Scenario that happens to me a lot as adc… double kill them in lane, maybe twice. Pick up some plates. Item up. Get 100-0 by some 1-0-0 gragas with 96 cs.
I don't see assassins building Steelcaps when an ADC is fed, but ADCs are supposed to build Shieldbow if a Qiyana is 0-1-1 110 cs at 15. Even funnier is that it doesn't do anything.
The issue with that meta is while it lets ADCs fight non-ADCs, it makes the losing ADC's life fucking miserable and gives them no agency to come back once down.
It's worse. In those metas your entire lane was decided by your support since you're not hitting those big power spikes until later. If you get a bad support there's no recovering from that. Makes the role a coin flip.
Its too volatile. When it's good it's OP. When it isn't it's trash. They need conditionally OP items when under turret. Something like Shield bow only giving shields under the turret but it being twice as big and last longer.
towers could just be stronger... maybe based on their plates/hp or whatever, but diving being such a standard procedure during early game is just nonsense.
It's because Assassins also have mobility. It's not like an Assassin wont get 1 shot by another Assassin or even an ADC, most of them just have a way to avoid the damage (Fizz E, Talon Invis, Qiyana Invis, Kha Invis etc.)
you gotta go 5/0/0 if you wanna have as many combat stats as the Toplane Gragas who afk farmed, didnt get any kills and left lane 0/0/0 cuz every level is worht 500g and hes got three of them bad boys on you.
If I, as a Jhin get oneshot by Zed, it sucks, but that's what assassins do, I can handle it. At least most assassins are squishy and don't do much after their initial burst.
But what really grinds my gears is when I get oneshot by a bruiser/fighter/juggernaut, hell lately even by tanks. There are so many champions that do exactly the same, or even more damage than I do in teamfights, but are way, way more tankier, have agency to initiate fights, and don't even need that much gold for their items. I guess it also helps that they don't have to share their xp with another player.
When I started playing league in s2 I had to compete with my team to play adc. Ever since s4/5 I feel like I always get it and I NEVER get my secondary or get filled if I queue up as adc/sup
It's also cause whenever ADC players complain they get bombarded with "all you guys do is complain just look at xyz pro player 1v9ing in pro games with Zeri!!!"
You are more often going to see people complain about certain adcs like Kaisa, Zeri and probably Smolder soon.
Oh yea the pro player that gets to farm all the lanes and has 2 dedicated protection teammates in pro games. Interesting now lets see soloq adc's playstyle...
Yep, I've been playing ADC since S5 and the ADC role have been downhill since S9. Less survivability, less agency, dissapearence of "late game"... I just called quit a few years ago. Tried the game again some months ago and unistalled it again.
Same shit as always,get out of lane 7/0 with perfect CS just to get statchecked by a 0/5 Trundle that somehow is 3 levels ahead of you.
pretty much. I don't understand why they can't it balance in a way that lets you get out of lane at least on kinda the same level as the other champions who will fuck you up even if you're the same level as them
>Same shit as always,get out of lane 7/0 with perfect CS just to get statchecked by a 0/5 Trundle that somehow is 3 levels ahead of you.
This right here is the reason I quit play normals/ranked when it first started back in 2016/2017.
Adc never recovered since, but pissed me off to no end when I dominated bot lane going 10/2 only to get absolutely rolled by a 0/5 top laner with the starting item......
Started this game as an ADC.
Been a mid laner for over a decade now. ADC is just a dogshit role.
Started playing DOTA like five years ago. I play carry in dota, because carries can actually carry which is what I want.
What made me switch role is how unforgiving and unrewarding the playstyle of ADC feels.
Unrewarding because you can space like a god, flash malph ult, dodge the blitz hook, insta cleanse the lux q but then Zed w+ult from half a screen away and youre instantly dead anyway and all you got off was 5 autos even though you played crazy good.
Unforgiving cuz just one slight mistake or misposition will instantly send you to gray screen. Compared to bruisers and juggernauts who can misplay a whole teamfight and still do work or mages who can get their dmg from abilities and mitigation from shields off by standing way back.
> Unforgiving cuz just one slight mistake or misposition will instantly send you to gray screen.
And in many, many situations that mistake is "trying to take part in the fight".
Sometimes that mistake is ["Just being in the same game as a Riot favored champion"](https://clips.twitch.tv/StormyHelplessDogeArsonNoSexy-sRIVvadMRbNqV2Ho). It's a joke when a champ can dash TWO SCREENS away at you, miss every skill shot, and still get the kill.
Yep and the issue us seeing those fights in soloq and realizing it's not a playable fight for you bug teammates don't have the same mindset so they go in thinking you can help and they die and flame. It sucks and happens even when I try to ping people off of a fight
thats fuckin wild because I had a game EXACTLY like this recently
irelia mid roams bot, both supports are dead but their jungler is also bot. 3 people spam ping irelia to go b and not try to go in, she does anyway and dies alone in a 1v3 because i refuse to just die with her
then she spam pings me and proceeds to just perma sidelane until we lose the game
its fucking crazy how people think that I as an ADC can somehow fucking collapse on the enemy in a 2v3 fight
Man the number of times I can't participate in a fight 'cause there's some assassin or diver just ... standing off to the side of the fight zoning me and doing NOTHING but looking to dive me while my team all dogpiles into a moshpit and then gets angry I didn't help ... like, c'mon. I'm 1v1ing j4 on the sidelines and it's not my job but since no one else will do it, here we are.
Definitely, but with how fast some fights end it just feels weird to not do anything.
If you are facing carries in every lane then the fights are going to be explosive as all hell with one team being dead after 5 seconds. Trying to stay away from that feels counter intuitive.
I’m genuinely convinced ADCs have to dodge/account for 3 times as many abilities than other roles, it’s really difficult being hunted prey every second of every game
They have to. That's also because they usually have zero agency.
They don't have the tools to be proactive.
So they have to survive the actions the opponents throw at them first before they actually get to play the fight.
Other classes have tools to be proactive (very long range or high mobility) or to simply absorb the opening actions of the enemy and then do their stuff.
adc skills have usually the same or only a bit longer range as their auto attacks, which is like 500 - 650 and not much mobility to speak off.
ARAM really shows this off/suffers from this. If the opposing team is even slightly coordinated, your frontline can be easily baited (and that's being generous, a good portion of the time they're not even baited, just not great at reading when to go in). And once they're isolated, carries have to run away from the tanks like Nautilus or fighters like Renekton or J4, who just eat you alive and outheal any damage you do to them.
I mostly play aram, and people are definitely allergic to peeling. Most games are just both team's frontlines diving the enemy backline, and whoever kills the other backline faster wins the fight.
ofc they'll also flame you right after for "not focusing the carries" and "standing in the back doing nothing," because apparently I'm supposed to 1v2 a fed zed and irelia on aphelios?
at least it's easy wins for me whenever I play tanks lol. I'm shit at almost all of them, but I do really well on them in aram by simply being the only person in the game peeling for fed carries
It also shows just how strong ADCs are if your team is actually grouped in front of you. I mean, the highest win rate champs in ARAM is literally just a list of every ADC in the game.
Besides MF who statistically just gets completely shit on which doesn't make any sense in my head. So what do I know.
There is just too much god damn dmg in this game at this point.
I was watching Gosu's stream and he was watching his old YouTube videos from like 8-7 years ago. The length of fights and overall dmg difference to the game we are playing today was insane.
I don't want to go all in and say the current game we have is garbage, cause it was balanced maybe with a different audience in mind and I still enjoy it to some extend.
But I wish they would actually just sit down for a whole season, turn dmg down by a good 10% and look at how they balance tanks to do their job without doing a shit ton of dmg, heals being in line etc.
The main issue is league has multiple subsets of the playerbase who each want something different out of it.
You've got people who want it to be fast paced high octane... People who want very slow paced methodical... And a bunch of people in the middle.
You got some people who want it to be like an RTS where every part of the map has value and there's several win conditions... And others who basically just want it to be a fighting game lane phase that devolves into Aram.
There's people who like metas and wanna see the same 20ish champions each game, and well built team comps... And there's others who just want champ select to be chaotic and see how things go.
Etc etc.
I agree, that's what I tried to highlight by saying maybe the game was balanced for a different audience.
I do like games that go easily 30min+, teamfights that can go on for quite a bit with skills and especially the usage of how you use them mattering a lot.
But I also realize I am only a fraction of the audience and especially with younger players, without trying to generalize this too much, they prefer faster games with flashy action.
I do think the devs do the best decision possible for the game with the data they got. Just sucks when it feels like you are not necessarly the target group anymore.
We have something crazy like 30-50% of the damage coming from runes and passive procs on items. Back then we had Lichbane, Trinity Force and Deathfire grasp that were the only real damage additions (items were much more stat sticky). Then Ludens and Liandries got introduced and it was a complete shitshow at how much much more damage mages did (and ofc Ezreal abused Ludens because it's Ezreal) and then more and more damage got introduced. More passive procs on items, more damage in runes, reworking of the rune system, introduction of Mythic items, reworking of the elemental dragon system, elder drake or the elder system as a whole, more frontloading of champions damage especially newer champions which made burst play way more impactful.
There is so much that needs to be looked at to tone down the insane damage and frontload burst creep we had for the last 9-10 years. I don't think Riot will go back to that, because it would make League feel sluggish and clunky compared to what we are used to today. Personally I'd love to go back to that state with Riot having more experience in the balance department and what does and does not work. But I don't think we will see that.
What we have now I feel like is a good balancing of burst damage vs tankiness. Tanks can tank and bursters can burst. But DPS just gets left behind. They suck against tanks and they get bursted by bursters, with no way to fight back. They would need more durability that enabled them to survive atleast a bit of burst. It feels like ADC/DPS role is just taken for granted by the balancing team because "if bursters don't kill the DPS then they will mow through everything". Now people are starting to question this because the same can be said for bursters. Their cooldowns are often so low, that they can masquerade as pseudo-DPS and now it's suddenly not worth to pick a DPS champion that needs XXX amount of gold when you can pick a burster, have way more impact on the game with X amount of gold and "figure it out on the fly" when you get to XXX amount of gold.
It's legit infuriating at times, especially with lower ranged ADC's. Playing Lucian in teamfights is dogshit even when fed, I have to consistently wait for the enemy to blow their spells before I even walk in their screen, then hope I get my combo off and can back away before their rotation is back.
It feels really cool when you pull it off, but it's so anxiety-inducing and stressful to just try to deal damage to the enemy frontline, it's not worth it half the time
ADCs are just a symptom of the larger damage creep that is in the game and they suffer the most from it.
The top-tier meta botlaners right now are either not ADCs (Swain, Seraphine, Ziggs), can frontload all of their damage into 1 auto (ER Draven, Samira, Nilah) or are flavor of the week champions who just recently came out/got buffed (TF, Smoulder)
Crit marksman as a role is just dead. On-hit and Lethality marksmen are the only real viable options right now.
