The problem with Marksmen

There are many perspectives on ADCs and many people arguing about ADCs.

I’m going to attempt to look at what I think makes ADCs (crit marksmen in particular) annoying.

But first, what is Riots philosophy on this? Riot has said that nerfing something is not based on winrate alone, rather that it is based off of “How annoying is this to play against”. Riot said they will still nerf a poor winrate champion if it is unfun to play against, but more specifically they said they strive to “fix the annoying parts of the kit”. One of the ways they said they can do this is by reworking the champions abilities.

Assasins in league have insane early game (especially level 6) and have insane one shot potential. However assasins damage falls of greatly late game and once the enemy starts grouping assasins have a really hard time picking off someone without getting targeted.

The counterplay to assasins is to ensure they don’t snowball or hold the game out late and group to counter assasins

Likewise many mages have one shot potential just like assasins, however their one shot plays differently

Let’s look at velkoz, I am most experienced on him. Velkoz is a mage who is very susceptible to 2 things

• Ganks
• Early all ins

If velkoz is forced to burn flash early he needs to play EXTREMELY safe or have good vision control or he will die from a gank.

Once we get to the mid game and on velkoz can one shot any squishy champion with ease with one full combo of SKILLSHOTS The key word here is skillshots, velkoz has to hit his abilities in order to oneshot, this can be very difficult to get to the back line and one shot the squishies without being in a bad position susceptible to being targeted. Velkoz instead needs to rely on the enemy to initiate or misstep and play around the enemies. It’s inportant to note that when velkoz uses his combo he has a few second opening where he can not do anything, he is weak.

Now let’s look at our beloved marksmen, marksmen are meant to be weak early game and scale into their damage late game. Some marksmen like Kalista will excel at a different time in the game than a vayne would excel.

Marksmen are meant to do high sustained damage whittling down the enemy constantly unless dealt with. The problem with their “sustained” damage is that to make their damage match a champion like velkoz they need to have very high damage numbers. It is the worst feeling playing a squishy mage and having a twitch ult runaans auto do over 1000 damage. Late game or not this is a very annoying to play against thing. This leaves marksmen in a place where they are either strong or nerfed so hard they are garbage.

This brings us to riots idea of getting rid of “unfun to play against” things. However I feel they nerfed marksmen in the completely wrong way. Let’s go back to my velkoz example, velkoz has a time window where he is unable to deal damage or defend himself, and this is when you can strike, by playing around his cooldowns or simply dodging his abilities. Marksmen do most their damage from auto attacks, which are undodgabld and have NO time window where they are weak. Some ADCs do have a escape ability or mobility ability, like Ezreal, Tristana and Sivir.

While you can play around velkoz by dodging his skillshots, or act around his cooldowns you can not dodge a marksmens auto attacks or play around their cooldowns since their abilities is not their damage. But how do we fix this?

I think I have an idea that’s decent enough to atleast be the spark of the conversation to a solution. I think the focus should be on shifting some of marksmen auto damage to instead damage on their abilities. This would allow counterplay by playing around the ADCs abilities.

We have to be careful not to take away marksmens identity of being sustained combat DPS, and to do this let’s look at vayne. Every few autos vayne does a burst of damage, I like this mechanic it awards her for getting risky and diving in to get multiple autos to proc this ability. If they were to shift her auto damage into more damage for her W that would be a rewarding play style which is less toxic to play against. It gives that mage an oppurtunity to not get one shot by one auto and instead requires the ADC to use SUSTAINED combat to get their damage off.

ADCs should be scary monsters late game, the undisputed king only matched by a few mages, just in a way that allows fair counter play.

Were ADCs overnerfed? Of course. The focus should not be on constant nerfs and buffs to this class but rather reworking the concept of the class to keep it threatening but with oppurtunities to exploit and punish