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Assassin Change Ideation

PandaNator43·3/23/2018, 3:18:15 PM·1 votes·366 views

Hi folks, looking to do some ideation on how to make assassins a more viable pick, let me know what your thoughts are:

1 ) New assassin item that grants bonus damage to shields, tied to assasins by lethality and magic pen scalings.

We’ve talked in circles about how the reliability/strength/abundance of shielding shuts down assassins. Looking to to give assassins a release valve in those situations without taking too much agency from enchanters. New Item: shield popper 40 AD Unique passive: grants 5% (plus 2% per 10 lethality, plus 2% per 10 magic pen) bonus damage to shields.

Initial thoughts: Its important to prevent non-assassins from abusing the bonus-to-shields damage: I try to do this by scaling the passive strength with lethality and magic pen. Anyone else have a good idea on how to do this? Perhaps with this item, compensatory buffs could be put on enchanters to make stronger against sources of damage other than assassins, is that a good change???

*With the Irelia release it looks like Riot might be happy to put a shield popper mechanic on specific champions, which makes it a bit easier…, and kind of invalidates “shield popper” as an item… but until they actually do that let’s go ahead and theorycraft :)

2 ) Another well discussed paradigm is how assassins are shut down by CC.

How should assassins deal with protector champions (Braum, Leona, Maokai, Poppy etc.)? How much power should assassins have in mitigating/avoiding CC before they start to invalidate the kit of the protector champions?

I struggle to think of how assassins should deal with CC champs head on… Perhaps they shouldn’t be able to at all. So I thought I’d give assassins a meta-game response to an enemy team stacked with CC. The idea is to give assassins ways to contribute to win conditions other than just kill the enemy squishies.

New Domination keystone rune: Saboteur - hit and run split pushing strategy for champs building lethality or magic pen.

Less sure on how to execute this one, here’s a couple ideas, it could be any or a combination of them:

A ) Bonus chunk of damage to Towers, but scales with AD+lethality or AP+magic.This could be as simple as Demolish but scaling with different stats.

A2) Similar to above, perhaps a tower can be marked by basic attacking it, and after x seconds it will explode. Perhaps the Damage could also scale off how many minions die under the tower? So mark a tower to start it “charging” -> farm the enemy minions underneath it -> run away-> let the turret kill all your own minions, then it explodes for x (plus x per lethality, plus x per magic pen, plus x per nearby minion death while charging)

B ) after killing a tower gain a decaying burst of movespeed scaling with AD+lethality or AP+magic pen

C ) after killing an enemy monster camp gain a decaying burst of movespeed scaling with AD+lethality or AP+magic pen and/or the sweeper affect for x seconds

Initial thoughts: These ideas are a lot less concrete, but I think any of them would help an assassin address enemy team comps with a lot of protection for their squishies.

What do you all think? I’d love to hear your ideas on how to make assassins a more viable pick.

TLDR:

1 ) New assassin item that grants bonus damage to shields, tied to assasins by lethality and magic pen scalings.

2 ) New Domination keystone rune: Saboteur - hit and run split pushing strategy for champs building lethality or magic pen.

3 ) I want to hear your feedback and any other ideas you all have to make assassins a more viable pick!

11 Comments

Karn Bishop3/23/2018, 4:47:56 PM2 votes

This is not a problem you can solve from the assassins end, its a problem you need to solve from the adc + support end of things.

My Hands3/23/2018, 8:21:27 PM2 votes

Well I'd like to point out riot is reworking Irelia to be a counter the the adc and shield problem. Her kit does built in extra damage to shields and she can stop adcs from basic attacking with her ult.

VoraciousX3/23/2018, 8:57:20 PM1 votes

There's only one main solution I think needs to be done, and that's heal and shield power items need to be removed from the game. As far as I can tell they're completely unhealthy in that they provide enchanter supports health, MR, etc making them tankier, while also increasing their heals and shields by so much(even more than if they just built flat out AP) that they no longer even need to be squishy. Enchanter supports should be incentivized to build AP for their shields. They even have limitless mana and 40% CDR with all heal+shield power items. I've even done it with Karma before in solo lanes. It's completely stupid. They either need to remove the items completely, only remove the heal+shield power mechanic so they're extremely niche, or rework them to have no health, less mana regen, and less CDR and give them other stats. But I 100% think that heal and shield power stats should not have a place in League when they already have a stat that enhances heals and shields, and that's AP.

Look at all enchanter support builds right now. If you notice you'll see they're building tanky with heal+shield power items. So now they're hard to kill, their ADC is hard to kill, and there's no real way to counteract them. It used to be to make them burn their spells on themselves and then turn on the ADC, but that doesn't work anymore because they're tanky. You have to basically have enough damage to burn through their shields AND their health in order to deal with them, and that requires so much damage that it's a little stupid.