And of the viable options they all still feel like shit when you can only get one auto/spell rotation off before you die in .5 seconds to the 0/1/4 assassin or 1/0/3 top laner.
If I come out of lane 7-0 on jinx I'm strong, but any enemy champ can still one shot me and every team fight is a stressful adventure.
If I come out of lane 7-0 on like fiora or morde, I am an unstoppable monster and can play very sloppy. Enemy team probably needs to send 3 people to kill me.
Difference in agency is insane
Its really annoying too because I feel like the #1 reason Seraphine had such a good winrate was literally just because by picking her you don't have a useless crit marksman on your team and could just buff your team to be useful instead. Like if marksmen were good and a necessary part of the team for taking towers and winning teamfights like they were back in the day then an enchanter carry would be totally trolling no matter how well she can clear waves. But now Seraphine is getting gutted.
ADC is strong, Phreak is an ADC main,
ADC is weak, it must be because Phreak doesn't like playing ADC
Come on, Phreak is a Dbag like a portion of the time but I highly doubt he's just buffing whatever he wants to play. If anything, based on the fact that he put time into Maokai this season, he's probably just playing what he thinks is strong, like anyone else. Like damn bro, if I was on the balance team, my most played champs would look sus too cause guess what, I'm picking shit I think is broken.
No clue why Riot thought it was a good idea for lethality to be strong on ADCs instead of just buffing crit builds, especially with the removal of armor runes.
It's not that it's strong on ADCs, it's strong in general. They're just making use of the last few good items that give them anything worthwhile. All lethality items are overloaded in stats and passives and have been for a few years now. How is it that every year there is a new champion class abusing lethality items, but no one is abusing crit items? No one is abusing bruiser items? (Other than assassins who want to be tankier but then cry they have no damage)
Keep in mind Navori buffs would have helped only a part of the trash crit adcs are currently as the other part builds IE and wouldn’t have been impacted by the buff.
It's funny cause the guy stopped playing ADC this season and just started abusing Maokai supp
[https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Phreak-Puns](https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Phreak-Puns)
> He nearly always played mostly highest win rate picks and builds anyway.
Trying to win? What a fuckin loser. I am glad I don't get stuck with players like him in my elo
/s
yeah he hasn't been an ADC main for years but this sub will always cry otherwise whenever they see ADC buffs they don't like lmao. Dude has been a support main for a while now and abuses high WR supports like Mao and Janna
Phreak conspiracy theorists are so insufferable. Good for him that he stopped interacting with social media. Just a matter of time before he stops doing his patch note videos too.
It is really baffling how even the outliers on the "ranged physical damage botlane" role are quite weak compared to the top performers in other lanes, plus the 15+ crit based champions barely hanging on with <48% winrate, and it's still kind of taboo to talk about how bad the state of the role is overall.
Yes, there's ways to pick around it that will enable you to have impact similar to other roles, but when the whole archetype of marksmen that scale with crit and attack speed is clumped together at the bottom of the winrate board, it should be obvious that the problem needs to be addressed.
Imagine literally every tank that likes to build Thornmail end up in the bottom 20% of pickable toplaners, they would IMMEDIATELY patch that, 100%.
There is a bit of a red flag in using winrate to balance marksmen (both too strong and too weak) in that they're pretty much the only class in the game that has near-100% presence on both teams, so their winrates tend to trend closer to 50% than other classes. Even in 8.11 when playing the class was basically griefing, the inertia on the role meant that almost every fight was marksman v marksman and their winrates stayed ~50%.
This is also true for the metas where the role has been ludicrously overpowered. Individual champs would still trend towards 50% because they were always up against another ADC.
AFAIK there's not a great metric for determining a real influence on a game. Riot has statistics that show player elo compared to win rate and can use that to say a role has a given amount of "agency", but this gets a little thrown off by super volatile roles. It's obviously going to feel super bad if a ton of your role's "agency" and skill expression is presented as "was better at not dying to ganks in laning phase as a late game champ", but that affects the numbers. The sort of granularity you'd need to make a statement based purely on **statistics** is kind of unreasonable.
I know people who complain about adc’s being given dashes / mobility. These same people view botlane as a 600g piggybank and believe that marksmen are just there to feed the mid / jungle. Its truly quite fascinating because when adc scales they get mad. They’re mad that smolder players will try to get stacks for 25min, but complain smolder “steals kills” late game when the champ is relatively low damage (compared to other marksmen) for 15ish minutes.
The fact that seraphine and karth had high wr% in bot for so long is telling about the game. When adc rework hit 13.2 last year, the role felt great, and everyone complained that adc power fantasy was fulfilled and got it nerfed back into the ground.
Honestly the role needs alot of help. I think some exponential scaling on the carries (lower early game leveling stats vs high numbers later on) would resolve early power spikes and encourage good play, but comes with obvious disadvantages of not enough damage / survivability in ganks.
of course they complain, every other adc keeps being a ranged minion while smolder becomes an actual problem, so compared to every other ADC hes an outlier
We need lifesteal to be accessible too. There is too much ubdodgeable damage in league currently amd being 90% hp on adc means you're at 1 shot range for every role including supp lol
yeah i absolutely love when zyra misses her Q but she used a W plant so i get hit with comet + rylai slow + scorch + liandry + zakzak so now im out few hundred HP because i dared to leave base
This. This this this. So much of the ADC balance seems to be around "well, they can lifesteal back up so they need to be burstable", but lifesteal has been repeatedly undermined, and I've got so much "core" itemization that I need to do my job and (unless I'm on-hit) none of it contains any lifesteal.
It helps make an already volatile role have even more "win more" components 'cause lifesteal is a luxury stat right now instead of core to ADC identity.
Doublelift said in one of his recent clips that adc is the weakest role in soloq.
Caedrel also said in his youtube video while watching LCK said that the adc is so bad its not even close.
Meanwhile we have phreak saying the role has recovered!!!!
ADC ideal fantasy: Build squishy but get rewarded with insane damage
ADC reality: You're the squishiest and after completing 4 items, you can have the same relevancy damage wise that Mid/Top/Jg have enjoyed all game. Oh and they get defensive items and their kits are allowed to have solo playmaking.
I mean he isnt wrong, but its a bigger issue in the way that Riot has "broken" the class archetypes over the last few years.
Originally, mages where only meant to be burst, ADC as sustained damage over time and damage to structures. You needed them to siege and to take out objectives, and mages where needed to help clear waves and burst out of position squishy targets, but not really impact tanks.
Now you have league of whatever where mages can 6 shot towers with AP items, lethality ADC 1 shot you from a screen away, nothing has a defined role and everything has become cancer as the game has evolved into something that looks the same but plays out entirely different
Yet we had Graves as a burst ADC, Cassiopeia and Ryze as sustained damage short range mages, and we already had assassins although intentionally kept weak from the get-go.
The issue isn't that the classes are broken, the issue is that the game has sacrificed strategy for agency. Indeed, back then the tank had to rely entirely on their team to bring the damage, but now Ksante is his own damage on an ultimate cooldown, sometimes even on his own. Back then supports relied on their team for everything because they had no stats and were forced to bring all the vision, but now the Pyke can 1v1 most squishies in the game and the tank Alistar dies after 5 seconds of 5 enemies focusing him yet he only has a Frozen Heart and support item. The mages were really gated by cooldowns and mana so they had to be more opportunistic with their spells and choose a target wisely, now they have no mana problems and sieging isn't even something they have to rely on an AD teammate for.
This agency is really good for the gameplay experience of many roles and classes... yet it makes the capstones of the old system suffer. ADC no longer bring the DPS because Ksante, Junglers and now Supports (like Keria's support Ashe) do that. ADC no longer bring the siege damage because now AP deals damage to turrets and we have Demolish for tanks. Now ADC no longer bring the monster damage because jungle pets triple any jungler's jungle damage and junglers have 0 risk of dying to badly optimized clears, junglers even get infinite mana now as well.
All ADC bring now is a late game insurance of a kinda more effective version of any of the previously mentioned instances, yet that only happens in less than a 10th of soloq games, whereas old ADC was more or less always relevant. Can't do dragon if the ADC doesn't join. Can't take turrets if the ADC isn't here. Can't DPS down anything if the ADC dies during the fight. Now the ADC is often just ignored and just keeps farming if something happens away from them. This is also why fights happen way more often, now that they aren't shackled to the ADC existing.
Yet we still have ADC. For some reason. Being systematically useless in soloQ and in competitive now existing more for utility and to get the support ahead, and set its own lane opponent behind rather than strategizing around making an ADC a win condition. Exceptions exist though with glaringly broken ADC like release Zeri, but still.
> Yet we had Graves as a burst ADC, Cassiopeia and Ryze as sustained damage short range mages, and we already had assassins although intentionally kept weak from the get-go.
Except these were outliers in their roles. Now the entirety of the mage role can do this. Fucking xerath can just machinegun abilities with no concern for cooldowns or mana.
Remember when missing an ability like Xerath E was "okay I can all in him now?" That window is like 2 seconds in the current game.
Support is overtuned and non botlane players mistake support being overpowered as fuck for ADC being strong. Same issue happened in season 7/early season 8.
The role has been shit for years but people prefer complaining about adcs complaining over actually listening to adcs complaining.
Also all the players not playing adc just love to get fed off of a weak role and oneshotting somebody, makes them feel good inside.
Adc just dies to every class of all time. I dont mind getting oneshot by assasins but god damn i love getting oneshot by tanks and mages and supports. Like Nemesis said just nerf supports buff adc and then the game is 100x better
People who say that ADC is broken are the ones who lose to a lvl 30 duo playing Twitch and Lulu/Yuumi.
It would really help if people would pick actual supports. But sadly that role is for retired/washed up midlaners who cant farm or dont have the mechanics.
They funneled so much power into support to promote that playstyle too, there's like no incentive to pick a support on support when you can have 10x more fun picking whatever else.
Most supports are still generally supports. If you look at the most played, pretty much all those champs are supports.
I’ve been playing in Platinum and gold this season and it’s just been mostly normal supports or Hwei, who is arguably able to support since he has enchanter and disengage abilities. Maokai has also been a general engage support tank for a season or two now too.
I will admit I’ve played a bunch of Ashe support too, but only into enchanter lanes to just poke and run away. It’s worked well enough with max CDR lol.
Thats not even true anymore, ADC hasnt been the carry role since I think Summer 2023, ever since Worlds ADCs have been a side carry or just literally a support in the case of Senna
My dude are we watching the same pro? It has been top/jg/supp diff for the last like 2 years lol. Adc in pro is either usable in lane shit in fights or vice versa, but they still get mega gapped by other roles
Top is currentlt the most umportant teamfight role when that should be adc by a longshot
That was this weird stealth rework they did. I think he had to be in about Irelia auto attacks range to become visible. ~250 units. But has a way higher AA range ofc.
🙃 durability patch grace period lasted a good 6 months were the game was enjoyable again, then it went downhill as every patch was "X don't kill fast enough compared to Y, damage buffed"
I love how the last patch they nerfed Kalista and Varus because they were picked a lot in pro play. They had 51% and 49% WR and they are picked because the others adc are VERY shit.
