Honestly: Jinx needs a rework

Generalist champions suck. Point, blank, period. When a champion covers too much of a spectrum, it's hard to fit others in that same general space. Riot has made attempts to reduce that overwhelming pressure some champs have on their role in the game, but the fact remains that we have a good bit of generalist champs in the game that get too much done when they're good. Sure, we could take this time to, once again, beg for some degree of required skill to operate Sona, but this is about my first main when I was Silver, then Bronze, then Silver again before I said "I'm fucking tired of support Shaco", which is Jinx. As per usual with this type of post, we're cutting most of the sarcasm and witty remarks to get straight to the point, cause this may or may not take a minute.

When Jinx isn't nerfed into oblivion, she's fucking ridiculous. Anyone remember Jinx from, like, season 5, when I first got here? Long range rockets with bonus damage that splashes, a long range slow that hits kinda hard, a standard auto-attack that ramps the HELL up, traps that hold people right still while you pelt them out of trading range or pepper them with that mini-gun, and an ult that you can either fish for long range finishers with or just straight shot-gun the thing. Jinx, although she had exploitable weaknesses, had such a well-rounded offense on a baseline level that she was top dog hyper-carry, and pretty much the top dog marksman in general, for most of the entire season (I think Lucian had another "I'm broken" fling in season 5 for a sec, but got nerfed). Jinx, Vayne, and Trist, with Vayne being more popular and Jinx with the highest win rate. That's how season 5 kinda went, and despite the fact that you could just lock Jinx down since she was the most immobile, getting ravaged from 700 range and then having the remaining few members of your team shot-gun finished when they finally managed to close that distance was honestly hard to get around.

Now that Jinx isn't ridiculous, she's kinda lousy all the time. To fix Jinx being the best 24/7, Riot removed her shot-gun capabilities on ult, increased the delay on her chomps arming, forced Jinx's Q to scale off of both her in-game level and her Q's rank, which kills its mid-game strength, and added an attack speed tax to her rockets, since I got here on League of Legends. That's a lot of nerfing, and I don't think Riot gave her that much back for it. At the time, most of, if not all of, this was fair (I don't agree with the mini-gun nerf), but now, Jinx has an issue of being consistently out-gunned. Because Runaan's Hurricane is now a crit item (which was a good change, don't get me wrong), someone like Twitch or Kog can toggle buttons and just fill in Jinx's niche of long-range, aoe, team fight hyper carry damage from a longer range and more reliable steroids. Trist and Vayne don't have as much range and aoe, but they pump out strong single-target damage and can peel themselves. If Jinx wants a steroid, she has to fight at 525 range for a bit or land some kills/destroy something. Why would anyone bother with a steroid to clean a fight when they need the steroid to win the initial fight? Why bother with a steroid that requires the shortest range of all hyper-carries to get rolling when you're probably gonna get out-dueled by most anyone you step up to since Jinx has no dueling tools? Even Cait has a more reliable, longer lasting trapping mechanic with a shorter delay and strong damage output reward for anyone she hits in comparison to Jinx's traps. Now that Jinx isn't the best hyper-carry in the game, she's been the worst one for a full on season, and Riot has no idea how to make things more fair for her (anyone remember when they tried letting Zap crit?). She's the worst at nearly anything she has in her kit in comparison to someone else, which is the usual "generalist" problem.

The worst part is that it's hard to just buff her back up. If you try to buff some of those things that got removed, like...say...her mini-gun nerf, it'll just make her strong enough in the early game to forgo her intended weaknesses as a hyper-carry (being bad early on). Jinx has a lot of different elements at one time. Other hyper-carries sort of miss out on a thing or another. Twitch has his stealth-n-pepper thing with his high ranges during ult and AS steroid out of stealth, but he doesn't have strong long-range options outside of ulting (he can throw a jar at you). Cait has strong sieging and long-range options, but she has no attack speed steroids. Trist has attack speed at ridiculous amounts and self-peel, but once again can't do much when it comes to throwing long range poke and junk. Jinx has long-range poke, a global execute ult, attack speed steroids (she has two...two shitty ones but two none-the-less), a movement speed buff, hard cc, an attack range mod, and splash damage...on one champ. If she's buffed in any aspect to be truly good at something, she then starts to overshadow a bunch of other champs, like Janna or Lulu do literally all the time in pro play.

When I play adc, I like playing Jinx. I like her personality and I like how she feels to control. However, I've let the dust on Riot's decisions settle for a hot minute now, and I think it's time to call it: Jinx needs a rework if she's going to be in a truly appreciable spot, balance-wise. Yeah, it's preseason right now, but this is a post I wanted to make for a good bit of season 7, too. Jinx just isn't much of a thing most of the time, which sucks since she's one of the coolest marksmen in the game along with guys like Jhin.