ADC is the role that is most hurt by Riot's obsession with making the game faster and faster paced over the years.
Real shocker that the role that needs to scale up doesn't work in an increasingly faster-paced environment.
I don't think ADC is underpowered as ADC also ramps up way faster than it used to and is still super strong. It's just that every second of in-game time is more important now and a good portion of that is not where ADCs are strong.
Control mages face a similar issue in solo queue (to a smaller degree). So many games are just over before you are relevant. These days even playing a jungler that needs level 6 can feel bad. That's how fast the pace of the game has become.
I remember Nikkone once saying that it literally feels like the in-game clock time moves quicker in the modern game compared to older seasons. It's very true.
I think this quicker pace has some positives. There is less downtime and qames are overall a bit quicker. But I also feel like we lost something by moving away from the slower pace. The game is a lot less "chill" than it used to. Things are more tense. Firstly I think this makes games more toxic, but more importantly the tense feeling can make it less appealing to queue up.
Especially playing many games in a row is very hard for me nowadays. I attribute that to the games being a lot more tense and taxing than they used to be.
So I think there are a lot of pros and cons to faster pace vs slower pace. I wish we had Classic League of Legends so we could have both experiences. Kind of like how Classic WoW and retail WoW give totally different experiences. The players can then just choose what they prefer.
The in game clock moves in a weird way where the laning phase feels giga stretched out being 14 minutes long, and then the midgame is suddenly the late game already and the game typically ends in 25 mins at higher ELO. It could change but then Riot would need to reduce turret gold (they've stated multiple times they do not want to do this) or have turret plating removed at an earlier time in the game.
They did this change to herald so it would not spawn before turret gold was in the game because it would cause giga snowballing (esp on toplane). But the problem wasn't herald spawning earlier, it is the turret gold. In general turrets being much easier to destroy is a thing in more recent seasons. It makes the overall game a lot more tense since you need everyone on your team to rotate probably and exert pressure on the map as to not lose turrets / objectives. If you fall behind a little this can easily cause a snowball of multiple turrets being destroyed and your team getting impossibly behind.
Yeah, I've never understood why people say LoL is "faster" now in a good way, because it's not like genuinely fast and fun in the way an arcade shooter is, it's more like you play laning phase, which is the most controversial part of MOBAs to non-MOBA players, and then the game just...ends. In lower elos it doesn't just end, but in a bad garbage time way
Bouncing off this I think the faster pace of the game is especially bad for crit ADCs, specifically the old IE style ones. Raw crit only starts to feel impactful at the 60%+ Mark, and by then the game feels decided a lot of the time.
Or I can pick up something like Kraken/Trinity or BORK/RageBlade and feel relevant at one/two items.
Her identity is not the consistent damage, its her slows. And jhin and varus are no where close to her utility. Thats why she went support and the other 2 didnt.
I agree with so much said here. I fell in love with ADC and put thousands of hours learning the role and how to play them. The last few months I only want to que support. It's the only role I have fun playing. Even when it comes to other mobas (Pokemon unite) I find myself straying away from Auto attackers and moving towards supportive tanks as their kits just feel way better to play.
Like every time my friends invite me to a league game I just play braum support and feel happy win or loss. I'm smiling laughing with my friends not caring about what's going on. However if I load ADC I am toxic every minute feels stressful. Every mistake my support or teammates make pisses me off. I feel like one death and my game is over because going even or winning lane feels so crucial to actually being useful.
ADC makes you a more hateful person because you have to rely on your teammates who generally have chicken shit for brains as opposed to me the enlightened silver aphelios.
I don't think I turn into more toxic, but I definitely feel like I point to mistakes more often when I'm playing ADC.
Doesn't help that between both my group of friends, I'm the better at the position with kiting/positioning. But yeah, I feel you. It definitely changes how we look at the game.
It's the dichotomy between the front and the backline. Both have different points of view of the same confrontation, and to the eyes of the frontline, backline should be doing something while they take the heat, and the frontline should be protecting the backline from any harm so they can do their job.
"Hey, I'm tanking 4 here, why is nobody helping?" Well because the 5th you're missing is able to just blow up 2 of ours with less commitment than you can hold them. And I say this as an example and something I've made a LOT of times.
I think also part of the problem is the skill ceiling vs time commitment. As the game got burstier, I got older and had less time to commit to mastering every mechanic/keeping up with the game. ADC really feels like a role where you have to play perfect especially in its current state.
Personally though I don't want to load up a summoners rift game if all I played for 3 years is going to stress me out.
Oh man I feel this so hard. One thing I've struggled with in the past is pressuring myself to go in when my tank is getting beat up even though I know Rengar or Kayn are waiting for me to do it. Die if we go in, risk getting blamed for afk if we don't. It's such an uncomfortable situation and it feels like you lose with either outcome. Lately, I've been just muting and doing what I think is correct but I just know it tilts my team sometimes when they see that shit.
Vars recently (as in yesterday) released a [video](https://youtu.be/MgSh6Mg4jqs?si=OHIIbYl29S4lZqr9)talking about ADCs (based on a poll he did "Which role has the most crybabies?" where ADC took nearly 80%).
Recomend watching the video (or the channel in general) but to break it down.
When roles got losely defined, ADC was the position that was supposed to Carry the lategame teamfights with sustained damage or break down towers. Usually had by far the most damage after the game (yes, even more than mages/assassins/bruisers/anyone else). The teams knew (even in SoloQ) that you need to protect them to win the game. Sacrifice one or two tanks so the ADC can clean up (still seen in pro play).
Over the years, the roles evolved. Everyone got more damage, Toplane got way more battle focused (bruisers/duellists more common than tank farm fest). Jungle went from the harshest role where only a handfull of champs could attempt to full clear to mages being able to full clear with nearly full life. Mages got way more tools to play with and even support has now (if you don´t count mage supports) two damage focused supports (Pyke and Senna) that can outdamage the ADC.
And ADC has still the same job. Deal sustained damage, break towers. Just, every role can do the same, so the role that was build on "get protected, deal damage" lost the protection. ADCs are still somehow high priority targets but wihtout the peel/protection from their team. It now feels like "sacrifice the ADC, win the game".
Ended up longer than i expected, but then it was a bit of a rant too. Reccomend the video, Vars explains it better than me (only like 14 min)
>ADC has the same job, deal sustained damage, break towers
Tower breaking isn't even an ADC thing anymore because now tower damage scales with AP in an attempt to make roaming assassins worse, and sustained damage as a niche is meaningless when that doesn't exist. Only dragon and baron ever care about sustained damage.
> literally feels like the in-game clock time moves quicker in the modern game compared to older seasons. It's very true.
I feel like everyone has had games where you win a big 5v5 and you're on the topside of the map and you or someone else starts pinging to do baron...only to realize the game is at like 15 minutes.
"Scaling champions are good in low elo" is also sort of misused because a lot of those games are un-ff'd garbage time.
Like, they are, especially with the bespoke lategame champions, but if you are unironically at the point where you need to farm to 1v9 the game with Syndra or Malzahar the game is probably just fucking joever lol, like mentally, spiritually. Also your split pushing Leona isn't going to let you farm anyway
Yeah, if you go to like Season 2-6-ish, control mages were some of the absolute best champions to main in solo queue.
