upgrades, which are insane for their price.

But also ADCs get far better component items. While mages have things like Aether Wisp and Armguard, which are both fairly good items ADCs get things like LW, Giant Slayer and Kircheis Shard, all of which have powerful passives close in strength to their completed items, which means it's going to be viable for ADCs to sit on a lot of incomplete items and very easily flex their builds without really investing much gold.

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20151 votes

Rageblade is good on Kog'Maw and Corki. That's it. Trist and Varus HATE that item. Varus is a poke-based ADC who actually prefers to go more caster build and poke with his Q as we saw all throughout the season and even in World's. Varus was made to use his AA's as a last line of defense sorta thing, hence why he's got 575 range, not 600+ when his kit is all long range stuff.

ADC's also can not just sit on their incomplete items. All the items have their strength on completion with the addition of a bonus effect, just like all the AP items give like BF sword is 40 AD for 1.3k just like Needless is 1250 for 60 AP and such. AD's form of Fiendish is 1.1k, so they have to pay more there... etc. etc.

Only items that are less than 3k though are the three AS/Crit items. These items are the equivalent of the CDR items for AP, which are 2550 for nomicon and 2.8k from Athene's, about the same price as the AS/Crit items. Both serve the purpose of enhancing the large AD/AP items you buy before or After. Most AD's can't rush their AS/Crit item like an AP can rush either big damage or CDR and mana regen, with the exception of Kog and Vayne who are currently scary as hell since Vayne lost her flat true damage, but she does 12% of some one's max health rather than 8% and Kog's W has an AD scaling on top of doubling his AS (And AS cap). Those two are different though...

Buuuut yeah. Giant Slayer is decent, but doesn't help against squishies if you're a level above the enemy or ahead in any way.

I should also note, ADC's aren't even getting the better components. AD Assassins are getting the better components with getting two really good items, Youmuu's and Death's Deal. Both have incredible build paths now with 65 AD (On par with IE and Essence) plus giving 65 AD with Youmuu's giving 20 ArP to help kill squishies AND tanks (Tanks because LW only affects the bonus armor, so you NEED flats or % REDUCTION to get through their 70 (Sion) -80 (Standard AP's like Ahri) - 103/104 (Braum/Rammus) base armors.).

kasfasOct 31, 20151 votes

Says sion has 70 base armour, my reaction: "WTF?!?! He's a TANK, and has less base armour then a FOX??!??! WTF RITO, no wonder he's so shit atm!" Sion main didn't even know his base armour was so bad for a tank...

DrNovaOct 31, 20151 votes

Health stacking is his thing

Zair UmbrasOct 31, 20152 votes

Yeeaah. Sion is more of a health tank was the biggest thing for him.

At least he isn't Thresh who has the lowest base of them all. New LW laughs at Thresh so hard and we're all glad we can punish Thresh for being Thresh.

kasfasNov 2, 20151 votes

To be fair, sion doesn't (or at least shouldn't) stack health. Really sion should rely on his W passive to get more hp, making resistance stacking better. Don't get me wrong, I know that he needs to build SOME health(in the forms of visage, rands, banshees, and less effective yet still very viable: dmp, warmogs, and sunfire), but should spend more time resistance stacking, again because he gets free hp. You SHOULD come out of laning with between 200 and 400 hp (the former being the very minimum, the latter being for pretty good csing sions) and if your playing right, should end the game with 600+ (that includes kills and assists. the more they die, the more free farm you get as well as the 10 for killing them). So sion does get pretty rekt by the LW changes.

A Good example of a tank who like to stack health is Zac, who I'm not going to bother getting into right now.

This is my 5 cents.

Thresh tho...

They may make some changes for him like: Thresh's souls count for x (thresh's level) amount of base armour, any additional souls are counted as bonus armour.

Though I must admit it would be nice to not see him for a while.

Zair UmbrasNov 2, 20151 votes

Well, I more meant he was a health tank because his W gives him so much more health than most tanks.

Thresh should have a flaw though. He's currently only got one flaw and that's his skill cap. He's got a ton of reliability and his passive even spawns more if he's not getting much early on. Having this flaw could simply lower his play rate slightly since he won't be so tanky. Could be for the best!

kasfasNov 3, 20151 votes

Well Rito won't do that cuz they wanna keep thresh making the LC$BIGPLAY$!

He doesn't deserve an indirect need like this though, that's really unfair. That's like needing a champion because there's an item they're good with and then needing them! REDICULOUS AMIRITE?!

Yea it would be for the best to leave him as is, but they won't...

Dang Rito!

RisenDarkKnightOct 31, 20151 votes

I think AP champions will still be played, mostly because there just aren't many AD mid choices. You've got Yasuo, Zed, and Talon. Those are the only really popular ones. Some will play Jayce, Riven or Gangplank. If you don't play those champions much or they are picked or banned, mages will still be useful. It will still feel bad because you can't take advantage of the new items and builds are more expensive since only passive gold was increased not gold from minions/towers.