Marksmen are weak because supports tax XP - which has an easy fix
Bot laners everywhere seem to be pretty pissed at the current state of the game. Most roles have had a meta where they’ve been weak – melee supports in season 6 worlds meta, assassins in the Cinderhulk era, or tank top laners in the season 5 worlds meta – but there’s no other role played bot in the current meta game. You can’t just put a tank in bottom lane because ranged ADs are weak. Marksmen are a crucial part of the meta, you can have a team without a tank top laner, but you can’t have a team without a marksmen. Barring drastic meta changes like Ziggs or Mordekaiser substituting for ranged ADs, marksmen will always retain the same fundamentally problematic play patterns.
A Single Bad Choice
The main problem with marksmen has nothing to do with their current balance state, but is rather an artifact of their role/lane entanglement in the current and previous metas. Marksmen have few strategic options.
Other lanes have multiple options on how to play the early and mid game than bottom lane marksmen. Note that I’m only talking about marksmen in the bottom lane, Quinn top didn’t suffer the same problems and neither did Graves or Kindred jungle. Bot lane is reserved for a scaling damage carry and their human (or yordle) shield. You can conceivably trade out a physical damage carry for a Mordekaiser or a Ziggs, but that has a lot of consequences for balance state and the overall metagame. If players seriously start playing Ziggs in place of a ranged AD, what stops the opposing bot lane to play an AP-based Ziggs-specific counter?
Top laners can take teleport and make all sorts of plays, junglers walk the entire map, mid laners can roam, and even the lowly supports can leave lane and piss off the opposing mid laner. Meanwhile you’re stuck farming creeps in the bot lane because you have to get that sweet gold coin. After all, that Infinity Edge (or equivalent core item) won’t buy itself.
Since marksmen are dependent on items, more so than any other class, you really can’t leave those minions to die to tower. If marksmen roam, you better get back to lane quickly or else you’ve delayed your core build. This is a problem for all classes, but it’s the most pronounced for marksmen. On top of this, only a handful of marksmen have meaningful roams – notably Ashe and Jhin – because they don’t have to walk far (if at all) to impact another lane with their ultimates.
Marksmen don’t have a lot of options. If you only have a single choice and it’s a bad one, the game becomes significantly less fun. There’s no easy solution to the rigidity of the marksmen role, so I’d call this more a feature of League of Legends than I’d call it a problem.
Support Tax is too Expensive
It doesn’t help that the most gold-dependent role is taxed that hardest. In the current meta marksmen sit bottom lane with a support that taxes their experience. It’s not uncommon for marksmen to be level 12 while a mid laner is level 14, which is a huge power discrepancy.
If each level gives you about 500 gold worth of stats, then you’re down 1,000 gold by mid game just because you have to pay your babysitter.
Since there’s no way of giving marksmen more meaningful options without significantly changing the current meta, the easiest way to give marksmen more standard gameplay is to lower or end the support tax.
Ending Support Tax
The support items (ancient coin, relic shield, and spelltheif’s edge) are more or less bought only by support players. My suggestion is to completely remove XP taxing on champions holding a support item – this way your team’s marksmen will be level 14 at the same time your mid laner is. The support would still receive the shared XP from nearby minions dying, but the other champion would still get all of the XP. This artificially creates experience for champions holding a support item.
If anyone remembers when these items were first released, you’ll also remember that players were opting to duo top instead of jungling, which was an unintended and hilarious side effect of introducing relic shield into the game. Given the current strength of the jungle “lane” and the item specialization required to jungle, I wouldn’t expect a repeat of the duo top lane fiasco.
It also has almost no effect on the occasional mid laner taking spellthief’s edge outside of not taxing the crimson raptor jungle camp by standing too close while their jungler takes it. Either way, that scenario is so minimally disruptive it barely impacts the game.
References
- Reddit post on gold gain per level: https://redd.it/27i9yv