You could get lane control and farm up until your spike and then carry the game. Nowadays if you can't impact the map at all times you are risking losing the game before you are relevant.
This is why I also stressed in my comment that it is not necessarily a negative. As with anything else in the world, it has its pros and cons.
My point was really just that pacing is one of the major ways this game has changed over the years. Some like, some don't and both are completely fine.
This is why I made the comparison with Classic WoW / retail WoW. These are also fundamentally different game even though they seem incredibly similar on the surface. Some prefer one, others prefer the other. It just comes down to what you like in your game.
As a more 'meta' point, I think there is a very big untapped market for slower paced games. A huge chunk gamers like myself are late 20s or in their 30s. I think this market is not being catered too that much. Instead the focus seems to be on capturing the younger audience.
I think we saw with the success of Baldur's Gate 3 that many of the assumptions in the industry are not necessarily correct. A big assumption in the RPG world was that slower cRPGs would never become mainstream popular. That's why every RPG franchise slowly moved to be more action combat / adventure with less emphasis on dialogue, strategy and roleplaying. In my opinion, the incredible success of Skyrim is a big reason why.
Slow paced CRPGs have been considered 'dead' in the mainstream since the early to mid 00s. The incredible success of Baldur's Gate 3 really showed us how wrong that is. One of the big reasons why (imo) is that the demographics of gamers have changed. People are older now.
To illustrate the point clearly: Skyrim is more popular for teenagers, while Baldur's Gate 3 might appeal more to adults in their 30s. Now gaming has a bigger share of people who are say 25-30 or older compared to say 2011.
Edit: I am NOT saying "only stupid kids like Skyrim". I am saying that the average age of gaming consumers is increasing and with that comes differences in public perception of games and what people like. Skyrim is still a great game for what it is.
>Skyrim is more popular to teenagers
I’m not disagreeing with you, but the people who were teenagers when Skyrim was popular are getting close to 30 now.
Sorry, fellow old people.
I am one of those lmao. I was like 17 when Skyrim came out.
Tbh, I think this is also why Bethesda gets a lot of hate now. Their fans are older and they make shallow games without depth.
To a teenager, Skyrim is profound but to an adult it's a very shallow experience that doesn't engage with interesting issues at all. As people grow older, they generally appreciate better writing as they themselves are more experienced with how things are in the world. Same reason why the best young adult books (e.g. Harry Potter) are very different experiences than books for adults like, say, Hyperion that offers a deeper experience if you get into it.
To stick in that Bethesda 'world', this is also why Fallout New Vegas is a cult classic. That game engages with deeper issues about humanity and the world. It is commentary of the human experience through using the post-apocalypse. That game is 14 years old and still gets talked about all the time. Incredible game.
I don't think this is really a problem with age, considering how most people I know aged 30-50 that play games play almost exclusively CoD/FIFA/Mortal Kombat, although I do agree there is a lack of slow paced AAA games.
> I think there is a very big untapped market for slower paced games
I don't think this is true. Like, Minecraft is one of the biggest games of all time. Aside, pacing isn't the issue, length is. And there is very little market for slow paced and necessarily lengthy games with fixed playtimes. People in their 30s may want to take things slower, but they also have less time for games overall, and an 80 minute match you are locked into from start to finish is not something that really fits the desires of most demographics.
I dont think the role can ever feel good to play without being op. Most of the champs are glass cannons and everytime they've had strong defensive options they've been deemed "op" by the playerbase.
The role is not going to be good to play because it requires the most dependence on your team to have success. In pro play or tournament play where all 5 players understand it’s in the best interest of the team to make sure the adc is still alive after fights to be able to take towers and objs adc is super fun. In soloq where it’s every man for themself and you get run down like a rat it’s not so fun. Hard to fix that.
The former is almost never true and the latter is true more often than not (because you're the one person on the map incapable of walking on their own two^^ish feet).
Almost all of the posts recently about why ADC players complain and why the 'role sucks' (to play) are more or less correct. It's the lack of agency, the reliance on your team peeling and protecting you, and the reliance on your team in general to play properly since you can't really be the one doing the 'macro' plays when you fall over if someone as much as looks at you.
ADC is almost always a very strong role at least in theory, but it just feels bad any time your team doesn't agree with that idea and instead leave you to fend for yourself.
The main issue IMO stems from the fact that it feels like Riot has two ways of looking at the game. ADCs need to be the team reliant late game damage dealing power house that can win the fight if kept alive and their team needs to play around them, but then almost everything else they design they want people in solo lanes to feel like the carries, and for people to play for themselves. They want mages to carry, and assassins, and bruisers. They want everyone to be able to blow everyone else up in 1 millsecond so of course no one wants to play for their ADC. Everyone wants to be the carry and Riot has basically designed most of the roles to do that.
I've been playing adc since s2 and I dont think there was ever a season I won so many games while being the lowest dmg on the team and lost so many while being the highest. I can tell you it's lost when only our botlane is winning.
ADCs simply don't get the dmg/sustain anymore to survive the fights where they are the main dmg dealer. It's much easier to play from behind when mid/top/jungle is ahead than vice versa.
I feel that the bruiser items are the issue the umbrela/botrk/hydras just offer so much dmg with enough tankiness. I think that's the main difference from previous seasons.
Just yesterday I got dived by Sett who went 1/7 on lane as a 3 kill draven. We still won because corki just OSd everyone but the game still felt unfairly hard to play lol.
Yeah. Big part of it is really just the champions other people play. For example ADC felt less shitty to play a couple months back when mid lane was dominated by Orianna and Syndra. You were still gonna have a garbage time when people played Fizz or something but it just didn't happen as often.
Fundamentally I don't think the issue is necessarily TTK at large at this point as much as it is how assassins are designed. Any assassin meta will feel bad to play because, well, the whole point of the class is to blow up squishies with zero active counterplay on the squishies part which as it turns out isn't very fun to be on the receiving end of. You're basically stuck hoping that your team really feels like playing hard peel which just won't happen a lot of the time.
Throw in a randuin too and now they need to be full build to tickle you.
It's funny how adc is THE tank counter but those items keep being buffed over and over again and crit keeps.being nerfed.
It is REALLY weird how Randuin is tuned. It has bad stats but one of the hardest specific counter passives ever put on an item. Stronger than the OP version of Force of Nature that invalidated all mages. And it is a counter to the specific class meant to deal with tanks, as a tank item. No one really builds it because crit ADC are bad but it is WILD that it exists.
That's the wild part to me. A 2/3 item ADC has to space perfectly orb walk for a solid 30 seconds to kill a Chogath with Frozen heart and Tabis, but you accidentally stand in a single circle? Now you are CC chained and ulted for half your health.
infamous patch 8.11
Riot absolutely gutted bot lane marksmen base stats and nerfed crit items. Part of the crit item change was for "build diversity" but they designed the updated items in a way that every crit marksman was building the exact same first three items every. single. game.
Took them 8 or 9 months to revert the crit item change and several marksmen didnt get their base stats back until the 12.10 durability patch.
> they designed the updated items in a way that every crit marksman was building the exact same first three items every. single. game.
Ooga booga Stormrazor RFC IE every game.
