I think that mixing sustained damage with burst damage isn't a good approach to champion design.

Pool Party Nasus·11/3/2015, 12:08:42 PM·8 votes·853 views

I've analyzed the different popular competitive picks or often complained champions and I realized that most of them offer flexibility in the way they inflict damage :

  • Gangplank : He's probably the biggest offender. High-damaging barrels which ignore armor for heavy burst damage, and sustained damage in the form of auto-attack, passive and ultimate.

  • Fiora : She offers a lot of flexibility. Her cooldowns are really low, especially on Q. Her passive offers nice true damage bursts, and her ultimate allow her to burst down someone with a huge part of their Hp as % true damage.

  • Mordekaiser : His play pattern is now focused on getting the 3 Q procs, which offers him nice sustained and burst damage.

  • Riven : Her very low cooldowns allow here to burst down squishies while still being a tank buster thanks to a lot fo armor penetration and AD steroids

  • Vayne : Well. Silver bolts offer huge chunk of damage. Even though this isn't really burst damage, it's pretty close.

  • Diana : Also one of the biggest offender. She can blows squishies with her combo, but thanks to her passive and build path, she's really effective against tanks.

  • Garen : His burst is conditional, but still available. His sustained damage apply mostly to the villain.

  • Darius : His bleed, low Q cooldown and free armor pen lets him do nice sustained damage. His ultimate is definitely the definition of burst.

  • Azir : Same as Diana, being auto-attack based allows him to be extremly effective in both damage types.

I think that, with the juggernaut era, being able to damage both tanks and squishies is a key to being viable. Everybody always complain about mobility, but I believe that this mix of damage types is a real power creep that needs to be adressed.

6 Comments

MLDzXnRRR11/3/2015, 12:57:50 PM2 votes

Fiora has crap DPS. Try to solo Baron and you will see. Crit and AS Fiora is wasting her kit. Riven is similar to her - crap DPS, but you can spam abilities with enough CDR, so it doesn't matter.

All AD champions have good sustained dmg and burst, if there are any AD ratios, if you buy AD. Old champions were scaling their abilities mostly with AP ...

Meserion11/3/2015, 3:43:09 PM2 votes

burst damage + sustained cough ADCs cough, yeah Riot didn't get the memo...

Hayaishi211/3/2015, 5:22:13 PM2 votes

Crits give adc sustained burst lol

Espy Psyche11/3/2015, 1:38:27 PM1 votes

Diana needs Sated Devourer and Nashor's Tooth to do any sustained damage, and needs AP to do any burst. She also needs defense to not instantly die because she has to dive fights to do any of her damage.

So if she could build eight items, she would be ridiculous. But she can only build six, and one of them is boots.

Captain Aishi11/3/2015, 3:12:54 PM1 votes

vayne's W is her DPS, her R+Q+E combo is her burst