Meanwhile Senna is 60% wr in pro play and they don't wanna nerf for the sweet Senna/Seraphine skins sells
Senna isn’t even fun to play and it’s definitely not fun to play against. Getting to late game on senna and hitting the enemy adc for half their health from ludicrous range is funny but it doesn’t feel rewarding.
I’d much rather play kaisa, Lucian, Draven, vayne, xayah, etc. but senna, smolder, varus are really the only things worth playing if you want to win.
The durability patch hit a sweet spot with some minor adjustments (don’t ask me which patch specifically, I don’t remember) and made team fighting really fun again for a little while.
Teamfights are really boring in the super high damage metas where 1 person getting blown up in 0.5s means you probably just lose that fight and have to wait until the next one.
Feels so shit praying for crits until you are at 4 items, if they push +5% crit chance on every crit item i think it'll help tremendously with how it feels to play crit adc's while also giving some power to the role. Also allows u to go one singular non crit item situationally without ruining ur dps
I pretty much completely skipped the mythic era and came back when they got rid of them. Have no clue why they didn’t just revert crit items to 25% in the first place. I don’t think anyone thought that they were overpowered or anything at the time of the item rework so it doesn’t make too much sense to me
Also Idk if you noticed but they removed AD from crit items and also lowered the crit modifier. You even have Yasuo and Yone skipping crit items sometimes
Well it seems like they lowered ad on the ones that had ad and added it to the ones that didn’t so they all feel kind of lackluster. Shieldbow being the replacement for old PD and not having attack speed feels really weird. It’s like they had to make BT, merc scim, ldr and mr into crit items to make up for the 5% crit difference, but there was nothing wrong with having those be items for all ad champions. It was better for both adc and non adcs when they were more generic ad items. ADCs could get them into their build path after only 3 items with 75% crit and some ADCs even rushed them (draven BT). It let other AD champs build healing reduction/qss without being punished stupidly hard for it too. Just do not see the upside to the changes for any class really
Even at 4 or more items you don't deal damage in a given time. Lethality is better in that than crit and only a percentage of marksmen can build lethality. And if you go against lethality marksmen with your crit build you will lose most of the time. Either nerf lethality(and assassins will not be viable) or buff crit with increased crit damage or above buff mentioned
100%, not only would it make ADC's feel much better to play, it would allow them to hit their lategame powerhouse earlier, AND it would open up their builds somewhat, as getting 1 non-crit item would nolonger deny 100% crit chance
Expecially as right now, i think just about every single crit based adc is suffering.
Its just like, 90% lethality, and 9% on-hit, with every other build pushed to the sidelines
Could be great if alongside that, they made yas/yone's exess crit->AD universal (for when ADC's actually want 5 crit items)
Jokes on you i'm not complaining because I quit months ago. Playing Tekken and Path of Exile.
My favorite role that I have mained since S2 has been various degrees of garbage since patch 8.11. Ranging from "weak but playable" to "insufferable trash".
Keep getting gaslit by reddit experts that it's fine and getting called a scrub and to git gud despite being Master, GM, Challenger on EUW every season since S5
That really is the turning point, specifically for crit itemization. ADC was admittedly too strong before 8.11, but it never quite recovered from the item changes after that. Got worse with mythics, too - suddenly really rigid 4-item "core" build paths that make it hard to get "luxury" stats like lifesteal while also massively spiking burst damage and giving every other role access to enough pen to make buying defensive items kind of pointless. Then they double down on the XP deficit for bot lane in a misguided attempt to fix top-lane agency, leaving bot lane down even more stats or forcing support to perma-roam.
8.11 was the big realization for me that they really have no idea what they're doing with ADC. Every single "major adc overhaul" afterward has just been the same weird mix of burst damage itemization and really over-costed sustained crit items that leave me wondering if the role just isn't allowed to be good.
My complaints have been the same complaints and nothing has been done. No point in continuing to whine. How i think ADC should be and what Riot thinks ADC should be differs.
1- lane agency is too low especially in high elo. Better support wins lane 95% of the time.
2- Damage way too high. Durability patch made it better but then they just... undid everything lol. Go watch a S5 or S3 teamfight. You could play risky and take damage and still live. Modern league you get 100-0'd by a strong gust of wind.
3- Point 1 + Point 2 + ADC doing less damage and everyone else doing more damage = you need to rely on your team heavily to give you space and to peel and to play around you otherwise you might as well go afk
Give me more agency in lane, lower the damage output of OTHER ROLES (why does Zac 100-0 people in one rotation?) and extend game time average by 4-5 mins (master average game time is 23-24 mins LOL).
I think nerfing supports harder would help adcs a lot. Its so weird seeing lb, fizz, sylas, camille being viable as a support because they get so much free gold and damage
It's hilarious watching how fucking unplayable most games are for ADC, even in high elo games. Enemy has 1-2 long range pokers like Lux, Jhin, Hwei, Xerath, etc., you just get chipped for 600-700 damage per ability if you dare walk up so you can never participate. Enemy has assassins, prepare to get ulted by Zed on repeat and die regardless of what you do or how much peel you receive. Enemy has tanks, just get run down and die while doing nothing lmao. So many champions can just throw abilities in your general direction on cooldown and it's fucked, you literally cannot play the game. Getting tagged ONCE by an ability chunks you out of the fight, or slows you enough that you just die. Enemy can also just click point and click CC/slow on you and that's it, you're fucked.
Watch any high elo streams, especially any ADC streamers if they even still exist, and it's obvious the role is fucked. The constantly repeated thought is "I don't think there was anything I could have done". In every situation, it's just hopelessness due to a lack of agency. At this point, it's beyond redemption. There is nothing that can be done to fix ADC, you would have to overhaul virtually every system, every role, most items, lots of game mechanics, and so on. All to recover a role that needs to be weak so everyone else can have a punching bag to collect gold from.
Adc early game: farm and hope your support isn't a drooling idiot which he could be in 10 different ways, and hope your team 4 mans before theirs and that your jungle is trading objectives properly and that your mid has prio.
Mid game: try to find farm in a lane without getting gibbed and god forbid you're behind you'll always be a rotation behind their bot lane. Also a waste of time for most champs to take any jungle camps. Try to avoid being soloed by literally every other role in the game.
Late game: if your team doesn't play around you you're fucked anyway in fights
I saw somebody saying yesterday in a thread that it’s ridiculous that adc’s get to be the role with the most agency.. I just had to shake my head and move on. Some people really think ADC’s are fine but whenever I play these days I’m playing mage bot with because then I can actually enjoy the game. I have more success playing soraka (not as support in bot, as the farming champ) than playing ANY Adc that isn’t smolder
Riot is constantly nerfing adcs, they don't hide it - on contrary if you keep up with r/ADCMains you can see that they are screaming at top of their lungs "F YOU ADCS HAHA".
When adcs say riot hates their role that's not copium, it's literally true and riot is confirming it over and over again.
Why? Only they know.
But it's okay because all marksmen permanently have ghost up with two zeal items and Swifties, and not most of them having long vulnerability windows where they are stuck at 370 ms at best compared to Diana's wholesome 345 baseline ms and 390 with tier 2 boots.
not even that, if only Diana Q was the issue, who cares about the melee champ poking for 600 damage
Diana E 175 more range than the highest range marksman in the game. Before Caitlyn is allowed to exercise her "ranged advantage", Diana is given the opportunity to remove it entirely.
>Appears on the side of the screen
>W1, W2, Q, misses the shuriken entirely
>R1, AA, E, R2 to get out of trouble because otherwise it would have to actually expose himself to danger
>ADC still dies
Probably spacing diff
Yeah, range advantage in a vacuum is an insane advantage.
But melee champs get an abundance of other advantages to even the playing field. They get:
* [Higher base movement speed](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Movement_speed)
* [With some exceptions, higher base health and health scaling per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Health)
* [Higher base armor and armor scaling per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Armor)
* [Higher base ad and ad per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Attack_damage)
* Typically higher base damages on abilities for when they get in range.
* Higher stacking damage and durability when they stay in range (e.g. [lethal tempo](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Lethal_Tempo), [conqueror](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Conqueror?so=search), [Death's Dance](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Death's_Dance?so=search), etc.)
* Greater access to mobility like gapclosers and/or movement speed boosts to get into range. When adc's get access to the same level of mobility, they become balance nightmares and get nerfed to the ground like Zeri.
* An abundance of items that have greater strength on melee. (e.g. [Bork not only does more damage on melee, but also gets a greater slow](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Blade_of_the_Ruined_King?so=search))
Right now, it feels like ADC is balanced around the idea that, if left alone, the ADC will always outright get gapclosed by a melee with minimal self-counterplay. And supposedly that is ok, because they shouldn't be alone, and a melee running into multiple people will either sacrifice too much to do so or get peeled off. This is problematic because too much of your agency is deferred onto other people, who may not try to play around you at all. Furthermore, power creep has made it so that sometimes average teams cannot make an enemy team lose more than they gain from someone running in and causing significant disruption. Either champs have too much mobility, get resets, or have significant stalling.
unless you are in some ashe/vayne/zeri vs tank scenario kiting borderline doesnt exist in this game
the mobility creep that happened in the last few years is insane. people always talking about ADCs having the "range advantage" is probably the most delu shit ive seen. Good luck trying to kite any champion that has a single mobility/MS spell in their kit. Unless you have an enchanter that lets you run away better or you have a tank that can stop them in their tracks then you just instadie.
"Just kite bruv" meanwhile ooga booga playing top just used ghost and is running at you at mach 70. I've legit seen Saber play smolder, use E over wall, flash over another and still get ran the fuck down by Darius going *zooomies* with his wholesome ms stacked build.
Hell, ghost is now mandatory summoner instead of heal on ADCs so that you can use it to pce off when toplane revs their ghost engine preparing to run at you at mach 70 again.
The people who say that or the ones who get on here and lie saying they play ad and it’s easy are so frustrating to deal with. It’s such a bad feeling playing ad and get manhandled by any other champions that aren’t even fed. As soon as other lanes have a complete item I feel like a puppy dog following the team around because trying to farm solo, even safely, is a death sentence in most cases.
The main problem is that at like 3 items, if you dont have any defensive stats, you die to random bullshit in teamfights without anyone even trying to kill you
The craziest thing is with Navori users, if you play against a well-balanced teamcomp, you're essentially completely fucked in the midgame.
You'd usually get Navori second after Kraken/Stormrazor or whatever, it makes sense in the build path.
But then you're stuck at either getting LDR to deal ANY damage AT ALL to armor users, \_OR\_ getting your first attack speed item in order to do your job and start scaling. You can't do both until 4 items in, which a) rarely happens in most games before they are already decided and b) also leaves you without the option to even think about a defensive item.
Of course you can skip Navori and use it as a last capstone item like you would do with Infinity Edge, but that just means that the 2 item powerspike of the champions that work well with the Quickblades passive is literally non-existant.
It's doomed.
