Shouldn't Champs with only a Primary Role be stronger than champs who have 2 roles?

ExecutorDill·Feb 22, 2016·3 votes·465 views

Example is Primary Role: Mage, Secondary role: NA. So shouldn't he be stronger at his job than mages who have Support or Assasin as a secondary role?

Mage Supports generally come with a lot of team utility and CC Mage/Assasins should have a lot of pick potential and single target burst Mage Marksmen want to Kite from the backline with magic damage and have some CC And finally Mage/Tanks have a lot of Survivability and AoE Magic Damage.

So what are mages with no secondary role suppose to do better than their counterparts? What is their defining strengths over subclass mages and what defining strength do the sublclass mages have over them?

I just used Mages as an example but this goes for all classes?

4 Comments

StratFeb 22, 20161 votes

First I just want to clarify that the role shown by Riot is firstly not entirely accurate and secondly isn't meant to strictly correlate to in-game lane positions. Riot doesn't balance around these roles (which is why personally I think they should just get rid of them to avoid confusion) but rather they balance around how players use the champions in-game.

As such, it's kinda pointless to define how a Riot-defined mage should perform differently to a Riot-defined mage/support.

So really, it comes down to the specific champions you're talking about:

: One of the best poking mages in the game, high burst damage combo, strong AoE damage especially in the jungle away from minions TwistedFate : Map control. Can win games in the early game by virtue of his ult ganks, can split push late game with his wave clear and ult for escaping Ryze : If I were Rito, I'd have defined him as as mage/tank, seeing as his strength is generally that he can output high amounts of damage while being tanky. There are glass cannon Ryze builds but they're bad. Karthus : His ult achieves similar early game pressure to TF (not quite as good) and his death passive means he can zone the enemy team really well in team fights (Zhonyas first, then death passive means he can control an area for about 10-15 seconds)

SachabotFeb 22, 20161 votes

Well, the mage class was probably a bad choice compared to the updated classes, because there's currently not a whole lot of differences between the constituent members.

Let's look at Marksmen instead, because they best illustrate what Riot wants out of a "class."

Really, a class is really just a mechanical subset of champions, that is, all members of a class share the same basic mechanical function. It doesn't denote anything other than this. "Marksmen" deal significant physical damage from range. Within this ideal, we have Caitlyn, who emphasizes long range and point control when set up; Quinn, who uses high mobility to bring a strong splitpush game; Graves with his high burst via abilities; Corki, another caster who deals a lot of magic damage as well, etc. They're all pretty different in how you play them, but at the core, they function the same way. You dont't pick the objective strongest (unless it's Kog, always pick Kog right now) because they're too different, instead you pick the one that fits the situation best.

That's the end goal of all of these class and champion reworks: To make each champion feel markedly different from one another while being similar enough that you can pick up and play and have some idea of what to do based on the class. Obviously we're a long way from that, but I hope to see it relatively soon.

So, I guess the answer is: Not particularly, it just tells you a bit of what they play like.