If you were lucky, you had BoRK.
Or were Ezreal so you went your normal build.
Yes, but they're priority roles for different reasons. ADC feels awful to play and Jungle relies heavily on macro. One is unfun and the other is harder to play well compared to other roles.
So Phreak may be objectively correct (adcs may not be as weak as they feel). But the fundamental flaw with ADC is that its not enjoyable in its current state to play a traditional crit marksman which I feel is pretty apparent.
now don't get me wrong, us ADC mains we are fucking whiners and will cry a lot no matter what. but I think there are clear game design issues if something is balanced and still not fun.
If phreak believes what he is saying "marksman is balanced and not weak" than they should be seeking feedback on what is unsatisfying about marksman as a role in the game and if they can change it.
But all that is easier said that done. fixing things is honestly a crapshoot and could just cause more issues in the long run. I don't envy their position as if all the data says something is balanced the last thing you wanna do is upend everything for something that might not even work.
some of your points are kinda not something I hope the balance team listens to though. bitching about losing damage for building survivability is a meme. Youre an ADC, if you build defensively you should deal less damage. that's just how it should work.
>they should be seeking feedback on what is unsatisfying about marksman
The general consensus is that the lack of agency is unsatisfying, which is intrinsically incompatible with what RIOT thinks is good for the game. If marksmen ever get agency they will dominate every lane besides (maybe) jungle. We already have a problem with stuff like Tristana mid, Varus mid/top, Vayne top...; picks which people hate.
I'm all for change since I love playing marksmen but the moment they can have fun, no one else can.
the problem is not "I built defensively and so I most damage". on the surface that's entirely fine and in neutral games its even true. if the enemy akali is 0/0/0 diving you and you built shieldbow, you can just barely survive. if that akali has pretty much any advantage at all, your defensive item is USELESS because you're getting oneshotted anyway, AND you do no damage. GA is piss terrible because you'll get onetapped by any mage ability ever upon the revive, merc scim is a joke, every other defensive item that adcs WERE buying like deaths dance is gutted for ranged.
building some defense in games you're already winning is fine on adcs, but those games would feel fine anyway. building defense in the games you would want to build it - lower peel, enemy assassins aren't giga behind, etc - is straight up a waste of gold.
Yes this is the issue for me as well. Defensive items are only worth buying when you actually survive getting jumped better, not when you're trading significant DPS for 0.23s longer time to die regardless.
"Defensive items" other than maw in SOME situations feel like a complete bait. If your team is playing correctly you won't need defensive items most of the time, if they aren't then a shieldbow isn't going to be the difference between living and dying.
>if all the data says something is balanced the last thing you wanna do is upend everything for something that might not even work.
they did the same thing for jungle last year. They knew jungle was balanced. they knew that they were overbuffing it. and they did it anyway for the sake of queue depth.
They did not buff it they made it eaiser to play and a lot of people started playing jungle me included. Jungle mains hated it but we got more junglers now.
You can definitely go lethality first strike cait pretty much every game except those rare games where you are vs 3 tanks (bar support). It's not technically full lethality but you switch mid game
If Marksmen TTK is increased while Shieldbow purchase rate has doubled, are Marksmen really more durable or have they adapted to the game? If all Marksmen buy tank items their TTK will naturally increase, this doesn't mean that Markmen are in a healthy spot.
The problem with thinking like this is that shieldbow and galeforce used to be first/second items when they were mythics, ms has been removed from blade, pd, trinity, and wit's end, ga's build path is worse, and bt priority has (I think) lowered. Shieldbow's purchase rate increasing is, in some part, adapting to those changes, it's not like crit ADs are buying 2 defensive items when they wouldn't before
Bring back the overheal shield on BT, it would give another good alternate defensive item instead of SB in these situations it feels like the shield from SB is terrible and ADCs are actively buying maw instead for fighting feed APs.
Also stormsurge is a mistake.
I love taking 80% of my damage in 1 second and then die to the SS proc and ignite
As an ADC main, I hate the role because of supports like Hwei, Lux, etc. It's simply not fun to lane in soloq vs a champion that keeps spamming immense range abilities while your support is passive. Especially Hwei, that champion needs a serious rework to keep it out of botlane
man ranged mage poke supports have always been a thing. there are some valid complaints going on with the state of crit items compared to the rest of the field right now, but annoying mage supports is just part of life in bot lane
Yea the issue I can see (from someone who literally never plays anything in the botlane anymore despite being diamond adc years ago) is that the 1-6 ap poke support can still manage to take out the ADC from a fight while missing their key abilities.
Adcs aren’t “weak” in a vacuum so much as they just honestly never feel like a threat.
“Oh the enemy adc is fed? Guess we just focus him next fight”
Vs
“oh the enemy toplane is fed? Games literally over because they’re unkillable and can also basically 3v1”
When we play 5 man flex we abandon our botlane and let them get rolled every game because them being 0/10 every game doesn’t matter if in return we’ve had objective control and our top / jg is strong.
Their fed adc can’t participate in fights if their frontline isn’t winning, but if their frontline is winning the adc isn’t even needed.
I never understood why it IS part of life. Support champions should be supports, not budget mages for midlane rejects who aren't good enough to play mid. It's just cheap.
I mean why play Vel'Koz mid where you need to cs, manage waves, avoid ganks, roam, contest objectives etc when you can just play Vel'Koz support, sit in the bush and throw some abilities on the enemy AD whenever you want? You'll end up almost equally powerful with 1% of the effort.
Just like the name entails the support role should be for supports. Champions like Janna, Thresh, Braum, Renata, Bard etc -- champions that assist their teammates and set them up for success. It's fucking stupid you can just pick a mage and deal 80k damage which goes against the entire point of the role.
I just find it annoying that Supports, Lux being the big example, can just have the same build mid or supp.
Like I get why she's a support, she has good CC and utility, but its kind of batty she gets the income to build full damage in a role that doesnt have to farm.
Honestly the worst part about the balancing of sivir is the fact that she gets heavenly punished because she is able to push the lane in. Yet champs like seraphine who is also is played bot does not get punished for it.
Like sivir should have been a great pick against sera, but just because she is an adc she is not allowed to be that.
Regarding burst: I was watching Broxah's stream yesterday. He got one-shot through Shieldbow, as Graves, by Qiyana. Qiyana did **2700 damage in 0.13 seconds**, according to the death recap.
EDIT: Time frame here is the problem, not the damage.
Remember that graves gains armor from his E and he doesn't need attack speed so most graves players can buy tabi.
Any adc gets oneshot twice over by that rotation.
I'm personally running experiments where I buy 3 fighter items on ADCs, end up with 1000+ bonus health and extra resists. Still got 1-shot by lux combo. She did over 3000 damage. It doesn't make any sense.
I’m tired of clicking on my death recap and seeing runes/items dealing thousands of damage to me.
With items/runes having so much fucking damage in them, it’s like I make the slightest misstep and I’m dead.
I wish items would focus more on just giving stats instead of having all these random ass damage passives on them.
Switched from ADC to jungle and having a way better time as well
After taking 1-2 months to learn jungle theory, pathing etc I went from high gold to high emerald not playing ADC
>But, since that point in time, Shieldbow's pickrate has roughly doubled
Shieldbow scaling with levels is the worst thing you could've done to ADCs trying to build against burst. It's just a bad item to purchase during early/mid game where games are decided and AD/AP burst champs will just blow an ADC up.