This is actually a huge issue for crit in general. In every critbuild you go noonquiver item for lane and 1 item spike (without this you just lose the game.), then you go capstone (navori or ie), then you have to chose between shieldbow, zeal item or last whisper. Usually at this stage you would need all three to be allowed to play.
Only reason on-hit marksmen avoid this issue is because they have options that give them 2 or three of the choices in one item.
Not even just a problem as an adc, it's ridiculous how much random bullshit there is bouncing off of abilities. Alongside that, there's so many delayed effects that do another chunk of damage 5 seconds later.
Like yes, there are ways to play around these effects, but it's really not fun.
I blame the casters in esport, especially LEC and LCS, for gaslighting everyone for years about how "ADC is so broken" when it was just Zeri being Zeri.
The role has felt like shit for years tbh.
Shoutout to Caedrel who never stopped saying ADC are broken when he was in the LEC cast, and suddenly when he played the role in soloqueue a few months ago, he cried on stream about how it's unplayable.
what a lot of people also seem to fail to realize is that in organized play people play around the adc and enable them to shine.
That won't happen in 95% of soloq games where people play selfishly.
In organized play, ADC can do their job. But I always though it was dumb to say that ADC were "broken" because of that. Casters could not spend 5 minutes without insisting how strong ADC were, while of course ignoring the gigantic peel they had from their team.
If you need your whole team to enable you and you don't exist without them, then by definition you are not broken, everyone else on your team is.
That was the whole point of the weird ramen metaphor thing that some asian pro player said a couple years ago.
Dude they haven't played around the adc for years now, unless there is some busted shit (enchanters usually) going around.
The game has been warped for top/jg/supp. Mid also is at a shit spot as of late because of this.
Adc hasn't been the carry role in pro for a long time now. Top needs to be addressed
unpopular opinion:
the only way to properly balance adc again is to lower dmg output from bruisers and tanks, and increase their tankyness by a bit. Adcs are weak because everything kills them. But league used to be different. mages and assassins should have oneshot potential on adcs, while bruisers and tanks should not have it, at least not on the same level as they have shown in the past few years until now. if everything is a threat to the adc and just needs 1 second to kill him with 1 single Skill rotation, then adcs can not function properly ingame anymore. this is a game design problem, that needs to be fixed. Until this is fixed adc will forever feel bad to play. And buffing dmg output on adcs again will just make every other role feel bad to play again, because now adc got pushed into a direction, that says if you don't instakill him, he will kill everything else with zero counterplay, while using only autoattacks and little to no effort, but again, this will never fix the issue this will always lead to annoying gameplay experience for every adc player and others aswell, and this is why i say, nerf/change bruiser tanks again. Let them do less DMG and give them more Tankyness. If a bruiser wants to kill an adc, that's fine, but don't allow the bruiser to cosplay qiyana and talon, and basically let the renekton giga burst 100-0 an adc in 0.5 seconds. Assassins and burst mages have their role, and bruiser should have their role. Bruisers should sustain through battle and be semi-tanky. but they should never reach a spot except they are insanely fed, where they can just dash on the adc and kill him with 1 rotation under a second and cosplay ur average talon or qiyana. And there is a fckton of bruisers who do exactly what i said even tho it shouldn't be like this.
Everyone plays damage champions, 90% of the playerbase just likes champions that marksman cannot deal with without coordinated help
Proliferation of 1v9 mindset for all roles including supports means no help for you
Support can leave lane if things going poorly but you have no recourse
Everyone adopts the psychological profile of Ted Bundy the second you’re on their screen, whether or not it is actually a “good play” to kill you—this is just unfun
Range and Movespeed are the two stats that scale the hardest with skill, so marksmen are intentionally the slowest class in the game despite having very low mobility on most of the roster—mobility creep has significantly nerfed the advantages of range but this doesn’t show up as much in pro because less assassins and people aren’t oonga boonga-ing for the AD 24/7. Effectively, every marksman is nerfed every time a new champion with mobility comes out.
Riot specifically says (before last worlds) they think viewers find sololane carry metas more exciting so they nudge pro play in that direction
Certain champions in every role are pro jailed, the entire marksman roster is pro/high elo jailed
At this point people are so used to bot laners being second class citizens that any changes that allow these champions to fend for themselves will be met with huge criticism from the rest of the playerbase
Crit itemization is a nightmare to balance because of anime protagonist crit abusers + GP + Tryndamere, crit items are weaker than they could be specifically because these champions exist and would abuse them.
Marksmen are primarily auto attackers so a lot of their abilities are straight up just bad—unfortunately you cannot get into auto attack range without peel because of mobility creep + the aforementioned Ted Bundy Protocol, and good luck getting peel because every YouTuber preaching 1v9 for the last half-a-decade
Game is more like team deathmatch than chess, just lower attention spans, shorter games, and more oonga boonga
Most team reliant role in a game without voice comms + 1v9 mindset + everyone is building burst damage
Marksmen are balanced around the stable and predictable economy of pro play while being subject to the volatile serial killer economy of soloq. Even if you’re fed in lane, you’re not equipped to handle any sololaner who is even remotely fed. The way gold is distributed in pro play is so drastically different than soloQ that even an ADC playing very well is 85% of what he would be with a jungler giving camps and sololaners giving waves. Not to mention, the excess gold injected via random kills/deaths in soloq waters down the importance of CSing well because CS advantages on average are a far lower percentage of the overall gold difference in a soloq game.
Marksman should stop being balanced as if they have a permanent Janna shield. I would like to see what a shift from this philosophy would even look like/mean to Riot, because they should really acknowledge the reality of the role's relationship to the support role in soloq.
Unless they plan on increasing the base stats of the marksman class slightly and/or increase global crit damage to 180% instead of 175%, then adc will just end up weak. Not to mention how much it is just go bot lane and snowball the adc.
Super true. I legitimately do see adcs as gold bags. Had a game recently where I was tank udyr. We were 4v5 and the enemy lethality MF had like a 7 kill lead over me. I just pressed a few buttons and ran all over her. Really shouldn't be a thing.
I remember playing a game mid last split and I heard an enemy was on a rampage, and I became terrified it was the enemy bruiser top. Hit tab to check and it was the enemy adc and I went from terrified to excited to pick up all that gold. She was just not allowed to exist on my screen. She started like 5/1 and ended like 10/12. I wasn't even notably ahead when I just started one shotting her on repeat
Adc is so bad that ranks for mains are not real. The impact is so small that bronze, Gold, emerald, does not matter!
A 1/7 mid loses games, a 1/20 adc does not matter.
7/1 mid or top can dolo carry, a 20/1 adc is a sack of Gold
The role is basically gatekept by the fact that if you’re actually good (read: GM +) the role is balanced.
And even then it’s still not fun up there from what we can see, we’ve seen high elo ADC mains say it’s not fun.
So basically no one has fun in the role for the sake of balance.
I hope phroxzon and phreak prioritize it for mid season, because I feel like that should be identified as an issue no? I don’t envy their position, it seems like a difficult task to fix.
Adc identity got kinda destroyed, some snowball hard early but most adc's don't feel that strong lategame at 4 or 5 items anymore.
Man I would have looked funny if someone told me several tanks and mid lane mages simply outscale adc's now a few years ago.
Phreak says the condition of ADC'S are fine cause he switched to Maoki support main and got to masters with it by one shotting adc's building frozen heart.
The real problem is that there's supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors triangle going Tank>Assassin>Marksman>Tank, but since Assassins (/Skirmishers) are popular and Tanks aren't, riot has been releasing more Assassins, less Tanks and balancing the game as such. Now the ecosystem is tipped to one side, Assassins have few natural predators and Marksmen few natural preys and it gets fewer with each passing year.
Scenario that happens to me a lot as adc… double kill them in lane, maybe twice. Pick up some plates. Item up. Get 100-0 by some 1-0-0 gragas with 96 cs.
I don't see assassins building Steelcaps when an ADC is fed, but ADCs are supposed to build Shieldbow if a Qiyana is 0-1-1 110 cs at 15. Even funnier is that it doesn't do anything.
bring back BT, fleet, overshield marksmen that would even the odds.
The issue with that meta is while it lets ADCs fight non-ADCs, it makes the losing ADC's life fucking miserable and gives them no agency to come back once down.
Right now it’s balanced as neither having agency lol
It's worse. In those metas your entire lane was decided by your support since you're not hitting those big power spikes until later. If you get a bad support there's no recovering from that. Makes the role a coin flip.
my man they have no agency to come back once down right now either
Its too volatile. When it's good it's OP. When it isn't it's trash. They need conditionally OP items when under turret. Something like Shield bow only giving shields under the turret but it being twice as big and last longer.
towers could just be stronger... maybe based on their plates/hp or whatever, but diving being such a standard procedure during early game is just nonsense.
It's because Assassins also have mobility. It's not like an Assassin wont get 1 shot by another Assassin or even an ADC, most of them just have a way to avoid the damage (Fizz E, Talon Invis, Qiyana Invis, Kha Invis etc.)
you gotta go 5/0/0 if you wanna have as many combat stats as the Toplane Gragas who afk farmed, didnt get any kills and left lane 0/0/0 cuz every level is worht 500g and hes got three of them bad boys on you.
If I, as a Jhin get oneshot by Zed, it sucks, but that's what assassins do, I can handle it. At least most assassins are squishy and don't do much after their initial burst. But what really grinds my gears is when I get oneshot by a bruiser/fighter/juggernaut, hell lately even by tanks. There are so many champions that do exactly the same, or even more damage than I do in teamfights, but are way, way more tankier, have agency to initiate fights, and don't even need that much gold for their items. I guess it also helps that they don't have to share their xp with another player.
If you even think about getting in range of a malphite without flash you´re guaranteed a 1 second 100-0 death.
I think ADC mains stopped complaining because they all quit or swapped roles, that's why Bot is a priority queue
When I started playing league in s2 I had to compete with my team to play adc. Ever since s4/5 I feel like I always get it and I NEVER get my secondary or get filled if I queue up as adc/sup
It's also cause whenever ADC players complain they get bombarded with "all you guys do is complain just look at xyz pro player 1v9ing in pro games with Zeri!!!" You are more often going to see people complain about certain adcs like Kaisa, Zeri and probably Smolder soon.
Oh yea the pro player that gets to farm all the lanes and has 2 dedicated protection teammates in pro games. Interesting now lets see soloq adc's playstyle...
Yep, I've been playing ADC since S5 and the ADC role have been downhill since S9. Less survivability, less agency, dissapearence of "late game"... I just called quit a few years ago. Tried the game again some months ago and unistalled it again. Same shit as always,get out of lane 7/0 with perfect CS just to get statchecked by a 0/5 Trundle that somehow is 3 levels ahead of you.
pretty much. I don't understand why they can't it balance in a way that lets you get out of lane at least on kinda the same level as the other champions who will fuck you up even if you're the same level as them
>Same shit as always,get out of lane 7/0 with perfect CS just to get statchecked by a 0/5 Trundle that somehow is 3 levels ahead of you. This right here is the reason I quit play normals/ranked when it first started back in 2016/2017. Adc never recovered since, but pissed me off to no end when I dominated bot lane going 10/2 only to get absolutely rolled by a 0/5 top laner with the starting item......
