Miss Fortune, Set Up to Fail?
Hello boards, I don’t post often, but when I do it’s almost always about my favorite champion, Miss Fortune. I’ve mained her since season 3 when I tried her on a free week and a high school friend gifted her to me because I enjoyed playing her so much. Today, I want to address the ways in which I feel that Miss Sarah Fortune has been set up to fail in game, although I am beginning to also ask that question about her lore and involvement in the story. I am only addressing the problems I find for Miss Fortune herself in comparison to her previous iterations and the other marksmen, because most of these problems have persisted through many metas, and to consider the meta as a whole is too big of an undertaking to address the faults of only one champion.
Disclaimer: When I say “Marksmen”, “All Marksmen”, or anything akin, I am excluding Teemo and other champions who while categorized as marksmen do not fulfill the role that is now called Bottom but was once called ADC
To begin, let’s look at who this champion is. Miss Fortune is designed to be strong in the early game, create a lead, and snowball it into a victory before her opponents can outscale her, while behaving more as a caster than a true marksman. This is all well and good, a fine concept to design around, but the execution has fallen flat since her rework in season 5, and even before it. A great number of the problems from before her rework remained after it, and new problems were created. Most notably, since that rework, she has the lowest base AD of all marksmen (54), and the least AD growth (+1/level). The latter, I am not as concerned with, as it works into the concept of being outscaled if the game drags out past her prime. The former, however, is in direct conflict to her concept, robbing her of a chance to have that early game strength. The next lowest base AD and growth combo for any marksman is Jinx, with a base AD of 61 and a growth of (rounded) +3/level, on a champion meant to scale into the late game, starting out with 7 more AD than the intended early game powerhouse.
Passive Love Tap- A simple enough idea, Miss Fortune deals some bonus damage each time she auto attacks a new target. It looks good on the surface, but given some thought it goes against the purpose of the marksman, to cut down enemies with auto attacks and physical damage in a timely manner. As long as you have two or more shots in a row against the same target, current Miss Fortune will always do less damage than her pre-rework self, with the drop off only becoming more severe the longer trades go on. Constantly having to switch targets, or being hamstrung when only facing one opponent, is crippling to Miss Fortune’s ability to satisfy the purpose of her role, being unable to focus threats down faster than they can focus her at any phase of the game, even the beginning in which she is meant to be more powerful. It is also my, and many other Miss Fortune players’ belief, that the bonus damage for triggering Love Tap was the justification used to give her the lowest base AD of all the marksmen.
Q Double Up- This is my favorite ability bar none in the game. When used properly, a powerful and satisfying tool to create pressure on lane opponents or pierce the enemy’s dangerous frontline to get at the squishies behind them without too heavily endangering oneself. That said, it is incredibly frustrating to utilize properly, even with the behaviour to ‘prefer’ targets directly behind the original when bouncing, it’s puzzling or downright improbable to predict where a bounced Q will go unless you shoot at the furthest back caster minion in the enemy line. Even after many attempts to test in matchmade games and the practice tool, it is still incredibly unclear whether “behind” is relative to the spot from which Double Up was originally fired, or where Miss Fortune is standing when it hits its target. This ability was (and still is) incredibly useful as an auto attack reset, effectively enabling a skilled user to auto-Q-auto for a near-instant triple tap, but that falls back into the problems mentioned in the Love Tap section about focusing a single enemy.
W Strut/Guns Blazing- Strut was Miss Fortune’s old passive, rescued and made into a sub-passive on her W, alongside the active Guns Blazing. The former, a movement speed buff if Miss Fortune can avoid taking damage for enough time, the latter, an attack speed steroid that reactivates Strut at its maximum automatically, but also reduces its own cooldown per each activation of Love Tap. My pet peeve with Strut, back when it was her true passive and even now as a force-activatable sub-passive, is that it is completely removed by any form of damage. From the lowliest level 1 caster minion shot gone astray, to the most deliberate attack by a fed enemy assassin, Miss Fortune is suddenly robbed of a minimum of 25 movement speed, and if it was fully enabled, 100 movement speed. Guns Blazing, as an attack speed steroid, and it’s cooldown reducing mechanic, only further exemplify the problems of Love Tap when used for anything more than clearing a minion wave. I often find myself nostalgic for the days of Impure Shots, Miss Fortune’s old W, which served as an attack speed steroid, but rather than reactivating Strut to its maximum, applied grievous wounds when activated and always applied a passive bonus of stacking magic damage on each autoattack (and in later iterations, each wave of Bullet Time.)
E Make it Rain- A fun, if odd, ability, dealing magic damage and slowing any enemy within its radius, as well as granting vision. Make it Rain is usually the least notable part of Miss Fortune’s kit, given that she doesn’t build AP, so it does not keep up with her other powers. However, it was particularly useful for applying Thunderlord’s Decree when it was overpowered, and was nerfed on its own to lose a significant portion of its base damage sometime before the mastery itself was brought into line. A similar scenario has followed with Arcane Comet, the skill itself having a significant lengthening on its cooldown awhile before the rune was nerfed into relative fairness. The skill, while not usually important to Miss Fortune’s overall gameplay, has been gutted twice over outside issues, and when those other issues were repaired, no compensation was given back to the ability or any other part of Miss Fortune’s kit.
R Bullet Time- A risky and powerful ability, forcing Miss Fortune to stand still and expel death in a cone in one direction, amazing to use well, disastrously wasteful if mistimed. My major qualm with this ability is that it can be interrupted/cancelled and put onto full cooldown without firing a single wave.
Itemisation- Despite the bonuses to critical damage and chance that synergize with her kit, namely the ability of bullet time to crit and double up being guaranteed to crit if the first shot kills its target (as well as having increased cast range when Rapid Firecannon is energized,) the inefficacy of auto attacking enemies has turned Miss Fortune away from building critical chance and strikes, and she instead itemizes on lethality and armor penetration, giving her similar builds to some of her most fearsome enemies (AD Assassins and Juggernauts). She also benefits from the cooldown reduction that often comes packaged with lethality and the significant portion provided by The Black Cleaver, which also synergizes very well with her ultimate. Despite this, Miss Fortune’s recommended items are almost entirely built on her crit path.
Solutions- I won’t claim any expertise in game design, and I’m sure many of my ideas for tuning the game in general would be more disastrous than the hyperboles often spun by critics of the game’s balance. Some changes I believe would help Miss Fortune to fill her niche properly would be an increase to her base AD so she is no longer the lowest (or at least not so far below) of the marksmen in that category, or even near the bottom of the barrel, while keeping her growth low to enable her opponents to outscale her if they survive her initial power (compounding with the large disparity of AD between her and their final builds), in opposition to the current changes on the PBE that increase her growth to +2 AD/level, and perhaps at the cost of reducing the bonus provided by Love Tap. Addressing my long-standing pet peeve, I do believe Strut should have the same exemptions from lane minion damage as Garen’s Perseverance, forcing her opponents to actually hit back or aggro a jungle monster to her if they wish to relent her pursuit or foil her escape.
