Is Vayne a useless character now?

No

Useless like in game or useless in lore?

You gotta put it in scope right?

Vayne is really good at 3 things. If any 2 of the 3 are overridden by other characters, she becomes practically useless because she has 1 engagement range, no poke, no defense, and unreliable CC. What she does have is just...so much fucking auto attack damage and she's pretty mobile.

So let's look at the 3 things.

1: Dueling. Vayne is an amazing duelist, and when that is relevant to the game (in a 1:3:1 or off on your own pushing a lane) as a whole, she is fantastic in the mid and late game. And although this game is way more team fight focused now with the support items the way they are, Vayne can still do okay in a team fight as long as it's basically 5 duels she fights. She is in this sense still relevant.

2: Killing tanks With her huge AD steroid and % true damage, Vayne can afford to build items that some other ADCs cannot and lose basically nothing. Namely of course. This makes her end game DPS much higher than most of her counterparts, and gives a definite time frame upon which an enemy tank will definitely die. Like no 2 ways about it, 3 billion armor or not, there is an upper limit to how long any character can last against Vayne.

Unfortunately, right now, any ADC, or hell, any character that has decent range and is built full ADC can melt a tank with little to no effort if they're allowed to just attack. So she's currently beaten out in this area...pretty miserably actually.

3: Surviving late game team fights It's true. She's great at this. I like to think of her as a late game ranged Yi. They actually have a lot in common. They both scale really well with attack speed, have a lot of steroids, and are pretty slippery if they know what they're doing. Her Tumble invis is one of the most powerful effects in the entire game when it comes to survivability. She can just kinda disappear for basically 1/3 of a fight and be untargetable. Which means if she can survive the AoE and dodge the skillshots, she can kill basically everything.

Unfortunately, late game is not something that happens all too often anymore. I've watched and it seems like a surprising number of games don't even make it to the 20 minute mark anymore, or if they do, they don't make it much past it. And I'm talking about high level games here... i'm not looking at bronze or anything like that. And even if it does happen? Like why not be one of these ticking time bombs instead that actually can engage enemies from >550 units away?

So yes, right now she's useless. Although she's looking promising for an attack speed on-hit build in the next season changes.

Lore made me feel really sad inside.

To match her fanbase, duh