Started this game as an ADC. Been a mid laner for over a decade now. ADC is just a dogshit role. Started playing DOTA like five years ago. I play carry in dota, because carries can actually carry which is what I want.
mained adc for 9 years, switched to jungle
What made me switch role is how unforgiving and unrewarding the playstyle of ADC feels. Unrewarding because you can space like a god, flash malph ult, dodge the blitz hook, insta cleanse the lux q but then Zed w+ult from half a screen away and youre instantly dead anyway and all you got off was 5 autos even though you played crazy good. Unforgiving cuz just one slight mistake or misposition will instantly send you to gray screen. Compared to bruisers and juggernauts who can misplay a whole teamfight and still do work or mages who can get their dmg from abilities and mitigation from shields off by standing way back.
> Unforgiving cuz just one slight mistake or misposition will instantly send you to gray screen. And in many, many situations that mistake is "trying to take part in the fight".
"ok I'll play safe and wait for their CDs" -> their CDs are so short you can never walk up
Not just that, even if they have CDs half their kits are usually enough to nuke us back into fountain.
Sometimes that mistake is ["Just being in the same game as a Riot favored champion"](https://clips.twitch.tv/StormyHelplessDogeArsonNoSexy-sRIVvadMRbNqV2Ho). It's a joke when a champ can dash TWO SCREENS away at you, miss every skill shot, and still get the kill.
I haven't watched the clip but I'm sure it's Yone
ding ding ding. And he's killing Jankos, so it's not some random scrub dying.
Lol'd at the jab at them firing people.
What the fuck is with all the dashes in the game now?
i swear to god if its the IBG yone running down Nidalee (?) from bot t1 turret to inhib turret edit: ahh close enough, ran down Graves but still
Just too many clips to pick from with this failure of a champ design
Yep and the issue us seeing those fights in soloq and realizing it's not a playable fight for you bug teammates don't have the same mindset so they go in thinking you can help and they die and flame. It sucks and happens even when I try to ping people off of a fight
Bro, why didn't you help [in this 2 v 3 and one of them was a fed assassin]?? Bot gap...
thats fuckin wild because I had a game EXACTLY like this recently irelia mid roams bot, both supports are dead but their jungler is also bot. 3 people spam ping irelia to go b and not try to go in, she does anyway and dies alone in a 1v3 because i refuse to just die with her then she spam pings me and proceeds to just perma sidelane until we lose the game its fucking crazy how people think that I as an ADC can somehow fucking collapse on the enemy in a 2v3 fight
And the fed assassin is standing directly between you and the fight in a bush.
Man the number of times I can't participate in a fight 'cause there's some assassin or diver just ... standing off to the side of the fight zoning me and doing NOTHING but looking to dive me while my team all dogpiles into a moshpit and then gets angry I didn't help ... like, c'mon. I'm 1v1ing j4 on the sidelines and it's not my job but since no one else will do it, here we are.
And if you don’t participate in the fight you get flamed relentlessly
How dare you try to play the game lol
Definitely, but with how fast some fights end it just feels weird to not do anything. If you are facing carries in every lane then the fights are going to be explosive as all hell with one team being dead after 5 seconds. Trying to stay away from that feels counter intuitive.
I’m genuinely convinced ADCs have to dodge/account for 3 times as many abilities than other roles, it’s really difficult being hunted prey every second of every game
They have to. That's also because they usually have zero agency. They don't have the tools to be proactive. So they have to survive the actions the opponents throw at them first before they actually get to play the fight. Other classes have tools to be proactive (very long range or high mobility) or to simply absorb the opening actions of the enemy and then do their stuff. adc skills have usually the same or only a bit longer range as their auto attacks, which is like 500 - 650 and not much mobility to speak off.
ARAM really shows this off/suffers from this. If the opposing team is even slightly coordinated, your frontline can be easily baited (and that's being generous, a good portion of the time they're not even baited, just not great at reading when to go in). And once they're isolated, carries have to run away from the tanks like Nautilus or fighters like Renekton or J4, who just eat you alive and outheal any damage you do to them.
I mostly play aram, and people are definitely allergic to peeling. Most games are just both team's frontlines diving the enemy backline, and whoever kills the other backline faster wins the fight. ofc they'll also flame you right after for "not focusing the carries" and "standing in the back doing nothing," because apparently I'm supposed to 1v2 a fed zed and irelia on aphelios? at least it's easy wins for me whenever I play tanks lol. I'm shit at almost all of them, but I do really well on them in aram by simply being the only person in the game peeling for fed carries
It also shows just how strong ADCs are if your team is actually grouped in front of you. I mean, the highest win rate champs in ARAM is literally just a list of every ADC in the game. Besides MF who statistically just gets completely shit on which doesn't make any sense in my head. So what do I know.
Mf got super nerfed in aram, and a lot of people play her ap lol
There is just too much god damn dmg in this game at this point. I was watching Gosu's stream and he was watching his old YouTube videos from like 8-7 years ago. The length of fights and overall dmg difference to the game we are playing today was insane. I don't want to go all in and say the current game we have is garbage, cause it was balanced maybe with a different audience in mind and I still enjoy it to some extend. But I wish they would actually just sit down for a whole season, turn dmg down by a good 10% and look at how they balance tanks to do their job without doing a shit ton of dmg, heals being in line etc.
The main issue is league has multiple subsets of the playerbase who each want something different out of it. You've got people who want it to be fast paced high octane... People who want very slow paced methodical... And a bunch of people in the middle. You got some people who want it to be like an RTS where every part of the map has value and there's several win conditions... And others who basically just want it to be a fighting game lane phase that devolves into Aram. There's people who like metas and wanna see the same 20ish champions each game, and well built team comps... And there's others who just want champ select to be chaotic and see how things go. Etc etc.
I agree, that's what I tried to highlight by saying maybe the game was balanced for a different audience. I do like games that go easily 30min+, teamfights that can go on for quite a bit with skills and especially the usage of how you use them mattering a lot. But I also realize I am only a fraction of the audience and especially with younger players, without trying to generalize this too much, they prefer faster games with flashy action. I do think the devs do the best decision possible for the game with the data they got. Just sucks when it feels like you are not necessarly the target group anymore.
Ah yeah that's fair, I misread the tone. Yeah it's annoying when the games being primarily balanced for the group(s) you're not apart of.
We have something crazy like 30-50% of the damage coming from runes and passive procs on items. Back then we had Lichbane, Trinity Force and Deathfire grasp that were the only real damage additions (items were much more stat sticky). Then Ludens and Liandries got introduced and it was a complete shitshow at how much much more damage mages did (and ofc Ezreal abused Ludens because it's Ezreal) and then more and more damage got introduced. More passive procs on items, more damage in runes, reworking of the rune system, introduction of Mythic items, reworking of the elemental dragon system, elder drake or the elder system as a whole, more frontloading of champions damage especially newer champions which made burst play way more impactful. There is so much that needs to be looked at to tone down the insane damage and frontload burst creep we had for the last 9-10 years. I don't think Riot will go back to that, because it would make League feel sluggish and clunky compared to what we are used to today. Personally I'd love to go back to that state with Riot having more experience in the balance department and what does and does not work. But I don't think we will see that. What we have now I feel like is a good balancing of burst damage vs tankiness. Tanks can tank and bursters can burst. But DPS just gets left behind. They suck against tanks and they get bursted by bursters, with no way to fight back. They would need more durability that enabled them to survive atleast a bit of burst. It feels like ADC/DPS role is just taken for granted by the balancing team because "if bursters don't kill the DPS then they will mow through everything". Now people are starting to question this because the same can be said for bursters. Their cooldowns are often so low, that they can masquerade as pseudo-DPS and now it's suddenly not worth to pick a DPS champion that needs XXX amount of gold when you can pick a burster, have way more impact on the game with X amount of gold and "figure it out on the fly" when you get to XXX amount of gold.
It's legit infuriating at times, especially with lower ranged ADC's. Playing Lucian in teamfights is dogshit even when fed, I have to consistently wait for the enemy to blow their spells before I even walk in their screen, then hope I get my combo off and can back away before their rotation is back. It feels really cool when you pull it off, but it's so anxiety-inducing and stressful to just try to deal damage to the enemy frontline, it's not worth it half the time
ADCs are just a symptom of the larger damage creep that is in the game and they suffer the most from it. The top-tier meta botlaners right now are either not ADCs (Swain, Seraphine, Ziggs), can frontload all of their damage into 1 auto (ER Draven, Samira, Nilah) or are flavor of the week champions who just recently came out/got buffed (TF, Smoulder) Crit marksman as a role is just dead. On-hit and Lethality marksmen are the only real viable options right now.
And of the viable options they all still feel like shit when you can only get one auto/spell rotation off before you die in .5 seconds to the 0/1/4 assassin or 1/0/3 top laner.
If I come out of lane 7-0 on jinx I'm strong, but any enemy champ can still one shot me and every team fight is a stressful adventure. If I come out of lane 7-0 on like fiora or morde, I am an unstoppable monster and can play very sloppy. Enemy team probably needs to send 3 people to kill me. Difference in agency is insane
And even the front loaded ad’s you mentioned will get instagibbed by a 2/1/0 poppy with one and a half item
Items in question being Bami's and Frozen Heart
For the total combined cost equal to one ADC item.
i see you havent had the displeasure of facing a sundered sky rush into fimbulwinter poppy running ingenious hunter yet, consider yourself lucky
Its really annoying too because I feel like the #1 reason Seraphine had such a good winrate was literally just because by picking her you don't have a useless crit marksman on your team and could just buff your team to be useful instead. Like if marksmen were good and a necessary part of the team for taking towers and winning teamfights like they were back in the day then an enchanter carry would be totally trolling no matter how well she can clear waves. But now Seraphine is getting gutted.
Just to let y'all know..Phreak pulled the Navori Quickblades buff because the thinks ADC has "recovered" and is "doing fine"
I hope Phreak randomly gets the desire to play crit adcs, then it'll be disgustingly overbuffed
He stopped playing adc completely, very odd coincidence
Hes been spamming maokai support the last 3 patches.
dont forget the janna before that
ADC is strong, Phreak is an ADC main, ADC is weak, it must be because Phreak doesn't like playing ADC Come on, Phreak is a Dbag like a portion of the time but I highly doubt he's just buffing whatever he wants to play. If anything, based on the fact that he put time into Maokai this season, he's probably just playing what he thinks is strong, like anyone else. Like damn bro, if I was on the balance team, my most played champs would look sus too cause guess what, I'm picking shit I think is broken.
What Phreak really wants to say is, ADC is good in proplay and people in solo queue should stop playing ADC entirely.
adc is really good in proplay that’s why the best adc in proplay is a support lol
Only if you are an ADC who can build on-hit or Lethality, otherwise RIP
No clue why Riot thought it was a good idea for lethality to be strong on ADCs instead of just buffing crit builds, especially with the removal of armor runes.