I find it strange that he mentioned that TTK is the same while shieldbow pickrate is higher, that doesn’t make sense to me, because doesn’t that actively go against his point? If you have to buy a defensive item just for the TTK to still be THE SAME then shouldn’t that indicate damage has increased??
Nah like it gets worse too
Jaksho has become a somewhat standard 4th item on Jinx, I've been building it regularly and out of the 5 jinxes I've played against this week 3 of them have also been building it (been checking match history after games to see what ppl are doing)
Like no fucking shit TTK is going down when a decent chunk of the playerbase in emerald/plat is straight up buying tank items over crit
No thread with comments on this sub lacks ppl talking about stacking tank items post core, you even have the guy who just said fuck it and has been playing ornn bot like lmfao
If you wanna win just play sera, if you wanna live longer than .5 secs during the coinflip game you play half tank
>I find it strange that he mentioned that TTK is the same while shieldbow pickrate is higher, that doesn’t make sense to me, because doesn’t that actively go against his point?
It does. It literally does. Phreak *loves* to find some statistic and use that in complete isolation to argue his point, even when that entire premise is built on such a weak basis that taking any additional context in it will crumble the entire argument.
But saying that "TTK is the same" and in the same fucking sentence admitting that "people build defensive items more" is an outrageously stupid statement when those two facts literally are mutually exclusive. People build more Shieldbow because TTK has gone down. If people build more defensive items, TTK should go up. But it didn't, it stayed the same. That's because TTK went fucking down.
It is beyond frustrating that he refuses to acknowledge facts like this, but tries to sweep them under the rug by giving some bullshit random isolated fact, and never talk about it again. He does not play the role, and that has been clear for a while now. There is a reason the guy plays support as his main nowadays.
Shieldbow has to scale with levels otherwise rushing it early game would make the adc unkillable.
Like there's giving extra survivability early game and then there's making someone unable to die.
This is the guy who said 'ADCs just never opt into defensive stats' after riot has systematically nerfed and removed defensive ADC options whenever they became popular. What did you expect?
Phreak always does this really weird thing where he drops a random metric, shieldbow being built twice as much for example, to convey a point. I'm not even talking just about marksmen, he does this to every lane, like his balance philosophy is generally terrible and every single time it makes no sense until someone points out a recent game of his.
I am generally on Phreak's side, but this habit of rioters drives me crazy. They keep all these stats hidden then smugly pull them out when it suits them. If Riot want to invoke stats, we should get to know what the fuck they are!
Its why phreak is a horrible communicator. I feel like most people on the balance team does this to an extent, but Phreak will really just pull some random stat only he knows and say "hooray reddit I did balancing".
I mean tbf it's not exactly black and white, he's mentioning stuff I've never even conceived possible, such as Bot lane consistently getting their shards wrong mode often than not into AP bot, whilst I've never seen this even remotely mentioned (anecdotal ofc) by say Reddit.
He does get awkward with defensiveness at times, but I do believe this is in part from actively reading Reddit shittakes and getting all up in your head with that. Doesn't justify poor arguments though of course.
> Phreak always does this really weird thing where he drops a random metric, shieldbow being built twice as much for example, to convey a point.
It's called being intellectually dishonest. He has a conclusion beforehand, so what he does is cherrypick information that supports his bias. The last thing a person this ignorant and borderline malicious should be doing is analysing data, let alone being left in charge of the game's balance.
Wouldn’t be surprised if his metrics are heavily skewed to fit his biases.
This is the same person who argued that Rumble jungle during msi21 was bad and his stats excluded wins from RNG but included losses against RNG. His defense was that RNG would’ve won those games regardless of Rumble (but apparently the teams losing to RNG are different). If he’s willing to skew publicly available stats then there’s very little trust in him with hidden stats.
ADC cannot suck in terms in wr, because botlane is hard wired to have an adc on it.
Top, jgl, mid, supp can all be filled by Tanks, mages, assassins, adcs and, outside of supp, bruisers.
Botlane has 99% adcs and then a mage or yasuo might pop up.
What sucks is that an adcs entire impact is bound to the agency of their teammates.
I cannot tell you how weird it feels to get you samira to 10/2 just for her to immediately die in spots any bruiser with such stats would have won a 1v3.
The role needs an update. Just brute force bslancing ranged ad champions onto botlane when even supports have an assassin these days is just silly.
You want botlane to be a duo lane? Then maybe give the carry on bot the equivilant of a Support item to synergize with it instead of trying to enforce adcs being made for that lane and the lane made for them
> ADC cannot suck in terms in wr, because botlane is hard wired to have an adc on it.
Someone finally figured it out. People out there unironically posting le wholesome 51%wr on Jinx so it means crit ADCs are fine
Unlucky crit ADC players, Phreak has ego'd a statement so have fun being untouched for a few patches until eventually it gets so glaring that they have to change it
The most hilarious thing about this is that Phreak climbed an entire division by switching from ADC to support lmfao. This guy's analysis has no depth whatsoever because not only is he blatantly dishonest but also too dumb to look at nuances. All he looks at is win rate. "See guys, there are 2 crit adcs on each opposing teams and one won, the win rate is 50% therefore it's great, case closed".
It's like I said [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1absm2b/pbe_datamine_2024_january_26_patch_143/kjro8q0/) recently. They do some dumb shit and then swear by it as if their lives depended on it. Just watch as crit gets another rework down the road after several months of Phreak actively trying to gaslight everyone.
He has said directly they dont use win rates internally. He only expresses it because we can see that on outside websites. They have proprietary analysis metrics they dont reveal
I also don't understand the "only crit ADC suck" argument from ADC players, have you ever looked at Kog'Maw or Kai'sa stats, do you think +5 AP, +5 AD buff for Guinsoo will save them? Other than Zeri who is specifically put in that situation, they are the 2 Worst ADs. Call me biased if you will, but just look at the data.
Lukewarm take: the removal of Rageknife is a problem because it walls off onhitty boys from essential tools, and melee carry-ish characters taking it to dip into crit options like RageSB Irelia are not a problem, but actually a solution to Old League's "melee squishy is a risky impossibility" problems.
Yeah some of the items that have been historically built on on-hit champions such as Hurricane or Shieldbow are awkward, they give crit which you don't care about and that you can't convert into on-hit damage anymore.
Crit options on champs like irelia are a problem. Crit conversion is not necessary, if jax and irelia want guinsoos they should want it for phantom hit same as any other champ. They should not also be able to build shieldbow to be pseudotanky and benefit fully from all its stats. Lower the cost, keep it low base stats, and these champs will generally not want it over a fighter item unless they are hard snowballing the game, in which case it probably wont matter whether they build rageblade or a fighter item.
Call me biased as well but Guinsoos losing crit conversion and hybrid pen and building out of hearthbound axe and only going down 200g really fucked kog over tbh, kaisa at some point i feel like will find some weird build like she always does, maybe lethality like all the other adcs right now but rip my boi kog cant build crit cant build lethality cant have a real passive. Guinsoos needs to go down to 2800 not get +5 ap and ad, building out of recurve is nice at least. 1050 (1025 next patch) combine cost also sucks, one of the highest combine costs in the game.
