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Ranged top laners are problematic

Malza·8/21/2018, 10:12:53 PM·47 votes·46,074 views

Currently when we take a look at professional play and high elo, ranged top laners are shoving all but a select few top laners out from existence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/98bkvz/griffin_vs_afreeca_freecs_lck_2018_summer/

In the LCK summer playoffs with two of the best teams in the entire world, almost every top lane pick was ranged top laners, and non ranged tops couldn't manage to win a single game. Similarly if you look at recent NA LCS games ranged top laners are the clear favorite to pick.

Gangplank Gnar Jayce Rumble KennenRyze all are picked a lot in pro play and high elo, which pushes out all top laners besides the select few strongest bruisers and tanks such as Camille Irelia ChogathOrnn DrMundo.

You might say to yourself "But wait! Gangplank Rumble aren't ranged champions!" but the playstyles they tend to lead themselves towards makes it so they almost always poke with abilities and rarely auto attack you besides to finish you off in lane. For all intents and purposes they play exactly like the other ranged top laners and should be considered as such.

The rune changes in the most recent patch hasn't really done anything to solve this problem, as the main 'counterplay' to these ranged top laners is to all in these champions, which is now much harder to do. Ranged champions that used to take Aery can now take Electrocute as a replacement with the much lower CD and do just as much damage as they were previously. Other champions such as Gnar Gangplank RumbleRyze already had completely viable keystones which didn't get nerfed at all.

It is very frustrating as a high elo top laner player to constantly play vs these ranged tops where my only option is to give up CS and hope that I can be more useful than them later in the game. A couple of days ago I was playing versus a challenger Rumble top lane player, and I had to give him a 50 CS lead to avoid dying or falling massively behind on XP even though I was playing the matchup nearly perfectly.

https://i.imgur.com/rYmjKnt.png

Thankfully my patience was rewarded and after their team made a couple of mistakes topside we were able to handily turn the game around, but this isn't the way that league of legends should have to be played.

https://i.imgur.com/UbzcEtL.png

Top lane simply isn't fun to play when these champions are meta, and I'm far from the only top lane main complaining about this. Hashinshin and Minishcap1 definitely don't agree on Singed, but the one thing that unites many high elo top lane mains is their hatred of ranged top laners.

https://twitter.com/Minishcap1LoL/status/1030955967058534400

101 Comments

D357R0Y3R8/21/2018, 10:35:15 PM28 votes

I don't think a nerf is the right call

they should massively work on how ranged laners interact with melees in lane because else it's never going to be balanced

HateDaddy8/22/2018, 12:01:18 AM8 votes

Another huge problem is that ranged top laners tend to scale incredibly well into late game, too (with a few exceptions). It makes playing melee champions pointless because you know accepting that best case scenario is going even and being outscaled anyway.

Also, FM needs to be melee only. I don’t know why this item is still allowed to be so heavily abused by Gnar.

Jerry SeinfeId8/22/2018, 12:03:20 AM8 votes

I'll be as transparant as possible: based on mastery my top 5 champs that can go top and i take top are: Singed Teemo Gnar JaxKarthus

######So yes, i play ranged top and singed, you can all collectively hate me.

I also want to make it clear that while i'll be talking about sending them to other lanes i do think they should still be viable top. But i feel like if they'd go into other lanes more they'd relieve some stress from toplane.

grasp Gangplank is disgusting to lane against. I've only played ap trynd against it but it felt horrible.

Teemo Please stop beating him up, I'd love for him to go bot as much as you want him out of top. The problem is that teemo has a decent early game, but shit range compared to most marksmen. I'm personally capable of playing him bot as i play in silver and he's my 4th most played champ. But there's so much shit to deal with his shrooms now, lane poke is all he really has. The biggest problem i see with getting him to another lane is that buffing his range will only make his toplane stronger. I feel like anyone with sustain and a dorans shield simply beats him in lane though.

Rumble I'm not gonna say too much on him as i don't play him, rarely play against him and don't really have much of an issue with him. His poke is fairly easy to dodge. Ofcourse he's a bit harder to get into than most so i don't see him alot nvm a good one (he's one of my friends mains tho so mostly on allied team even) I really like him because he's one of the few real ap bruisers aside from singed in this game.

Kennen Stop promoting ad kennen, make ap more attractive, get him to mid. Pretty sure he'd be fine then.

Quinn She seems to be dropping in playrate/winrate this patch. I get the feeling like alot of her mains would love her as an adc, maybe we could look into that a bit more? I don't think she's a good toplaner unless she's overtuned.

Jayce With his range i never understood why he doesn't go mid, don't see him much either way. I do play a bunch of aram tho so fuck im.

That's just my opinion on those if it means anything, most of this is either from the singed or teemo matchup vs them.

Now there's 3 champs i still want to talk about, 2 of which you mentioned.

Gnar Ryze are proplay champs. Both of them are gutted because of it, clearly it's still not enough. Which brings me to the Proplay problem. LCS isn't soloque, you're masters so i'm sure you understand that better than me. Disable them. Take them out of LCS and balance them accordingly for the real playerbase. As much as you may hate him gnar is in a miserable state.

Now i wanna talk about the thing i hate most about this game:Vladimir I know he's not strong right now, but i genuinly feel like i have a chance against most other toplaners with singed or teemo. This dude just cancels anything i wanna do, doesn't die and poke/trading doesn't help either.

All i can propose is that Doran's shield gets a slight change. It does what it does right now with one change: _Melee only: Passive is increased against ranged attacks. _ I say increased because i don't think doubling it would be a good idea.