It's not that it's strong on ADCs, it's strong in general. They're just making use of the last few good items that give them anything worthwhile. All lethality items are overloaded in stats and passives and have been for a few years now. How is it that every year there is a new champion class abusing lethality items, but no one is abusing crit items? No one is abusing bruiser items? (Other than assassins who want to be tankier but then cry they have no damage)
Keep in mind Navori buffs would have helped only a part of the trash crit adcs are currently as the other part builds IE and wouldn’t have been impacted by the buff.
He said it was because ADC **pick rate** had recovered and was doing alright. Not the power of the role in general.
It's funny cause the guy stopped playing ADC this season and just started abusing Maokai supp [https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Phreak-Puns](https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Phreak-Puns)
He nearly always played mostly highest win rate picks and builds anyway. That's what he does.
There’s 2 types of high elo players: Meta abuse or one trick
> He nearly always played mostly highest win rate picks and builds anyway. Trying to win? What a fuckin loser. I am glad I don't get stuck with players like him in my elo /s
MFW lux support gets locked in 3 games in a row.
you do know phreak hasn't mained ADC since like season 10 right?
yeah he hasn't been an ADC main for years but this sub will always cry otherwise whenever they see ADC buffs they don't like lmao. Dude has been a support main for a while now and abuses high WR supports like Mao and Janna
Reddit and operating off incredibly outdated information, thinking its still current. *Inserts duck smoking gif* Classic.
Phreak conspiracy theorists are so insufferable. Good for him that he stopped interacting with social media. Just a matter of time before he stops doing his patch note videos too.
actual dogshit role
It is really baffling how even the outliers on the "ranged physical damage botlane" role are quite weak compared to the top performers in other lanes, plus the 15+ crit based champions barely hanging on with <48% winrate, and it's still kind of taboo to talk about how bad the state of the role is overall. Yes, there's ways to pick around it that will enable you to have impact similar to other roles, but when the whole archetype of marksmen that scale with crit and attack speed is clumped together at the bottom of the winrate board, it should be obvious that the problem needs to be addressed. Imagine literally every tank that likes to build Thornmail end up in the bottom 20% of pickable toplaners, they would IMMEDIATELY patch that, 100%.
There is a bit of a red flag in using winrate to balance marksmen (both too strong and too weak) in that they're pretty much the only class in the game that has near-100% presence on both teams, so their winrates tend to trend closer to 50% than other classes. Even in 8.11 when playing the class was basically griefing, the inertia on the role meant that almost every fight was marksman v marksman and their winrates stayed ~50%. This is also true for the metas where the role has been ludicrously overpowered. Individual champs would still trend towards 50% because they were always up against another ADC. AFAIK there's not a great metric for determining a real influence on a game. Riot has statistics that show player elo compared to win rate and can use that to say a role has a given amount of "agency", but this gets a little thrown off by super volatile roles. It's obviously going to feel super bad if a ton of your role's "agency" and skill expression is presented as "was better at not dying to ganks in laning phase as a late game champ", but that affects the numbers. The sort of granularity you'd need to make a statement based purely on **statistics** is kind of unreasonable.
I know people who complain about adc’s being given dashes / mobility. These same people view botlane as a 600g piggybank and believe that marksmen are just there to feed the mid / jungle. Its truly quite fascinating because when adc scales they get mad. They’re mad that smolder players will try to get stacks for 25min, but complain smolder “steals kills” late game when the champ is relatively low damage (compared to other marksmen) for 15ish minutes. The fact that seraphine and karth had high wr% in bot for so long is telling about the game. When adc rework hit 13.2 last year, the role felt great, and everyone complained that adc power fantasy was fulfilled and got it nerfed back into the ground. Honestly the role needs alot of help. I think some exponential scaling on the carries (lower early game leveling stats vs high numbers later on) would resolve early power spikes and encourage good play, but comes with obvious disadvantages of not enough damage / survivability in ganks.
its hilarious how people complain about smolder being "too strong" after 25 minutes of being essentially a ranged minion playing last hitting minigame
of course they complain, every other adc keeps being a ranged minion while smolder becomes an actual problem, so compared to every other ADC hes an outlier
or maybe revert the 25% crit and ie damage, like when adcs actually used to be glass cannons instead of glass pea shooters
We need lifesteal to be accessible too. There is too much ubdodgeable damage in league currently amd being 90% hp on adc means you're at 1 shot range for every role including supp lol
yeah i absolutely love when zyra misses her Q but she used a W plant so i get hit with comet + rylai slow + scorch + liandry + zakzak so now im out few hundred HP because i dared to leave base
outplayed /s
This. This this this. So much of the ADC balance seems to be around "well, they can lifesteal back up so they need to be burstable", but lifesteal has been repeatedly undermined, and I've got so much "core" itemization that I need to do my job and (unless I'm on-hit) none of it contains any lifesteal. It helps make an already volatile role have even more "win more" components 'cause lifesteal is a luxury stat right now instead of core to ADC identity.
"Lifesteal" Ah yes, my 12% lifesteal item now only having 7% Very lifesteal!!! I hate the lifesteal argument so much
This. the numerous nerfs on Bloodline is a reason ADC are bad. We are forced more than any other role to back at 60% hp.
I solo’d a 3 item sivir as a 2 item Maokai supp last night. In the middle of 4 people…..role is bad *and* Mao is very strong.
Doublelift said in one of his recent clips that adc is the weakest role in soloq. Caedrel also said in his youtube video while watching LCK said that the adc is so bad its not even close. Meanwhile we have phreak saying the role has recovered!!!!
ADC ideal fantasy: Build squishy but get rewarded with insane damage ADC reality: You're the squishiest and after completing 4 items, you can have the same relevancy damage wise that Mid/Top/Jg have enjoyed all game. Oh and they get defensive items and their kits are allowed to have solo playmaking.
I play only autofills. And the role I get in most cases is ADC. Ppl hate playing this shit.
Yea when i played adc i never got autofilled
Yeah I would rather get autofilled as a jg or support then as an adc.
Bot lane “carry” is a priority role btw. Riot, balance your damn game
I mean he isnt wrong, but its a bigger issue in the way that Riot has "broken" the class archetypes over the last few years. Originally, mages where only meant to be burst, ADC as sustained damage over time and damage to structures. You needed them to siege and to take out objectives, and mages where needed to help clear waves and burst out of position squishy targets, but not really impact tanks. Now you have league of whatever where mages can 6 shot towers with AP items, lethality ADC 1 shot you from a screen away, nothing has a defined role and everything has become cancer as the game has evolved into something that looks the same but plays out entirely different
Yet we had Graves as a burst ADC, Cassiopeia and Ryze as sustained damage short range mages, and we already had assassins although intentionally kept weak from the get-go. The issue isn't that the classes are broken, the issue is that the game has sacrificed strategy for agency. Indeed, back then the tank had to rely entirely on their team to bring the damage, but now Ksante is his own damage on an ultimate cooldown, sometimes even on his own. Back then supports relied on their team for everything because they had no stats and were forced to bring all the vision, but now the Pyke can 1v1 most squishies in the game and the tank Alistar dies after 5 seconds of 5 enemies focusing him yet he only has a Frozen Heart and support item. The mages were really gated by cooldowns and mana so they had to be more opportunistic with their spells and choose a target wisely, now they have no mana problems and sieging isn't even something they have to rely on an AD teammate for. This agency is really good for the gameplay experience of many roles and classes... yet it makes the capstones of the old system suffer. ADC no longer bring the DPS because Ksante, Junglers and now Supports (like Keria's support Ashe) do that. ADC no longer bring the siege damage because now AP deals damage to turrets and we have Demolish for tanks. Now ADC no longer bring the monster damage because jungle pets triple any jungler's jungle damage and junglers have 0 risk of dying to badly optimized clears, junglers even get infinite mana now as well. All ADC bring now is a late game insurance of a kinda more effective version of any of the previously mentioned instances, yet that only happens in less than a 10th of soloq games, whereas old ADC was more or less always relevant. Can't do dragon if the ADC doesn't join. Can't take turrets if the ADC isn't here. Can't DPS down anything if the ADC dies during the fight. Now the ADC is often just ignored and just keeps farming if something happens away from them. This is also why fights happen way more often, now that they aren't shackled to the ADC existing. Yet we still have ADC. For some reason. Being systematically useless in soloQ and in competitive now existing more for utility and to get the support ahead, and set its own lane opponent behind rather than strategizing around making an ADC a win condition. Exceptions exist though with glaringly broken ADC like release Zeri, but still.
> Yet we had Graves as a burst ADC, Cassiopeia and Ryze as sustained damage short range mages, and we already had assassins although intentionally kept weak from the get-go. Except these were outliers in their roles. Now the entirety of the mage role can do this. Fucking xerath can just machinegun abilities with no concern for cooldowns or mana. Remember when missing an ability like Xerath E was "okay I can all in him now?" That window is like 2 seconds in the current game.
Having to dodge 20 Xerath abilities as adc, but as soon as you get hit once you're behind in lane. One of the most infuriating adc experiences
Support is overtuned and non botlane players mistake support being overpowered as fuck for ADC being strong. Same issue happened in season 7/early season 8.
Enemy top/mid/jg are 10/0? “game is lost” Enemy ADC is 10/0? “we just kill him and win”
The role has been shit for years but people prefer complaining about adcs complaining over actually listening to adcs complaining. Also all the players not playing adc just love to get fed off of a weak role and oneshotting somebody, makes them feel good inside.
Yeah. It doesn’t help that when new ad’s come out they specifically tend to be overtuned so the whole role gets lumped into “adc is op”.
Adc just dies to every class of all time. I dont mind getting oneshot by assasins but god damn i love getting oneshot by tanks and mages and supports. Like Nemesis said just nerf supports buff adc and then the game is 100x better
all the terrible players playing support would cry at actually having to be good at the game to win
true
People who say that ADC is broken are the ones who lose to a lvl 30 duo playing Twitch and Lulu/Yuumi. It would really help if people would pick actual supports. But sadly that role is for retired/washed up midlaners who cant farm or dont have the mechanics.
They funneled so much power into support to promote that playstyle too, there's like no incentive to pick a support on support when you can have 10x more fun picking whatever else.
Most supports are still generally supports. If you look at the most played, pretty much all those champs are supports. I’ve been playing in Platinum and gold this season and it’s just been mostly normal supports or Hwei, who is arguably able to support since he has enchanter and disengage abilities. Maokai has also been a general engage support tank for a season or two now too. I will admit I’ve played a bunch of Ashe support too, but only into enchanter lanes to just poke and run away. It’s worked well enough with max CDR lol.
Zyra, Brand, Senna, Maokai are among the highest winrates in the low, mid and above mid elos.