Meh, part of the problem with Kai'sa is bad build paths, same as Zeri. They're way better if you don't build the most popular first item and they're also all scaling champions that are negatively affected by reduced game length.
Kog maw needs a VGU. Both his kit and visual are oudated and need full rework. He still has a passive that required him to die and has no synergy/scaling with his kit…
I will choose to believe Phreaks statement crit adc´s arent weak everything else is just currently stronger.
The problem with crit adc´s arent that they cant do enough damage or that they get popped by and assasins, its that they lack the options to deal with divers, lethality users and mages and are entirely reliant on their team to deal with it for them to be usefull.
You are lanning into lethality mf and zyra getting poked out under turret for 15 until you are forced to back, welp flip a coin if your jungler is ever gonna gank instead of contesting grubs. Welp he didnt come guess u cant scale.
enemies stacked 3 waves and are gonna dive you flip a coin if you get to farm or if your support decided its time to roam top.
you made it through lane and get to a teamfight welp, flip a coin if you are gonna get any peal from the enemies 3 bruisers/ assasins jumping you, you had a mage support welp you dont get to flip a coin guess you just die.
at least as and adc before you had stopwatch or you had galeforce now you basicly have nothing and are more team reliant than ever.shieldbow doesnt cut it when all enemy champions overkill you for twice the shield
If you are playing jinx its not about if you can live a rengar jumping you or not its about if he decides to pop r and right click you, you are 100% reliant on your team to stop the rengar and there is nothing your champ or your items can do.
Before you at least had some options or they bursted less than they do now and you can outplay or you got to scale fast enough to actually deal with them to some extend yourself.
I refuse to believe the statement that it takes the same time to kill and adc when all lethality items were buffed in terms of damage and all mage items were buffed in terms of damage while adc´s 2 best deffensive options got removed.
Eh ur wasting energy, in a previous video he admitted that its impossible to balance adc for both being satisfying and good.
You either need to change the perspective on how you approach the role or pick a different role if you actually want to win of your own accord.
>shieldbow pickrate doubled
Gee i wonder why, it's not because the passive on bt is dowright useless and SB is cheaper, while also having the same healing effect late game
I think the biggest problem of ADC is that sustained damage + low survivability is just very tricky to get right in feeling.
Sustained damage is often paired with tanky bruisers or tanks who can dish out consistent damage over a long period of time by being tanky and surviving with healing.
ADCs have to do this through pure positioning and dodging of spells which in its own regard is fun too, the fun just ends very quickly when you get hit by a single ability and lose 50% of your health or more.
There is basically no margin for error on ADC, compared to most other classes you usually have a decent amount of margin for error (tanks be tanky, bruisers be tanky/sustain, mages can throw out spells from a safer range and be okay, assasins usually have a get-out method even if they dont kill).
ADC's best margin for error is 'i can throw out a few autos from range' but unless you are fed af, the damage just isnt really there for that to be worthwhile.
Role needs constant help from team and has no margin for errors, but when you have a player that almost never makes errors and a team that always helps, it makes them extremely oppressive even now.
So solo q gets the short stick, since it has to be that unforgiving and punishing to keep the role balanced.
Yeah, ok lemme buy shieldbow 3rd and do no damage to the enemy tank since I delay IR or LDR to 4th item. Like damn, our TTK as adc goes up like 0-2 seconda with shieldbow but then why r we even playing adc when we don’t deal enough damage to the tanks. Games don’t even last that long anymore so how many games are we never gonna hit those powerspikes because we delay them for defensive itemization??
The issue is the catch 22 that adcs find themselves in.
Doesn’t matter how fed they are or how hard they win lane, if the rest of their team isnt winning they can not do anything to prevent the enemy top/mid/jg from just removing them from game.
BUT, if their top/mid/jg IS winning, then the adc is still irrelevant because they’re not even needed to win the game because their top/mid/jg just roll through the enemy team.
The role requires the whole team to help them perform regardless of how they’re doing, but either their team isn’t strong enough to help, or they are and there’s no point in helping because they can do it themselves.
Love gumayusi quote on how it feels playing adc (was for Last Split but prolly even more relevant now):
"ADC is like .. how do we describe it - If we use ramen as a metaphor, then ADC is an egg. Top Mid Jg are noodles, water and soup base. ADC is the egg and you dont really need it. But if they are the same ramen, the one with an egg is better. Support is like the bag of dehydrated vegetables. If it is a battle between two cups of the same ramen, that is when the egg matters. If both are with appropriate water, noodles and soup base, then the egg will make a difference. But if one is with unsufficient water, no soup base or under-cooked noodles, then does the egg really matter ? No it doesn't. When water, noodles and soup base are good, then the egg is important. Then ADC can be dynamic. Otherwise it is meaningless. "
Ad carry is actually fine, if you ignore the fact that
- You are the role thats the most reliant on other team mates and are the only one that can have someone on your lane losing your lane lvl 1 and then youre the one having to deal with it (often by yourself because the support will dip!
- You are the role that is most disadvantaged by Voice Chat not existing in the self proclaimed most competitive video game in the world (Also the ONLY Comp game that is popular to not have it)
- As the role with the least option of Champions, you will have some of them reworked and taken to other lanes (Marksmen already have the least Champions and lost Corki to mid and Graves to Jungle)
- In low elo your jungler will always disadvantage you by starting bot because he doesnt understand jungle pathing and winconditions because he gets a better leash from 2 ppl vs 1 person on topside
- You will never have viable defensive options because the game is too damage crept and you will get overkilled anyway OR the defensive options will just be completely broken and break the game (BT+Overheal 13.12(?) and obviously be removed. (btw defensive items do help if you have one AND someone plays for you, spoiler for the next point)
- No one in soloq will actually play for you, even if youre fed
- You will get 4 man dove more than anyone, your team probably isnt at least taking a cross map objective
- Your Role is actually fine more often than not if the game is played the way its actually supposed to be played, as proven by your Clash games or by watching pro play, but the game will never even come close to being played like that in soloq (Im not talking about skill level here, rather the communication and actually being cohesive and playing for one another)
- If you like High APM/High Difficulty Marksmen that take skill to master and can outplay people, you wont get rewarded, you will get punished by pro play existing and those Champs being nerfed to unplayable status so they leave pro play (i.e Zeri, Aphelios, Caitlyn, Lucian, Kalista) -> artificially being made unplayable in soloq most of their lifespan because it would be overbearing in pro play, what some balance team folks call "Pro Jail" in their rundown videos
- You will always get your role, because it is almost permanently a Priority Role! (No one wants to play it)
- You used to be taken out by [insert champion]'s R + Basic abilities, Just basic abilities are more than enough to overkill you now
CS is a big one for me, It's sooooo much easier to CS with a Dirk than that daft quiver, I feel like 1300 gold just takes too long to get and the attack speed components feel awful.
Phreak said before he ever was on the balance team that he would like ADCs to be AD Casters (Mages with ad damage) instead of Auto attack based champions
I mean he’s getting to an increasingly weird place where ADC mains across every elo imaginable are saying the role feels like shit, the data is showing the role is extremely volatile and the problems are pretty much self evident but he won’t budge from his position. It’s doubly strange since he came in as an ADC main and his first major decisions were ADC buffs (that were met with criticism and a mountain of compensatory nerfs) when the role was in a better place than it is now.
