Vayne Champion Design vs Other Marksman

Vayne is a mobile markswoman that gives the satisfaction of doing tons of damage with every 3rd proc of silver bolts and making flashy plays. Despite being a fun, mobile adc to play, vayne does not offer bring much to the table in terms of team fight capability and in terms of having a strong kit. In general, a marksman's role is to do as much damage as possible from the back. A champion is balanced in terms of survivability, team fight utility, and damage output, whether it be in terms of burst and damage per second. Vayne as a champion will be looked at in these three ways.

Vayne's damage output Vayne is meant to be a hyperscaling markswoman that will do tons of lategame damage per second as compensation for her weaker early game relative to other marksman due to her lack of burst. Compared to other late game marksmen in terms of damage per second her lategame (single target) damage is not unique. Tristana carries a 110% attack speed boost (really just compensation numbers for lowering her as/level gain) , twitch has a 70% attack speed buff, kogmaw 6% max hp as damage on hit along with a 30% attack speed active, and jinx a 130% attack speed buff when using her "pow-pow". After considering base attack speed gain per level all of these marksmen/women have about 50-60% more attack speed when buffed other than kog'maw. However, vayne does have her silver bolts passive which should boost her damage per second significantly.

Now here's where the problem arises with vayne's single target damage per second. Vayne's silver bolts scale with attack speed, which is perfectly fine, but vayne's silver bolts scale only with attack speed. Her silver bolts * do not* scale with critical hit chance and critical hit damage (i.e. PD & I.E. pun intended). This is a problem in terms of dps because stacking large amounts of critical chance and critical damage is not synergistic with her main scaling aspect of her kit. Her silver bolts scale with attack speed, but there reaches a point where stacking more attack speed yields less gains than stacking attack damage (please do not confuse with diminishing returns). Attack damage synergizes well with both attack speed and critical chance + critical hit damage. Vayne does not gain as much relative % dps gain by stacking ad+crit chance + critical damage. This is because if Silver bolts composes of 50% of vayne's dps, stacking 100% crit chance wouldn't actually double her dps, it would only increase it by 50%. The relative benefit of ad+crit chance+critical hit damage is less compared to other marksmen.

One could say silver bolts is an amazing steroid, but other marksmen have attack speed buffs to boost their dps. The real difference between vayne's silver bolts compared to other marksmen is that her silver bolts is a passive buff. Once other marksmen's attack speed buffs or kog'maw's 6% hp shred runs out, THEN vayne's silver bolts starts to show benefit compared to other marksmen. There is a problem with this as well. Most team fights are decided within the first 5 seconds of a team fight. Instantly bursting a target or quickly dpsing a target down within 5 seconds removes all threat from the enemy champion and shifts the favor towards the team that bursted the enemy target down. Because of this, the fact that vayne's silver bolts is passive becomes less significant.

Burst is a more reliable form of damage and has immediate impact in team fights. When talking about vayne's kit, she is the most attack speed centric champion and has the least amount of burst. The fact that burst on marksmen exist and the fact that champions such as corki, lucian, (okay, lucian has a history of being op in general) and even twitch have burst keep pure dps champions less relevant.

The existence of burst and importance of burst along with other marksmen's attack speed scaling makes vayne's scaling not significantly better overall. This lack of significantly better scaling than other marksmen is a bigger problem when coupled with vayne's inferior kit.

Extra note on silver bolts. People will say silver bolts is amazing because of the fact that it does true damage, but by building LW on vayne (still a common build) physical damage becomes more effective and the importance of true damage becomes less important. Also, if black cleaver is being built, then physical damage will begin to do more and more damage and silver bolts' damage effectiveness is reduced once again. Also take kog'maw's 6% per auto x 3 hits = 18% magic damage after 3 hits. With 100 magic magic resist, let's just say a little over that amount since tanks will slightly more magic resist, that 18% magic damage becomes about 7-8% magic damage over 3 hits. Vayne's silver bolts proc is 60/3000= 2% hp, + 8% base, so 10% max hp over 3 hits. As one can see, vayne's silver bolts does not even gain that much ground over kog'maw, another late game scaling marksman, in terms of dps.

This is merely looking at vayne's silver bolts of in terms of damage output. Note that vayne's damage is purely single target. This is significant when it comes to team fights.

Team fight Vayne So vayne scales lategame, although not that much harder than other marksmen. Comparing apples to apples, or late game marksmen to late game marksmen, late game dps should be relatively similar. But that only applies if one is considering purely single target dps. Looking at marksmen's kits holistically, vayne clearly gets outclassed in terms of team fight damage output, along with utility.

Taking jinx as an example, she has hyper scaling attack speed to do big single target damage late game. She has a 140% AD ratio poke, 700 range AOE rockets, AND an aoe ult that scales with % missing health as damage along with flat ad scaling. Important part of her ult and her auto attack rockets are that the damage is aoe.

Twitch has a 290 + 150% ad scaling max stacked expunge along with a line aoe ulti that will hit targets for 100%, 80%, 60%, and 40% damage. Beyond this, his passive will apply, which will deal 216 damage over 6 seconds at max stacks.

Kog'maw's damage is a bit more single target focused, but his E is still aoe magic damge, and his ult can potentially do aoe damage but it is merely used for long range bonus damage in between.

