Assassins will need to have their design changed if they are wanted in LCS

Elohaven·Apr 24, 2018·10 votes·5,760 views

Assassins are an opportunistic class and LCS is made of players who minimize their mistakes or opportunities to catch them out.

Jarvan is a better assassin than Talon because he can engage and delete the enemy ADC while being relatively tanky. Key word - engage. Assassins need more engage opportunities to be able to catch ADCs and catch them before peel comes in or get more opportunities in fights which is hard to create as teamfights are a point LCS excels at.

The thing is, assassins are designed more for SoloQ where people are uncoordinated and more mistakes can be found. LCS is not such an environment and with the current assassin design philosophy, "catching out someone" wouldn't work out. And it'd also be unhealthy for an assassin to have a burst and escape instantly mechanic which complicates the issue of getting them more active in LCS.

5 Comments

Teridax68Apr 25, 20184 votes

Personally, I feel "opportunism" in assassins has mostly ended up translating to waiting until an enemy separates from their team -- which, I agree, is precisely what pushes them out of organized play, as they don't function at all when teams stay grouped. However, I think the larger problem is that League's meta overall has reduced itself to just grouping up nonstop past a certain point in the game -- splitpushing isn't an effective strategy, because Riot has actively balanced it out of competitive play, and generally the only way to respond to numbers is with equal numbers, and ideally equal power, since that's what steamrolls objectives. Ideally, League's late-game should allow for splitpushing in a healthy way, because that would allow assassins to thrive by picking those opportunities and hunting down splitpushers.

Beyond that, though, the problem with assassins in competitive play is that they simply get hard-countered by defense: in Seasons 3, 4, and 5, for example, assassins frequently dominated the competitive scene, not just because the framework for opportunism had changed, but because marksmen had far fewer overall defenses, even in the middle of their own team. This allowed assassins like Zed, LeBlanc, Fizz, Ahri, etc. to make picks even against grouped-up teams, because their attack really boiled down to a duel against their target. Nowadays, those kinds of plays are no longer possible when assassins have more delayed damage, and even a second of forewarning is already enough for the marksman to receive immense amounts of healing, shielding, damage reduction, various unique types of protection from certain wardens, as well as crowd control from their support and tank. Defense is far too easy to apply relative to offense, and it is this imbalance that has pushed assassins out of pro play as well.

Just to be clear, I think it's healthy for assassins to spend more time killing their targets, assuming it's done in a manner that doesn't feel forced (LeBlanc's reworked passive was infamous for this), and in a perfect environment, assassins should be giving their opponent more time to react and still have a chance of succeeding. It is the state of defense in the game that is problematic, especially when applied to marksmen, and it's combined particularly poorly with the assassin reworks to drive the class out of competitive viability (but nowhere else, since other divisions give more opportunities to assassins). If Riot were to address this problem, namely by making protection less abundant and less reliable overall, it would give assassins plenty more room to maneuver even at the highest levels of play, as they wouldn't have to kill a target that is currently guaranteed the full protection of their whole team every high-level, organized game.

plantersApr 25, 20182 votes

I agree more with your first point than the second. If you think about it, right now, tanks are a safe way to effectively win lane and then game in competitive because they outscale fighters in 5v5 teamfights and fighters cant effectively fight them in early to mid game meaning more teams want to run a tank than a fighter. With the fact that current tank design typically has 3-4 cc in their kits there is no way an assassin will be useful. They will literally walk in, get CC'd and die. Doublepoints if the ADC is an ez with , anyone with or the support can put down a 1k shield and then to shut down any attempts at damaging them.

Edited to clarify my points

IfnethApr 25, 20181 votes

A professional league of legends player can be expected to react within a third of a second—slightly less than the average peak of human performance—to everything happening in a teamfight. Therefore, an assassin viable in an LCS teamfight would have to approach the enemy team, dive the backline, kill the ADC, and escape within 0.3 seconds. This does not sound like fun, fair, or interactive gameplay at any level of fed-ness or competition.

Teridax68Apr 25, 20181 votes

Reacting to something, and countering it entirely, are two completely different things. Ideally, anyone should be able to react assassins, even pros, but assassins should still be able to outplay them. In this particular case, reacting over the course of 0.3 seconds, or even one second, should not translate to piling up so much protection and peel on the marksman that the assassin can no longer do their job. If it always takes the offense longer to act than it does for the defense to react at full power, then League as a whole becomes too defensive a game, as is already the case in pro play. This is why I think the solution here should be to tone down the sheer amount of marksman-oriented defenses in League, rather than to have assassins kill people in under 0.3 seconds.