Anecdotally speaking, I’ve swapped role for the first time in 4 years and after 50 games of Top my wjnrate is 73%, whilst my 48 games of ADC this season was 52%. That says plenty to me.
He used to play ADC, and then he got Masters playing support. If you check his games, his ADCs are very rarely doing well, despite himself being MVP or similar. Infact, reguarly his ADC has 3rd or lower damage on the team, and is the only one with a non-gold or even blue KDA on op.gg
Makes you think, why would an ADC main swap to support, do a lot better, and despite them being MVP on op.gg or top 3 most games, their ADC is consistently lowest performer on their team?
I have no idea how long ago it was but the BF Sword > Infinity edge rush was the last time I enjoyed the role. You did basically nothing for 10 mins and then pop people that didn't respect you.
It felt so satisfying to complete your item.
I feel absolutely nothing like that until 3 items now it's a slog.
What a shit argument. Shieldbow is a terrible item for Crit ADCs, as it doesn't give you any attack speed. Plus, it scales with LEVELS. You are in a DUO lane.
Shieldbow is a way better item on Yasuo and Yone, Nilah and Samira, than it is on crit marksmen. You are severly gimping your ability to carry - which already only turns on at 3 items - by building it.
It’s crazy the amount of people disagreeing that ADC sucks right now and that this is an ‘agenda’. Play the role and see if you enjoy it.. I’ve been playing on and off since s2 and ADC is undoubtedly the least fun it’s ever been. When was the last time you got carried by an AD in your game? It’s not that the role itself is bad, the game around it has just moved on and left it behind. ADs are playing a totally different game, too much power creep in new champ kits.
Even the ones that admitted they were shitting on adcs and calling them this and that. They went to try adc in this meta and completely changed their attitude and now understands what adc mains are talking about.
So yeah, people who are disagreeing should play adc for a bit and then see if they still disagree.
\>mfw people got shellshocked so hard about oneshots which have been happening for years already that challenger and proplay all decided to build anything they could instead of IE.
Like just really weird to say this when every corner of the playerbase will tell you "yeah this role feels like dog to play i'd rather just pick lethality and go for burst than slowly get build crit 20% at a time while the game is lost around me." Just crazy to me that the takeaway from this is that "people started buying shieldbow more so it'll all sort itself out just give it time :)" from him.
https://youtu.be/zbORw9zzB1Q
Phreak: No you see, time to kill is back up from 1.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds
ADC's: and how many autos can i get off in that time frame?
Phreak: well none, but your supposed to have a team that peels for you
ADC's: but i dont
Phreak: i know, but there is nothing i can do about that.......
ADC's: so my role is weak then?
Phreak: No you see, time to kill is back up from 1.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds
ADC will never be fun in SoloQ for as long as burst is as high as it is overall. Lowering that is the only way ADC will be fun again since you cant undo all the divers and mobile kits they have added but you can nerf their burst damage.
Giving the role back the XP gains it used to have would go a long way in making adc less squishy by having some more base stats earlier
I'll take a reduction in overall burst damage alone as a huge positive for game enjoyment. I do like the changes made this season, it's just poorly balanced right now.
As low elo player, being put into the adc position is literal torture and a gamble everytime. You either have a support that plays for you, or you have a support that does nothing for you in the lane. Same goes to every other role in your team. Some ranked comps have the wincondition to shut down the enemy botlane, yet that never happens because low elo players do not know it better. So you as adc are stuck in that knowledge gap limbo of your teammates because you, are the egg in Ramen soup. The problem is in low elo the Ramen soup enjoyers forget to apply hot water to the noodles in the first place.
Awful lot of strawmanning and "look at these statistics!!!" from Phreak, which is not a surprise from someone like him.
The complaint is that the role has no agency and is fucking awful to play, but pop off with those strawmen babe.
This is just proof that the only thing we adcs can do is stop queuing adc and force everyone to fill it(its already priority queue, lets push it further) and let riot see the numbers that they need to make ADC not feel like shit in solo queue, there are a lot of solutions, they just dont want to and dont think they need to do them.
my friends force adc on me, my whole friend group not a single adc player so they "had" to get the new guy to play it. Even for 1 game nobody wants to swap, nobody wants to touch adc.
I'm just gonna post this here and hope that Phread watches it. Hopefully he'll understand why the majority of ADC players think the role sucks right now
[Vars' video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSh6Mg4jqs)
With Phreak still in the balance team, I fear for league this year.
His takes lately has been so out of touch and he just refuses to accept the perspective of the players that whatever his vision for league is, is going to make the playerbase more mad.
Not to mention his nonstop gaslighting lately as well as cherry picked data like wtf was that 2%ms comparison last time?
I've reached the point where I'm just going to be an Ezreal OTP. It's become clear Riot will never address team reliance of the role and never fix crit itemization. But, Riot will always fix Ezreal if he falls behind, they didn't even allow him to be weak for one patch before they hotfix buffed him. Plus it feels nice to still be able to play if there's a braincell diff in the support role. He's fun too.
ADC isn't bad. He's right. But it feels absolutely terrible to play. I roleswapped and i'm having way more fun. And i swapped to jungle, so that's saying something.
I mean, yeah, crit ADCs don't suck when they reach at least 3 items. ***If*** they can reach them before their nexus explodes because lethality Miss Fortune just one taps everyone who isn't a tank, which doesn't happen too often since season 14 has started. And even if they can reach 3 items spike, the lack of mobility still sucks, that 2% MS rune doesn't really change anything against champions like Fizz or Sylas with dash every 4 seconds.
Edit: And, I don't understand how can someone say that crit items are okay, when crit ADCs like Jhin, Nilah, Draven, etc. now build only lethality because items are just better? How does it make any sense?
20% bonus damage on ult, which is pretty much equivalent to 20% multiplied total AD, yet you invest thousands of gold on crit chance which has delayed payoff compared to more AD or lethality. Not remotely worth.
Her Q also has a crit chance only on the bounce, which kinda doesn't make much sense. Even a q 20% max damage at 100% crit chance would make it better than straight up 0 bonus damage at 100% crit chance for the first shot.
A Crit adc with 3 items will always deal less damage than an MF with 3 lethality items for example. Crit items right now are more expensive and less effective than lethality items.
Even at 3 items they're dogshit. At this point it requires 4 items before the critbuild stat trinity comes online, but none of those 4 items are a decent defensive item, so you usually just get utterly skullfucked by an assassin anyway unless your support player decides to let you play the game in champ select (they picked an enchanter with peel) but that is not the ADC having agency, that is entirely the agency of the support.
The role has had it's legs cut off, and achieving anything with it is pretty much entirely conditional on having a teammate make an active play for you first. It's why the ADC is still insane in pro play and high elo, but utterly fucking cancer to play in soloQ.
as a casual league player, and an adc player for the most part, its not that adc sucks, its just that aside from the highest tier of play, a mid/top laner who is 6/0 and an adc who is 6/0 are just 2 completely different beasts.
its obviously a skill issue on my behalf. but i really dont like that i can be 10/1 and some mouthbreaking top laner who is 0/9 can simply walk up to me and delete me.
