Boards›Live Gameplay Balance

Phage, Trinity Force, and its relation to Fighters vs ADCs - Plus a new item.

LoLByTheNumbers·9/19/2013, 3:08:53 AM·3 votes·294 views

Fighters have been in a tough spot for quite awhile now. Irelia, Jax, Fiora, and the like have been competitively nonviable for all of the summer split, if not longer. With Trinity Forced getting buffed, Phage was reworked slightly in an attempt to give these fighters a stronger presence, trading the inconsistent slow for a consistent speed boost. While the Phage/Trinity change has certainly increased the viability of fighters, especially versus tanks, it has also decreased their viability when we take into considerations the current evasive meta-game and how Trinity Force has increased the evasiveness of ADC's, especially the already evasive "Trinity Force" ADC's (Corki and and Ezreal in particular).

As the the Phage/Trinity forces have impacted ADC's in a greater way than it has fighters, it has actually hurt fighters, in my opinion, pushing them farther away from making an impact. Why is this? Let's take a quick look.

Trinity Force has heightened the power of Ezreal, and even more so Corki. Both of these ADC's are extremely evasive and extremely spell spammy. This is perfect for Trinity Force and has more synergy with them than with fighters.

+ADC's will get the first hit proccing the move speed bonus from phage before fighters. This gives the ADC's a greater ability to kite than it gives the fighters an ability to chase.

+ADC's will be able to continually keep the MS buff on, where as fighters will have the buff drop against evasive ADC's while they try to catch up after escapes.

+Evasive ADC's like Corki/Ezreal have very low CD's allowing them to proc the damage bonus of Trinity Force more often than their fighter counterparts.

So what can be done to with Phage/Trinity Force to tone down this discrepancy? Here are my thoughts.

Phage Tweaks - These would occur in T.F. as well.
Lower MS bonus to 10/30 (Potentially only for Ranged)
Increase the MS bonus duration to 3s for Melee Champions

Trinity Force Tweaks
Lower the proc damage to 180% for Ranged Champions

Zealot's Fevor - Phage + Long Sword + Cloth Armor/Chainmail
+AD
+Health
+Armor
Unique Passive: Fevor - +15 MS, this bonus increases to 40 MS when running towards an enemy champion.
Unique Active: Charge (10s CD)- On use would cause your AA to attack to act like Udyr's Bear Stance quick dash, extending the range of melee attacks slightly and causing that attack to dash the champion into melee range.

I know that this is essentially taking Vayne's passive and Udyr's Bear dash and combining them into an active use item, but I feel that it would give fighter's a way to stick to their ADC counterparts and any overly evasive counterpart. It would give them more options of play and force more counter-play from opponents than wait for gap closer, dash away.

@SnowSpotsGaming - Twitter

3 Comments

General Elephant9/20/2013, 8:52:47 PM1 votes

I do feel phage is in dire need of more directions, and you've come up with quite a unique answer, however I feel like this may be better handled as a "two birds, one stone" situation. What I mean by this is to handle the bork issues by rolling up bork's active, phage's passive, and making a high durability oriented item. Ie an item that combines using bilgewater cutlass and phage emphasizing the hp, and even the damage and ms, to make it less efficient for adc's who really need the aspd to keep the item viable over pd, ie and the like. I dunno. It is an idea just like yours, though I wouldn't mind seeing your idea implemented.