I've played ziggs for a while now but I want to try another artillery mage. I've been looking at lux, vel koz, and xerath, and would like to know how they compare to eachother. Specifically I'd like to know who has the strongest laning phase, and who has the most reliable self peel.
Zoe is the best artillery mage BY FAR.
Lux is the safest and has the best self peel of the three, but has the lowest range (except for her ult) and longer cooldowns. Xerath has the best wave control, but his stun is his only defense and lockdown and its duration depends on the distance the orb traveled. He's got the more aggressive playstyle in the laning phase as well. Vel'koz has probably the highest damage potential, but his only hard CC is a short knockback, making him struggle against melee champions with multiple gapclosers.
lux is the only one who's a babe and not ugly
Xerath is easily the most overpowered Artillery mage. Spells go through minions,strong slow/stun, longest ranges, mana sustain passive. Lux has some alright range and utility with q and w with an alright laning phase. Velkoz is all around in most spots and is good when enemy team comp is bulky
Xerath probably has the best lanening, rather reliable longranged poke to spam with good waveclear, and if he lands his stun he can get alot damage in his full combo. He also has huge teamfight damage from afar, but probably the worst selfpeal amongst the 4
Ziggs tends to have less killthreat as his stuff is less reliable to land, but hios waveclear is good and if he gets to a tower, he will get plateings. Also, his aoe followup on something like a J4 ult can be rather massive and he offers more zone controll than the others. He's also rather save vs predictable threats with his W and E, but needs to long to react to supprising all-ins.
Lux has the highest killpotential with the huge burst of her full rotation, and probably is the savest with two rather easi to land CCs and her shield. An early extra point into the shield can cockblock assasins quite badly. Her wavecontroll needs some more effor than on the others, and her raw poke isn't as good. She's basically the sniper amongs them.
Vel is somewhere in between? His wavelcear is good, his poke is great, his full combo is about as deadly as lux, but with less range, his self peel vs targets that are already on top is bad, but he is great at keeping his distance cause his W can be cast while moveing and even Q hardly costs time with animation cancleing, his base ms is above other mages and his Q is a very spamable slow to keep people from getting close. His constant spam and the way his Q works creates supprisingly high zone controll(not as good as ziggs W+E though). His main weakness is that he exposes him self quite a bit for waveclear or full combos, and landing his combo setup is harder than for lux or xerath, but therefor he has more dps and the truedamage to deal with high MR.
I find it interesting that Lux, Xerath, and Ziggs, despite having some of the longest ranges on their spell casts, their passives require them to be within 550 units to basic attack to get some kind of benefit. Especially, since you typically DON'T want to be in range to auto attack since most gap closers or CC requires that enemy to be within 550 units to cast.
Meanwhile, Vel'koz, does NOT need to basic attack or get in basic attack range unless he wants to maintain he deconstruct stacks, in reality isn't that helpful unless you're a macroing 1v1 mid lane Vel'koz god, he doesn't need to be in auto attack range to proc his passive 3-stack effect.
As far as how I'd rank them if they were pitted against eachother.
I'd probably put Ziggs at the top. They can all push but his passive works on structures and I value turret plating and turret gold than say, assists from shielding or from the minor damage that comes from Vel'koz E.
His ulti is also super useful in scattering enemies like a GP ulti. Heck, it might as well be GP's Ulti that had been upgrading with Death's Daughter.
Ziggs passive also being able to take advantage of attack resetting, AA > Q > AA where one of those AAs can be empowered by his passive and has little attack delay or faster projectile speed than Lux auto.