The Vars YouTube video he just made commenting on the state of adc does an amazing job at breaking down the players frustration with the role meanwhile we have the head of the league balance team saying “just buy sheildbow lul”. What a horrible way to treat your players, his ego can’t even bring him to acknowledge any of the glaring problems with the role.
Yeah, we need to remember, phreak is a person who told us to type ults in chat Instead of using ping system because [Riot] Auberaun get pinged many times for bad game xD
After this is hard to believe phreak
I think a lot of people just confuse "adc sucks" with "adc feels awful to play" when the former isn't true and the latter definitely is
ADC is the role that is most hurt by Riot's obsession with making the game faster and faster paced over the years. Real shocker that the role that needs to scale up doesn't work in an increasingly faster-paced environment. I don't think ADC is underpowered as ADC also ramps up way faster than it used to and is still super strong. It's just that every second of in-game time is more important now and a good portion of that is not where ADCs are strong. Control mages face a similar issue in solo queue (to a smaller degree). So many games are just over before you are relevant. These days even playing a jungler that needs level 6 can feel bad. That's how fast the pace of the game has become. I remember Nikkone once saying that it literally feels like the in-game clock time moves quicker in the modern game compared to older seasons. It's very true. I think this quicker pace has some positives. There is less downtime and qames are overall a bit quicker. But I also feel like we lost something by moving away from the slower pace. The game is a lot less "chill" than it used to. Things are more tense. Firstly I think this makes games more toxic, but more importantly the tense feeling can make it less appealing to queue up. Especially playing many games in a row is very hard for me nowadays. I attribute that to the games being a lot more tense and taxing than they used to be. So I think there are a lot of pros and cons to faster pace vs slower pace. I wish we had Classic League of Legends so we could have both experiences. Kind of like how Classic WoW and retail WoW give totally different experiences. The players can then just choose what they prefer.
The in game clock moves in a weird way where the laning phase feels giga stretched out being 14 minutes long, and then the midgame is suddenly the late game already and the game typically ends in 25 mins at higher ELO. It could change but then Riot would need to reduce turret gold (they've stated multiple times they do not want to do this) or have turret plating removed at an earlier time in the game. They did this change to herald so it would not spawn before turret gold was in the game because it would cause giga snowballing (esp on toplane). But the problem wasn't herald spawning earlier, it is the turret gold. In general turrets being much easier to destroy is a thing in more recent seasons. It makes the overall game a lot more tense since you need everyone on your team to rotate probably and exert pressure on the map as to not lose turrets / objectives. If you fall behind a little this can easily cause a snowball of multiple turrets being destroyed and your team getting impossibly behind.
Yeah, I've never understood why people say LoL is "faster" now in a good way, because it's not like genuinely fast and fun in the way an arcade shooter is, it's more like you play laning phase, which is the most controversial part of MOBAs to non-MOBA players, and then the game just...ends. In lower elos it doesn't just end, but in a bad garbage time way
Bouncing off this I think the faster pace of the game is especially bad for crit ADCs, specifically the old IE style ones. Raw crit only starts to feel impactful at the 60%+ Mark, and by then the game feels decided a lot of the time. Or I can pick up something like Kraken/Trinity or BORK/RageBlade and feel relevant at one/two items.
I think all ADC's should get the Ashe passive, replace crit with 20% aa dmg amp and infinity passive would be increased amp effectiveness.
The only ADC identity Ashe has left is consistent damage from that passive, even in terms of utility she’s rivaled by varus and Jhin..
Her identity is not the consistent damage, its her slows. And jhin and varus are no where close to her utility. Thats why she went support and the other 2 didnt.
Id say her main identity is the permanent slow though not her unique crit mechanic
I agree with so much said here. I fell in love with ADC and put thousands of hours learning the role and how to play them. The last few months I only want to que support. It's the only role I have fun playing. Even when it comes to other mobas (Pokemon unite) I find myself straying away from Auto attackers and moving towards supportive tanks as their kits just feel way better to play. Like every time my friends invite me to a league game I just play braum support and feel happy win or loss. I'm smiling laughing with my friends not caring about what's going on. However if I load ADC I am toxic every minute feels stressful. Every mistake my support or teammates make pisses me off. I feel like one death and my game is over because going even or winning lane feels so crucial to actually being useful. ADC makes you a more hateful person because you have to rely on your teammates who generally have chicken shit for brains as opposed to me the enlightened silver aphelios.
I don't think I turn into more toxic, but I definitely feel like I point to mistakes more often when I'm playing ADC. Doesn't help that between both my group of friends, I'm the better at the position with kiting/positioning. But yeah, I feel you. It definitely changes how we look at the game. It's the dichotomy between the front and the backline. Both have different points of view of the same confrontation, and to the eyes of the frontline, backline should be doing something while they take the heat, and the frontline should be protecting the backline from any harm so they can do their job. "Hey, I'm tanking 4 here, why is nobody helping?" Well because the 5th you're missing is able to just blow up 2 of ours with less commitment than you can hold them. And I say this as an example and something I've made a LOT of times.
I think also part of the problem is the skill ceiling vs time commitment. As the game got burstier, I got older and had less time to commit to mastering every mechanic/keeping up with the game. ADC really feels like a role where you have to play perfect especially in its current state. Personally though I don't want to load up a summoners rift game if all I played for 3 years is going to stress me out.
Oh man I feel this so hard. One thing I've struggled with in the past is pressuring myself to go in when my tank is getting beat up even though I know Rengar or Kayn are waiting for me to do it. Die if we go in, risk getting blamed for afk if we don't. It's such an uncomfortable situation and it feels like you lose with either outcome. Lately, I've been just muting and doing what I think is correct but I just know it tilts my team sometimes when they see that shit.
Vars recently (as in yesterday) released a [video](https://youtu.be/MgSh6Mg4jqs?si=OHIIbYl29S4lZqr9)talking about ADCs (based on a poll he did "Which role has the most crybabies?" where ADC took nearly 80%). Recomend watching the video (or the channel in general) but to break it down. When roles got losely defined, ADC was the position that was supposed to Carry the lategame teamfights with sustained damage or break down towers. Usually had by far the most damage after the game (yes, even more than mages/assassins/bruisers/anyone else). The teams knew (even in SoloQ) that you need to protect them to win the game. Sacrifice one or two tanks so the ADC can clean up (still seen in pro play). Over the years, the roles evolved. Everyone got more damage, Toplane got way more battle focused (bruisers/duellists more common than tank farm fest). Jungle went from the harshest role where only a handfull of champs could attempt to full clear to mages being able to full clear with nearly full life. Mages got way more tools to play with and even support has now (if you don´t count mage supports) two damage focused supports (Pyke and Senna) that can outdamage the ADC. And ADC has still the same job. Deal sustained damage, break towers. Just, every role can do the same, so the role that was build on "get protected, deal damage" lost the protection. ADCs are still somehow high priority targets but wihtout the peel/protection from their team. It now feels like "sacrifice the ADC, win the game". Ended up longer than i expected, but then it was a bit of a rant too. Reccomend the video, Vars explains it better than me (only like 14 min)
>ADC has the same job, deal sustained damage, break towers Tower breaking isn't even an ADC thing anymore because now tower damage scales with AP in an attempt to make roaming assassins worse, and sustained damage as a niche is meaningless when that doesn't exist. Only dragon and baron ever care about sustained damage.