Tristana with the new changes is even more team fight centric than before. Her E applies a 100 base damage + 110% ad ratio bomb/explosive charge which can stack up to 100% bonus damage and does aoe damage. It was noted that a tristana could apply an explosive charge buff, stack it, and buster shot the enemy champion into other enemies to hurt everyone else as well. Tristana with the new changes has not been played much to show how reliable the aoe damage is, but it may be a common occurrence with the ability to push enemies wherever the player chooses.

So jinx as an aoe ult, twitch has line aoe auto attacks, kog maw has aoe magic damage slow and long range poke, and tristana even gets cool ad scaling aoe to her kit. Vayne's single target damage is a fine comparison to other late game marksmen, but when it comes to team fights where aoe shines, vayne is completely outclassed in that regard.

Survivability Ahh, survivability. Amazing tumbles to dodge skill shots, 1 second invisibility to blow opponents' minds, and 30/90 movespeed from night hunter to hunt enemy's down. Sounds like a lot of mobility and survivability, but the reality is that vayne is 550 range. Tristana sits at 669 range at level 18, kow'maw at 710 range while his Bio-arcane barrage is buffed, Jinx at 700 range while using switcheroo - fishbones. It sounds amazing to give vayne all this mobility and utility to survive but all of that benefit is mitigated by the fact that her range is short. (Don't get into Lucian as his kit is very strong) She has 550 range which makes her much easier to focus down compared to other marksmen despite having 2 second tumbles and invisibility merely because vayne must worry about long range mages hitting her at near or over twice her auto attack range. Also, invisibility is very unreliable as a part of survivability as it can be amazing when players do not have pink wards/upgraded red trinket, but then completely useless once the enemy team has stealth detection (look at akali for an extreme example of this, or night hound/riki if anyone has played hon/dota)

But important to respect about vayne's kit is that if she can survive the burst the enemy team will barrage down upon her then she will be able to utilize her tumbles and mobility to track down targets and kite around melee champions. Her tumble, condemn, and ulti serve the purpose of being able to survive through mobility, turning invisible, and condemning melees away. But this is exactly the problem with her kit. As stated earlier, a champion is balanced around survivability , damage output, (and team fight utility, which more so became team fight damage), so inherently with all the self peel that vayne brings, she has to have shorter range compared to other late game marksmen, OR she has to take a cut to her late game scaling. Having vayne with mobility/kiting and invsibility as a form of survivability, and then sticking her range to 550 is somewhat contradictory, yet is necessary to bring a champion to balance. This is fine when looking at vayne purely as a standalone kit, but because marksmen are run with supports, the fact that vayne has slightly better peeling/kiting than other marksmen becomes less important. There is extra self-peel/kiting in vayne's kit, which once again, is mitigated because she has to kite from 550 range, but that role of peeling is already fulfilled by the support. So now her kit is inherently weaker due to her self peeling that is deemed pointless since teams/duos can simply take a strong team fighting marksmen and pair him/her up with a peeling support like janna/nami.

So overall, vayne's kit is a self peeling single target marksmen. The fact that all of her damage (literally every bit of it) is single target makes her effectiveness weaker in team fights when compared to other lategame marksmen and even every other marksman (besides urgot, but urgot is more of a ranged bruiser/fighter than marksman) that has aoe and/or burst. Despite the drawback of being all single target damage, her damage output compared to other marksman is not significantly greater to compensate for the lack of burst and aoe damage that other marksmen have. The fact that vayne's range is 550 mitigates her self-peeling capability and agility. Also, since supports already fulfill the role of peeling for marksmen, balancing vayne's kit around her self peels and mobility becomes a burden and weakness to her overall kit - in other words, vayne's kiting/mobility is balanced by having shorter range, which becomes a burden since a marksmen with low kiting but high range can be picked and supplemented with a support that can do all the peeling. A combination of short range and single target damage results in a marksmen that brings very little to a team fight and is much easier to take down compared to other marksmen.

Tl;dr Vayne needs some kind of change to her kit/buffs. There are some other weak points of her kit that I didn't mention, such as condemn stun not being reliable once team fights happen in base/lane (which is fine), and not having much to fall back on like other marksmen.

Personally, I love vayne's mobile playstyle, but the way she is now with her 550 range, pure single target damage, and reliance on pure dps makes her far too weak compared to other marksmen.

Another thing I'd like to point out about her kit is her Tumble's 50% AD scaling. 50% AD scaling sounds amazing, but the reality of the skill is that for maximum dps output this skill is useless since silver bolts' scale with attack speed, which means vayne's will be stacking attack speed. At about 1.6 attacks/sec (that's the number that's thrown around) , using tumble actually results in a dps loss, since tumble animation cuts into the time vayne could be autoattacking. Tumble flat ad scaling and silver bolts attack speed scaling do not scale at all. Not only this, tumble's 50% ad bonus does not critically strike which ruins her tumble scaling even more, since critical strikes are what makes marksmen scale so well into lategame. (Also, for the record, Lucian's 50% ad bonus passive can critical strike. "B-b-but he has to use a skill to proc his passive!" But Lucian can proc his passive 3 times within 2 seconds with QWE.) So vayne's two scaling scaling skills do not actually scale together. This may be for opening up new build paths, but frankly, 50% AD every 2 seconds assuming you build zero attack speed so there isn't dps loss when using tumble, is very suboptimal, especially since the bonus damage is physical and does not critically strike.