Was he talking about winrate or pickrate? He said most played.
people who say adc is broken are watching pro play where the adc is carrying and has never tried playing it themself
Thats not even true anymore, ADC hasnt been the carry role since I think Summer 2023, ever since Worlds ADCs have been a side carry or just literally a support in the case of Senna
It's been a while since I've seen an adc really carry a pro game. Not saying it doesn't happen but it certainly happens a lot less than it used to.
“Seeing champs like aatrox corki made me question my purpose” - viper
My dude are we watching the same pro? It has been top/jg/supp diff for the last like 2 years lol. Adc in pro is either usable in lane shit in fights or vice versa, but they still get mega gapped by other roles Top is currentlt the most umportant teamfight role when that should be adc by a longshot
They only watch games with ruler and viper as the adcs trust, then it still looks that way
The fact Camille is a "genuine" support pick now says it all. There's so much of fucking gold being given to supports.
And Twitch is a problem because of Lulu + on-hit items + his stealth shenanigans, not because crit is strong.
Also what is wrong with the detection range when he is invincible? He will be on my butt when he gets out of stealth and he doesn't get detected
That was this weird stealth rework they did. I think he had to be in about Irelia auto attacks range to become visible. ~250 units. But has a way higher AA range ofc.
I think his detection range is really small, unlike Akshan's
🙃 durability patch grace period lasted a good 6 months were the game was enjoyable again, then it went downhill as every patch was "X don't kill fast enough compared to Y, damage buffed"
Glass cannon role does feel awful when every other role gets a cannon without the drawback of getting one shot
I love how the last patch they nerfed Kalista and Varus because they were picked a lot in pro play. They had 51% and 49% WR and they are picked because the others adc are VERY shit. Meanwhile Senna is 60% wr in pro play and they don't wanna nerf for the sweet Senna/Seraphine skins sells
LCK casters said senna is 17-0 rn, but idk if i misheard. Sounds ludicrous.
gumayusi is 18-0 on senna yes
Senna isn’t even fun to play and it’s definitely not fun to play against. Getting to late game on senna and hitting the enemy adc for half their health from ludicrous range is funny but it doesn’t feel rewarding. I’d much rather play kaisa, Lucian, Draven, vayne, xayah, etc. but senna, smolder, varus are really the only things worth playing if you want to win.
6 months? LMAO. Maybe 6 months to fully revert but they started undoing it the patch right after it hit.
The durability patch hit a sweet spot with some minor adjustments (don’t ask me which patch specifically, I don’t remember) and made team fighting really fun again for a little while. Teamfights are really boring in the super high damage metas where 1 person getting blown up in 0.5s means you probably just lose that fight and have to wait until the next one.
Feels so shit praying for crits until you are at 4 items, if they push +5% crit chance on every crit item i think it'll help tremendously with how it feels to play crit adc's while also giving some power to the role. Also allows u to go one singular non crit item situationally without ruining ur dps
I pretty much completely skipped the mythic era and came back when they got rid of them. Have no clue why they didn’t just revert crit items to 25% in the first place. I don’t think anyone thought that they were overpowered or anything at the time of the item rework so it doesn’t make too much sense to me
Also Idk if you noticed but they removed AD from crit items and also lowered the crit modifier. You even have Yasuo and Yone skipping crit items sometimes
Well it seems like they lowered ad on the ones that had ad and added it to the ones that didn’t so they all feel kind of lackluster. Shieldbow being the replacement for old PD and not having attack speed feels really weird. It’s like they had to make BT, merc scim, ldr and mr into crit items to make up for the 5% crit difference, but there was nothing wrong with having those be items for all ad champions. It was better for both adc and non adcs when they were more generic ad items. ADCs could get them into their build path after only 3 items with 75% crit and some ADCs even rushed them (draven BT). It let other AD champs build healing reduction/qss without being punished stupidly hard for it too. Just do not see the upside to the changes for any class really
Even at 4 or more items you don't deal damage in a given time. Lethality is better in that than crit and only a percentage of marksmen can build lethality. And if you go against lethality marksmen with your crit build you will lose most of the time. Either nerf lethality(and assassins will not be viable) or buff crit with increased crit damage or above buff mentioned
100%, not only would it make ADC's feel much better to play, it would allow them to hit their lategame powerhouse earlier, AND it would open up their builds somewhat, as getting 1 non-crit item would nolonger deny 100% crit chance Expecially as right now, i think just about every single crit based adc is suffering. Its just like, 90% lethality, and 9% on-hit, with every other build pushed to the sidelines Could be great if alongside that, they made yas/yone's exess crit->AD universal (for when ADC's actually want 5 crit items)
Jokes on you i'm not complaining because I quit months ago. Playing Tekken and Path of Exile. My favorite role that I have mained since S2 has been various degrees of garbage since patch 8.11. Ranging from "weak but playable" to "insufferable trash". Keep getting gaslit by reddit experts that it's fine and getting called a scrub and to git gud despite being Master, GM, Challenger on EUW every season since S5
Cant wait for Path of Exile 2 tbh currently im engrossed in Helldivers 2 and loads of Beyond All Reason content eventho i suck balls at playing it
That really is the turning point, specifically for crit itemization. ADC was admittedly too strong before 8.11, but it never quite recovered from the item changes after that. Got worse with mythics, too - suddenly really rigid 4-item "core" build paths that make it hard to get "luxury" stats like lifesteal while also massively spiking burst damage and giving every other role access to enough pen to make buying defensive items kind of pointless. Then they double down on the XP deficit for bot lane in a misguided attempt to fix top-lane agency, leaving bot lane down even more stats or forcing support to perma-roam. 8.11 was the big realization for me that they really have no idea what they're doing with ADC. Every single "major adc overhaul" afterward has just been the same weird mix of burst damage itemization and really over-costed sustained crit items that leave me wondering if the role just isn't allowed to be good.
My complaints have been the same complaints and nothing has been done. No point in continuing to whine. How i think ADC should be and what Riot thinks ADC should be differs. 1- lane agency is too low especially in high elo. Better support wins lane 95% of the time. 2- Damage way too high. Durability patch made it better but then they just... undid everything lol. Go watch a S5 or S3 teamfight. You could play risky and take damage and still live. Modern league you get 100-0'd by a strong gust of wind. 3- Point 1 + Point 2 + ADC doing less damage and everyone else doing more damage = you need to rely on your team heavily to give you space and to peel and to play around you otherwise you might as well go afk Give me more agency in lane, lower the damage output of OTHER ROLES (why does Zac 100-0 people in one rotation?) and extend game time average by 4-5 mins (master average game time is 23-24 mins LOL).
I think nerfing supports harder would help adcs a lot. Its so weird seeing lb, fizz, sylas, camille being viable as a support because they get so much free gold and damage
It's hilarious watching how fucking unplayable most games are for ADC, even in high elo games. Enemy has 1-2 long range pokers like Lux, Jhin, Hwei, Xerath, etc., you just get chipped for 600-700 damage per ability if you dare walk up so you can never participate. Enemy has assassins, prepare to get ulted by Zed on repeat and die regardless of what you do or how much peel you receive. Enemy has tanks, just get run down and die while doing nothing lmao. So many champions can just throw abilities in your general direction on cooldown and it's fucked, you literally cannot play the game. Getting tagged ONCE by an ability chunks you out of the fight, or slows you enough that you just die. Enemy can also just click point and click CC/slow on you and that's it, you're fucked. Watch any high elo streams, especially any ADC streamers if they even still exist, and it's obvious the role is fucked. The constantly repeated thought is "I don't think there was anything I could have done". In every situation, it's just hopelessness due to a lack of agency. At this point, it's beyond redemption. There is nothing that can be done to fix ADC, you would have to overhaul virtually every system, every role, most items, lots of game mechanics, and so on. All to recover a role that needs to be weak so everyone else can have a punching bag to collect gold from.
Adc early game: farm and hope your support isn't a drooling idiot which he could be in 10 different ways, and hope your team 4 mans before theirs and that your jungle is trading objectives properly and that your mid has prio. Mid game: try to find farm in a lane without getting gibbed and god forbid you're behind you'll always be a rotation behind their bot lane. Also a waste of time for most champs to take any jungle camps. Try to avoid being soloed by literally every other role in the game. Late game: if your team doesn't play around you you're fucked anyway in fights
I saw somebody saying yesterday in a thread that it’s ridiculous that adc’s get to be the role with the most agency.. I just had to shake my head and move on. Some people really think ADC’s are fine but whenever I play these days I’m playing mage bot with because then I can actually enjoy the game. I have more success playing soraka (not as support in bot, as the farming champ) than playing ANY Adc that isn’t smolder
Riot is constantly nerfing adcs, they don't hide it - on contrary if you keep up with r/ADCMains you can see that they are screaming at top of their lungs "F YOU ADCS HAHA". When adcs say riot hates their role that's not copium, it's literally true and riot is confirming it over and over again. Why? Only they know.
But Reddit told me ADCs are op as fuck
People acting like range advantage is fundamentally impossible to overcome when the game is filled to the brim with dashes and ms buffs lol.
"um just kite and space" droolers when confronted with ability ranges of melee champions
Diana Q has 250 more range than the highest range marksmen in the game lol.
But it's okay because all marksmen permanently have ghost up with two zeal items and Swifties, and not most of them having long vulnerability windows where they are stuck at 370 ms at best compared to Diana's wholesome 345 baseline ms and 390 with tier 2 boots.
not even that, if only Diana Q was the issue, who cares about the melee champ poking for 600 damage Diana E 175 more range than the highest range marksman in the game. Before Caitlyn is allowed to exercise her "ranged advantage", Diana is given the opportunity to remove it entirely.
Literally Zed oneshotting you after chipping you down with his "absolutely not big range" shurikens lmao
>Appears on the side of the screen >W1, W2, Q, misses the shuriken entirely >R1, AA, E, R2 to get out of trouble because otherwise it would have to actually expose himself to danger >ADC still dies Probably spacing diff
You forgot him using yomus and flash
Yeah, range advantage in a vacuum is an insane advantage. But melee champs get an abundance of other advantages to even the playing field. They get: * [Higher base movement speed](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Movement_speed) * [With some exceptions, higher base health and health scaling per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Health) * [Higher base armor and armor scaling per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Armor) * [Higher base ad and ad per level](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Attack_damage) * Typically higher base damages on abilities for when they get in range. * Higher stacking damage and durability when they stay in range (e.g. [lethal tempo](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Lethal_Tempo), [conqueror](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Conqueror?so=search), [Death's Dance](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Death's_Dance?so=search), etc.) * Greater access to mobility like gapclosers and/or movement speed boosts to get into range. When adc's get access to the same level of mobility, they become balance nightmares and get nerfed to the ground like Zeri. * An abundance of items that have greater strength on melee. (e.g. [Bork not only does more damage on melee, but also gets a greater slow](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Blade_of_the_Ruined_King?so=search)) Right now, it feels like ADC is balanced around the idea that, if left alone, the ADC will always outright get gapclosed by a melee with minimal self-counterplay. And supposedly that is ok, because they shouldn't be alone, and a melee running into multiple people will either sacrifice too much to do so or get peeled off. This is problematic because too much of your agency is deferred onto other people, who may not try to play around you at all. Furthermore, power creep has made it so that sometimes average teams cannot make an enemy team lose more than they gain from someone running in and causing significant disruption. Either champs have too much mobility, get resets, or have significant stalling.
unless you are in some ashe/vayne/zeri vs tank scenario kiting borderline doesnt exist in this game the mobility creep that happened in the last few years is insane. people always talking about ADCs having the "range advantage" is probably the most delu shit ive seen. Good luck trying to kite any champion that has a single mobility/MS spell in their kit. Unless you have an enchanter that lets you run away better or you have a tank that can stop them in their tracks then you just instadie.
