AD Assassin and Marksman Itemizations are Backwards

badooga·3/3/2017, 1:14:53 AM·1 votes·436 views

AD Assassins are generally meant to burst down a single target quickly - crit should be a stat they synergize with to increase burstiness. Instead, they build lethality as it is more relevant early on and still excels at destroying squishies.

Marksmen are generally meant to be DPS-oriented glass cannons - lethality should be a stat they synergize with to properly able to deal with beefier targets over the course of a teamfight, so that they can penetrate their high armor. Instead, they use crit as AS-based items increase the chances of critting more

What if the two stats were rebalanced in order to fit the opposite roles? Perhaps various assassin abilities can be made to critically strike (and not crit on basic attacks), and various crit items would be reworked and disassociated with attack speed (item 3087 item 3085 item 3046 item 3094) and instead grouped with more AD-oriented items to better synergize with burst, as well as some price decreases to not render assassins useless early on. Lethality can then have its price adjusted to be higher (also, bringing back 40-100% lethality scaling would probably be best, so that their early game will still be weak), and then ADCs can be given better tank-slaying tools to not bring back the ADC slaughterfest we had a few patches ago.

Then what would happen? Various assassins, ADCs and others would probably have to be rebalanced and such. For example, Caitlyn would probably have her passive reworked to exclude crit. Ashe Gangplank Tryndamere Yasuo would definitely need some hefty changes (Tryndamere specifically needing a rework) to make them work with lethality and not crit.

Obviously this would be a lot of work that Riot probably wouldn't want to put the effort into doing, even for a time like Preseason 8. Furthermore, the current lethality/crit marksman problem can easily be addressed by reverting the 60-100% change back to the 40-100% scaling we had before and nerfing any overtuned champions that need nerfs. This just popped into my mind earlier today, and I wanted to post about it... thoughts?

2 Comments

Sett up 4my gank3/3/2017, 1:16:17 AM2 votes

Lethality is not the counter to tank's armor is the counter to lethality.

Mecha MaIphite3/3/2017, 1:44:30 AM1 votes

Unless they made crit amplify spell damage, which would be absurdly difficult to balance, it wouldn't work. AD assassins are generally AD casters that occasionally weave autos in a combo; most of their damage is coming from spells. Because crit is effectively multiplying the damage of autos, it will scale much better with AA reliant champions.

Lethality, on the other hand, is focused around base armor. It's pretty easy to negate it with an armor item, so it's better on assassins.