Potential Return of Kill Lanes

With the upcoming changes to ADC itemization I think there decent potential for kill lanes to become viable again. Currently with the way ADCs are kill lanes have pretty much 0 potential.

What are kill lanes

Kill lanes are lanes with hard engage/lock down and enough damage to follow up and hopefully kill the adc/support or at the very least shove them out of lane denying them farm. Some examples of strong kill lanes from previous seasons include / /
The whole goal of kill lanes is too shut down the ADC while they are their weakest point in the game before they even have the opportunity to scale up and become the late game threat they were always meant to be.

So why aren't kill lanes viable right now?

1. Duo lanes have to share exp (and in some instances farm) so relative to their solo lane counter parts they aren't scaling as fast or hitting their level related power spikes as early. Without the scaling of an ADC they are inherently behind the mid laner and top laner. This makes kill lanes too inconsistent to be an actual counter to an adc + support.

2. Support items are much stronger for ADCS than kill lanes or mages. Ardent Censor for example is pretty much worthless for Pantheon or Rengar compared to what it can accomplished on ranged carries like Kog'maw or Varus because of the attack speed synergy. Other support items like and can lock out kill lanes from securing kills with power damage reduction and healing further suppressing kill lanes

3. ADCs have consistent early power spikes that allow them still be reliable even if they fall behind. plus any item makes for a decent amount of damage because of the extremely powerful synergy of Attack Damage, Critical Chance, Critical Damage and Attack Speed. These 2 items contain mostly everything an ADC needs to be successful.

4. Kill lanes are lackluster at objective control compared to ADCs. ADCs have consistent damage they can apply safely from afar so they can take dragon or turrets faster while taking less damage while lowering the risk to take damage or get poked down by enemies. Bot lane is also the only lane in the game to not have early turret protection which means if a kill lane gets pushed out of lane they have a very high chance of losing their turret early. This inherently pushes kill lanes into a high risk low reward situation compared to ADCs which are low risk and very high reward.

Compared to standard meta bot lanes kill lanes are too inconsistent and high risk to be viable. Supports have high utility from support items, especially in the vision starved environment League of Legends is currently in. Kill lanes like Pantheon or Xin Zhao can't opt into support items. If they were to spring for a warding/gold income item they would lose a lot of kill potential making them useless and getting out scaled by a standard ADC + support OR they would get the ward too late forfeiting all objective control leading to much easier dragons and invades from the enemy champions.

So why do the ADC itemization changes make kill lanes viable?

ADC power spikes come in later thanks to the changes to and items. Infinity Edge no longer grants critical strike chance by itself ( instead doubling your critical strike chance) and both Infinity Edge and Zeal items are more expensive. This makes Infinity Edge less powerful as a rush item ontop of the fact that it is also being changed to deal less damage to squishy targets and more damage to tanks. Meaning that even the 2 item power spike which comes later they won't be able to output the same damage to a kill lane like Xin Zhao plus Rengar.

Another big change to ADC items will make kill lanes more effective is the change to last whisper items making the armor penetration% affect ALL armor a target has instead of just the bonus armor. this makes the item more effective against ADCs who typically don't build armor and a lot of ADCs are also getting base armor reduction which gives flat armor penetration and percent armor penetration a strong synergy further boosting a kill lanes potential to shut down ADCs and other squishies in fights.

TL:DR ADC itemization changes will push back their power spikes leaving far more room for kill lanes to shut them down while also increasing kill lanes damage potential through armor penetration synergy.

This is my first post on the league of legends board and I'm really nervous to see what you guys have to say (or if you guys will even see this at all) but I'm looking forward to reading all of the feedback you guys have for me and any discussions that can come from this post. This is the 3rd time I am writing because I've accidentally closed out of everything and the post really suffered from it because I didn't have the energy to redo everything but regardless I wanted to get this post out and see what you guys have to say about the potential for kill lanes to come back.

If you haven't seen Riots post about the changes you can find them here and if you haven't seen the actual changes posted on the PBE you can find them here or you could wait for the patch coming out soon because none of these changes are 100% final.

I'm really excited for the new ADC itemization changes even if kill lanes don't make a comeback!