AirKingNeo8/21/2018, 10:49:09 PM7 votes

I'm a Kayle main, which makes it ironic, but I agree.

Kayle is mostly fine because she's very threatened by most top laners due to her half melee laning and not having a "fuck you melees" kit like Kennen, but other ranged tops like Gnar, Kennen, Jayce, GP (even though I typically play GP counters, Grasp GP is stupid) need to be fixed or gutted until they're fixed.

I don't see why they repeatedly push Gnar and Kennen back into the meta, and it's very fucking stupid that they allow completely boring, low interaction champions into the professional level of the game.

Electro5228/21/2018, 10:16:21 PM5 votes

Approved!

Clementine8/23/2018, 11:42:23 PM4 votes

If you consider Gangplank a "ranged" top laner, why don't you consider Pantheon a ranged top as well?

Oakleaf Ranger8/22/2018, 2:42:21 AM4 votes

GP is a fucking melee champion in name only.

His whole damn play style basically is just harassing from range until you are low enough to all in. It infuriates me that his Q doesn't receive the same ranged penalty that other ranged champions get when using certain items or effects.

KronosXVIIII8/22/2018, 9:31:58 AM4 votes

When I’m trying to cs in top and someone just clicks on me from behind their casters...few things filled me with such intense yet fleeting rage

Salson8/22/2018, 8:45:20 AM2 votes

Can we add Heimerdinger there. I know he's more of a low elo issue, due to having a more foolproof nature, but he's no less anoying to play against.

Sona Ping8/22/2018, 12:30:49 AM2 votes

There's another ranged top who is simply is not to play against. One with a longer range than the ranged champions you mentioned.

According to the standards of this this discussion, Singed is a ranged top laner. His play style lends himself to able to zone enemies from the wave with the threat of damage from his abilities, he can poke and zone with his abilities and damage at a range outside of his melee basic attack range, and does not need to autoattack besides to all-in and takedown an opponent. Unlike other ranged champions, when you all-in them to, as you put it, quote " 'counter-play' " them, Singed kiting when you try to engage him... well how does chasing Singed work, everyone? And again, unlike ranged champion who have to build some damage in order to be effective, so they are weaker when you try to interact with them, Singed can just build tank.

People may take a "ranged" champion like Rumble into Singed and the Singed may (and have) complained about that pick because taking him makes it a "ranged" vs. "ranged" matchup. It can give them some options to counter-play into the Singed instead of the reverse.

This why the subjective, emotional "fun to play against" does not work as a standard because people have fun winning. A lot of people want to just press their buttons and win, they don't want to play passive, they don't want to play the matchup, they don't want to be countered. They want to be the one who is countering, who forces the other guy to farm under tower. So it's not a surprise that there are tweets and rants to nerf ranged champs because a lot of those champs are the counterpick.

That's why you have to have holistic design around all the players, not around completely arbitrary standards of "MY fun" or personal opinions.about how it "should" be but instead around how the game functions, about how the matchups are actually supposed to be played.

ModCaliCoastReplay8/23/2018, 6:46:31 AM2 votes

Counterpoint:

As a ranged top lane player, here are some things that irk me about melee toplaners:

  • The way Renekton 's empowered stun combo takes off 1/2 of my health, mostly via a single point-and-click ability
  • The way Darius can generally kill me if he lands one hook past level 4 or so, no matter what point the game is at after that, or what development state either of our champions is in
  • The way I can't roam for even a few minutes versus a Nasus, even if the lane is strongly won, or he'll farm up 100 free stacks or more
  • The way Riven can gap-close and all-in without effort if even a single kill ahead
  • The way Yasuo can abuse his dash to stay out of the range of many champions' kits entirely

Of those, the only one I've ever actually questioned the game-healthiness of is Yasuo, and that only because I feel like his spammable dash causes many different champions to have a near-zero chance to land any potential abilities.

With the rest, I feel like the matchup is a known quantity - it is my job to do whatever it takes to stay out of range of these champions' gap-closers and combos, and if I do, I am rewarded with either a force-out that lets me get ahead (most of the time) or, more rarely, a kill. If I don't, then it's likely that they'll get a kill (which is itself more likely for many melee champs than ranged ones, due to the increased power of all-ins).

Some of you who play only melee tops should try playing ranged tops, if you truly feel it's "freelo". You'll find out that there are indeed tradeoffs.

In any case, League of Legends is not a fair game. No matter what champion you play, in general, there's a way to make that champion extremely broken - or you wouldn't be playing him/her. And some of these "problems" with ranged toplaners are not fixable without fundamentally altering the entire balance structure of the game itself.

As a final note, I think a lot of these issues on all sides would be much more manageable if not for the current high-damage meta. Riot has a fetish lately for hearing announcers go "Oooooh, that damage!" or "Deleted!" during telecasts - but I'm not even sure it's all that healthy for LCS, much less the overall game itself. I know I'd definitely prefer to see more extended engages and counterplays over Leblanc doing 100-0's on squishies and then teleporting away with so much as half an item lead.

I'd love to see what might happen if a global 5% reduction in damage were tried out on PBE one day. Like many others, I feel the results might be a healthy surprise for everyone.

LemurMonster8/23/2018, 7:52:04 AM1 votes

What are you taking about? Gnar got nerfed even more because of the rune he uses.

Aery got nerfed

Scorch got nerfed

Chrysalis got nerfed

It's now nearly impossible to carry with him now. Gnar requires a lot of communication & team work. In solo it's all meaningless because due to really disorganized teams.

Smart Girl8/22/2018, 3:42:18 AM1 votes

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