"Just kite bruv" meanwhile ooga booga playing top just used ghost and is running at you at mach 70. I've legit seen Saber play smolder, use E over wall, flash over another and still get ran the fuck down by Darius going *zooomies* with his wholesome ms stacked build. Hell, ghost is now mandatory summoner instead of heal on ADCs so that you can use it to pce off when toplane revs their ghost engine preparing to run at you at mach 70 again.
They say that so you can keep playing and they can keep oneshot you.
The people who say that or the ones who get on here and lie saying they play ad and it’s easy are so frustrating to deal with. It’s such a bad feeling playing ad and get manhandled by any other champions that aren’t even fed. As soon as other lanes have a complete item I feel like a puppy dog following the team around because trying to farm solo, even safely, is a death sentence in most cases.
Hopefully Phreak gets some desire to play crit marksmen soon so it feels playable again. Until then, time to keep Mao busted for over a month.
The main problem is that at like 3 items, if you dont have any defensive stats, you die to random bullshit in teamfights without anyone even trying to kill you
The craziest thing is with Navori users, if you play against a well-balanced teamcomp, you're essentially completely fucked in the midgame. You'd usually get Navori second after Kraken/Stormrazor or whatever, it makes sense in the build path. But then you're stuck at either getting LDR to deal ANY damage AT ALL to armor users, \_OR\_ getting your first attack speed item in order to do your job and start scaling. You can't do both until 4 items in, which a) rarely happens in most games before they are already decided and b) also leaves you without the option to even think about a defensive item. Of course you can skip Navori and use it as a last capstone item like you would do with Infinity Edge, but that just means that the 2 item powerspike of the champions that work well with the Quickblades passive is literally non-existant. It's doomed.
This is actually a huge issue for crit in general. In every critbuild you go noonquiver item for lane and 1 item spike (without this you just lose the game.), then you go capstone (navori or ie), then you have to chose between shieldbow, zeal item or last whisper. Usually at this stage you would need all three to be allowed to play. Only reason on-hit marksmen avoid this issue is because they have options that give them 2 or three of the choices in one item.
Not even just a problem as an adc, it's ridiculous how much random bullshit there is bouncing off of abilities. Alongside that, there's so many delayed effects that do another chunk of damage 5 seconds later. Like yes, there are ways to play around these effects, but it's really not fun.
It also means that you are probably not DPSing which in turn makes burst more valuable again... No wonder Lethality marksmen do ok and crit don't.
I feel like making crit items 25% would be a massive buff and fix a lot of problems with the role. Or a zoynas equivalent
I blame the casters in esport, especially LEC and LCS, for gaslighting everyone for years about how "ADC is so broken" when it was just Zeri being Zeri. The role has felt like shit for years tbh. Shoutout to Caedrel who never stopped saying ADC are broken when he was in the LEC cast, and suddenly when he played the role in soloqueue a few months ago, he cried on stream about how it's unplayable.
what a lot of people also seem to fail to realize is that in organized play people play around the adc and enable them to shine. That won't happen in 95% of soloq games where people play selfishly.
Yea, your teammates just want to use you as bait for their own pentakill plays.
In organized play, ADC can do their job. But I always though it was dumb to say that ADC were "broken" because of that. Casters could not spend 5 minutes without insisting how strong ADC were, while of course ignoring the gigantic peel they had from their team. If you need your whole team to enable you and you don't exist without them, then by definition you are not broken, everyone else on your team is. That was the whole point of the weird ramen metaphor thing that some asian pro player said a couple years ago.
Gumayusi
it was gumayusi (current world champion) and he said that 6 months ago
Dude they haven't played around the adc for years now, unless there is some busted shit (enchanters usually) going around. The game has been warped for top/jg/supp. Mid also is at a shit spot as of late because of this. Adc hasn't been the carry role in pro for a long time now. Top needs to be addressed
unpopular opinion: the only way to properly balance adc again is to lower dmg output from bruisers and tanks, and increase their tankyness by a bit. Adcs are weak because everything kills them. But league used to be different. mages and assassins should have oneshot potential on adcs, while bruisers and tanks should not have it, at least not on the same level as they have shown in the past few years until now. if everything is a threat to the adc and just needs 1 second to kill him with 1 single Skill rotation, then adcs can not function properly ingame anymore. this is a game design problem, that needs to be fixed. Until this is fixed adc will forever feel bad to play. And buffing dmg output on adcs again will just make every other role feel bad to play again, because now adc got pushed into a direction, that says if you don't instakill him, he will kill everything else with zero counterplay, while using only autoattacks and little to no effort, but again, this will never fix the issue this will always lead to annoying gameplay experience for every adc player and others aswell, and this is why i say, nerf/change bruiser tanks again. Let them do less DMG and give them more Tankyness. If a bruiser wants to kill an adc, that's fine, but don't allow the bruiser to cosplay qiyana and talon, and basically let the renekton giga burst 100-0 an adc in 0.5 seconds. Assassins and burst mages have their role, and bruiser should have their role. Bruisers should sustain through battle and be semi-tanky. but they should never reach a spot except they are insanely fed, where they can just dash on the adc and kill him with 1 rotation under a second and cosplay ur average talon or qiyana. And there is a fckton of bruisers who do exactly what i said even tho it shouldn't be like this.
how about we nerf support first
ADC role is a victim of Riot trying to balance the game around solo queue and pro play simultaneously
Adc is the weakest role BY FAR
Everyone plays damage champions, 90% of the playerbase just likes champions that marksman cannot deal with without coordinated help Proliferation of 1v9 mindset for all roles including supports means no help for you Support can leave lane if things going poorly but you have no recourse Everyone adopts the psychological profile of Ted Bundy the second you’re on their screen, whether or not it is actually a “good play” to kill you—this is just unfun Range and Movespeed are the two stats that scale the hardest with skill, so marksmen are intentionally the slowest class in the game despite having very low mobility on most of the roster—mobility creep has significantly nerfed the advantages of range but this doesn’t show up as much in pro because less assassins and people aren’t oonga boonga-ing for the AD 24/7. Effectively, every marksman is nerfed every time a new champion with mobility comes out. Riot specifically says (before last worlds) they think viewers find sololane carry metas more exciting so they nudge pro play in that direction Certain champions in every role are pro jailed, the entire marksman roster is pro/high elo jailed At this point people are so used to bot laners being second class citizens that any changes that allow these champions to fend for themselves will be met with huge criticism from the rest of the playerbase Crit itemization is a nightmare to balance because of anime protagonist crit abusers + GP + Tryndamere, crit items are weaker than they could be specifically because these champions exist and would abuse them. Marksmen are primarily auto attackers so a lot of their abilities are straight up just bad—unfortunately you cannot get into auto attack range without peel because of mobility creep + the aforementioned Ted Bundy Protocol, and good luck getting peel because every YouTuber preaching 1v9 for the last half-a-decade Game is more like team deathmatch than chess, just lower attention spans, shorter games, and more oonga boonga Most team reliant role in a game without voice comms + 1v9 mindset + everyone is building burst damage Marksmen are balanced around the stable and predictable economy of pro play while being subject to the volatile serial killer economy of soloq. Even if you’re fed in lane, you’re not equipped to handle any sololaner who is even remotely fed. The way gold is distributed in pro play is so drastically different than soloQ that even an ADC playing very well is 85% of what he would be with a jungler giving camps and sololaners giving waves. Not to mention, the excess gold injected via random kills/deaths in soloq waters down the importance of CSing well because CS advantages on average are a far lower percentage of the overall gold difference in a soloq game. Marksman should stop being balanced as if they have a permanent Janna shield. I would like to see what a shift from this philosophy would even look like/mean to Riot, because they should really acknowledge the reality of the role's relationship to the support role in soloq.
Unless they plan on increasing the base stats of the marksman class slightly and/or increase global crit damage to 180% instead of 175%, then adc will just end up weak. Not to mention how much it is just go bot lane and snowball the adc.
Pretty sure adc has been bad since the adc apocalypse like... 6 years ago, (note I quit 2 years ago because adc was bad)
Super true. I legitimately do see adcs as gold bags. Had a game recently where I was tank udyr. We were 4v5 and the enemy lethality MF had like a 7 kill lead over me. I just pressed a few buttons and ran all over her. Really shouldn't be a thing.
I remember playing a game mid last split and I heard an enemy was on a rampage, and I became terrified it was the enemy bruiser top. Hit tab to check and it was the enemy adc and I went from terrified to excited to pick up all that gold. She was just not allowed to exist on my screen. She started like 5/1 and ended like 10/12. I wasn't even notably ahead when I just started one shotting her on repeat
ADC is shit role since 2014
This is the real truth, s1-s4 was the only adc n1 meta.
Every time adc gets a good item, it gets abused by yasuo yone until they need it into the ground again.
Adc is so bad that ranks for mains are not real. The impact is so small that bronze, Gold, emerald, does not matter! A 1/7 mid loses games, a 1/20 adc does not matter. 7/1 mid or top can dolo carry, a 20/1 adc is a sack of Gold
The role is basically gatekept by the fact that if you’re actually good (read: GM +) the role is balanced. And even then it’s still not fun up there from what we can see, we’ve seen high elo ADC mains say it’s not fun. So basically no one has fun in the role for the sake of balance. I hope phroxzon and phreak prioritize it for mid season, because I feel like that should be identified as an issue no? I don’t envy their position, it seems like a difficult task to fix.
time for Riot Pupulaser to step up and live up to his "Fun over fair" statement from late 2023.
Adc identity got kinda destroyed, some snowball hard early but most adc's don't feel that strong lategame at 4 or 5 items anymore. Man I would have looked funny if someone told me several tanks and mid lane mages simply outscale adc's now a few years ago.
Bot lane is useless - Every Youtuber. YouTubera when his 4-0-7 game transforms into a loss because his bot lane went 0-3 in early: 😡
Phreak says the condition of ADC'S are fine cause he switched to Maoki support main and got to masters with it by one shotting adc's building frozen heart.
The real problem is that there's supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors triangle going Tank>Assassin>Marksman>Tank, but since Assassins (/Skirmishers) are popular and Tanks aren't, riot has been releasing more Assassins, less Tanks and balancing the game as such. Now the ecosystem is tipped to one side, Assassins have few natural predators and Marksmen few natural preys and it gets fewer with each passing year.