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Riot's introducing counterplay for all of the classes...where's the counterplay for ADCs?

WoonStruck··3 votes·492 views

They are still a "Instantly kill or stay out of range or else you're fucked" class. Does that 'counterplay' sound familiar at all? Like something Riot's been removing from another class?

2 Comments

ProfDrDeath1 votes
  • First of, ADCs are not instantly killing you in the early to mid stages of the game, except when you have fed them to reach lategame status (3+ items + boots, which is about 10k gold) by 15-20 min. ADCs that can consistently blow you up in the mid game on even footing are abuse cases and usually fairly quick to be targeted with nerfs. See Vayne.
  • Second, their damage is there for a reason - they are the class that is designed to be able to kill tanks and other highly tanky targets with superhigh DPS. This design intention comes with its own drawbacks. For instance, the superhigh damage can only be reached by devoting your entirely build towards damage, leaving you vulnerable to damage yourself (which is why ADCs are almost universally ranged). Lifesteal mitigates this somewhat, but its dependency on doing damage still leaves you as an ADC vulnerable to burst damage and/or things that prevent you from doing damage.
  • If you are inside a properly positioned ADC's death radius in the late game, you should be equipped to tank their damage for a bit. If you're a squishy inside that ADC's damage radius, you are either playing a high risk/high reward melee champion (aka an assassin bound to kill the ADC or be killed yoursel), a rather low-priority target like a support or you are the team's mage or ADC and you screwed up royally.
  • Riot explicitly toned down ADC's anti-squishy damage when they changed the way Last Whisper and its upgrades work in season 6. Before, the explicit anti-tank item worked equally well as an decrease in time-to-kill against squishy targets. Problem at the same time was that Riot also introduced Serrated Dirk and its upgrades and improved Youmuu's as a standalone item, which led to the ArPen ADCs in the later parts of S6.
WoonStruck1 votes

  • Nobody said they're instantly killing anyone early-mid. Their relatively strong early-mid is too good considering their late game.

  • ADCs fulfilled their function just fine when they went 2 defensive items sometimes back in seasons 1 and 2. They'd get defensive items as early as 3rd item in relatively common scenarios.

  • They are not designed to kill tanks. That's a bullshit excuse that Riot started using around season 3; it used to be true that only ADCs could kill tanks back when tanks would have over 200 hp/5 (or even ~180 on champs like Irelia) and 200-400 of each resist, but after they removed regen, essentially, its been a false claim people have been making for ages. They were never designed to do so, they just did. Tanks used to be the last ones alive universally to the point where a lot of their tankiness/regen didn't matter; you played around their engage/lockdown and then left them to uselessly waddle around until everyone else was dead. If you didn't fight properly, the fight would last long enough for a second round of abilities from the tanks, which was often a turning point. On top of that, ADC damage this season is higher than its ever been in the past, and they reach that damage much sooner, on top of being stronger early-mid. You saying ADCs are designed to kill tanks is like saying any champion with high DPS was designed to kill tanks.

  • Lifesteal is too strong this season due to Warlord's. This turns many of these 'high risk/high reward melee champions' into 'high risk/low reward melee champions'. That's if the ADC doesn't already kill them during their 'window of counterplay' that's recently been introduced.

  • Last Whisper changes were targeted at assassins more than ADCs.

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