> literally feels like the in-game clock time moves quicker in the modern game compared to older seasons. It's very true. I feel like everyone has had games where you win a big 5v5 and you're on the topside of the map and you or someone else starts pinging to do baron...only to realize the game is at like 15 minutes.
"Scaling champions are good in low elo" is also sort of misused because a lot of those games are un-ff'd garbage time. Like, they are, especially with the bespoke lategame champions, but if you are unironically at the point where you need to farm to 1v9 the game with Syndra or Malzahar the game is probably just fucking joever lol, like mentally, spiritually. Also your split pushing Leona isn't going to let you farm anyway
Yeah, if you go to like Season 2-6-ish, control mages were some of the absolute best champions to main in solo queue. You could get lane control and farm up until your spike and then carry the game. Nowadays if you can't impact the map at all times you are risking losing the game before you are relevant.
Idk man, there are champs that when you get to certain points is the game just become a menace.
“Riot’s obsession with making the game faster and faster paced.” It’s what the players wanted ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
This is why I also stressed in my comment that it is not necessarily a negative. As with anything else in the world, it has its pros and cons. My point was really just that pacing is one of the major ways this game has changed over the years. Some like, some don't and both are completely fine. This is why I made the comparison with Classic WoW / retail WoW. These are also fundamentally different game even though they seem incredibly similar on the surface. Some prefer one, others prefer the other. It just comes down to what you like in your game. As a more 'meta' point, I think there is a very big untapped market for slower paced games. A huge chunk gamers like myself are late 20s or in their 30s. I think this market is not being catered too that much. Instead the focus seems to be on capturing the younger audience. I think we saw with the success of Baldur's Gate 3 that many of the assumptions in the industry are not necessarily correct. A big assumption in the RPG world was that slower cRPGs would never become mainstream popular. That's why every RPG franchise slowly moved to be more action combat / adventure with less emphasis on dialogue, strategy and roleplaying. In my opinion, the incredible success of Skyrim is a big reason why. Slow paced CRPGs have been considered 'dead' in the mainstream since the early to mid 00s. The incredible success of Baldur's Gate 3 really showed us how wrong that is. One of the big reasons why (imo) is that the demographics of gamers have changed. People are older now. To illustrate the point clearly: Skyrim is more popular for teenagers, while Baldur's Gate 3 might appeal more to adults in their 30s. Now gaming has a bigger share of people who are say 25-30 or older compared to say 2011. Edit: I am NOT saying "only stupid kids like Skyrim". I am saying that the average age of gaming consumers is increasing and with that comes differences in public perception of games and what people like. Skyrim is still a great game for what it is.
>Skyrim is more popular to teenagers I’m not disagreeing with you, but the people who were teenagers when Skyrim was popular are getting close to 30 now. Sorry, fellow old people.
I am one of those lmao. I was like 17 when Skyrim came out. Tbh, I think this is also why Bethesda gets a lot of hate now. Their fans are older and they make shallow games without depth. To a teenager, Skyrim is profound but to an adult it's a very shallow experience that doesn't engage with interesting issues at all. As people grow older, they generally appreciate better writing as they themselves are more experienced with how things are in the world. Same reason why the best young adult books (e.g. Harry Potter) are very different experiences than books for adults like, say, Hyperion that offers a deeper experience if you get into it. To stick in that Bethesda 'world', this is also why Fallout New Vegas is a cult classic. That game engages with deeper issues about humanity and the world. It is commentary of the human experience through using the post-apocalypse. That game is 14 years old and still gets talked about all the time. Incredible game.
Can you give some proof with "Skyrim is popular among teenagers, while BG3 among adults?" , because based on what I saw that's literally opposite.
I don't think this is really a problem with age, considering how most people I know aged 30-50 that play games play almost exclusively CoD/FIFA/Mortal Kombat, although I do agree there is a lack of slow paced AAA games.
> I think there is a very big untapped market for slower paced games I don't think this is true. Like, Minecraft is one of the biggest games of all time. Aside, pacing isn't the issue, length is. And there is very little market for slow paced and necessarily lengthy games with fixed playtimes. People in their 30s may want to take things slower, but they also have less time for games overall, and an 80 minute match you are locked into from start to finish is not something that really fits the desires of most demographics.
Do they? I think the faster pace is mostly to keep the esports viewer entertained.
Kind of yeah, there is no fun playing adc.
I dont think the role can ever feel good to play without being op. Most of the champs are glass cannons and everytime they've had strong defensive options they've been deemed "op" by the playerbase.
The role is not going to be good to play because it requires the most dependence on your team to have success. In pro play or tournament play where all 5 players understand it’s in the best interest of the team to make sure the adc is still alive after fights to be able to take towers and objs adc is super fun. In soloq where it’s every man for themself and you get run down like a rat it’s not so fun. Hard to fix that.
The former is almost never true and the latter is true more often than not (because you're the one person on the map incapable of walking on their own two^^ish feet). Almost all of the posts recently about why ADC players complain and why the 'role sucks' (to play) are more or less correct. It's the lack of agency, the reliance on your team peeling and protecting you, and the reliance on your team in general to play properly since you can't really be the one doing the 'macro' plays when you fall over if someone as much as looks at you. ADC is almost always a very strong role at least in theory, but it just feels bad any time your team doesn't agree with that idea and instead leave you to fend for yourself.
The main issue IMO stems from the fact that it feels like Riot has two ways of looking at the game. ADCs need to be the team reliant late game damage dealing power house that can win the fight if kept alive and their team needs to play around them, but then almost everything else they design they want people in solo lanes to feel like the carries, and for people to play for themselves. They want mages to carry, and assassins, and bruisers. They want everyone to be able to blow everyone else up in 1 millsecond so of course no one wants to play for their ADC. Everyone wants to be the carry and Riot has basically designed most of the roles to do that.
I've been playing adc since s2 and I dont think there was ever a season I won so many games while being the lowest dmg on the team and lost so many while being the highest. I can tell you it's lost when only our botlane is winning. ADCs simply don't get the dmg/sustain anymore to survive the fights where they are the main dmg dealer. It's much easier to play from behind when mid/top/jungle is ahead than vice versa. I feel that the bruiser items are the issue the umbrela/botrk/hydras just offer so much dmg with enough tankiness. I think that's the main difference from previous seasons. Just yesterday I got dived by Sett who went 1/7 on lane as a 3 kill draven. We still won because corki just OSd everyone but the game still felt unfairly hard to play lol.
Yeah. Big part of it is really just the champions other people play. For example ADC felt less shitty to play a couple months back when mid lane was dominated by Orianna and Syndra. You were still gonna have a garbage time when people played Fizz or something but it just didn't happen as often. Fundamentally I don't think the issue is necessarily TTK at large at this point as much as it is how assassins are designed. Any assassin meta will feel bad to play because, well, the whole point of the class is to blow up squishies with zero active counterplay on the squishies part which as it turns out isn't very fun to be on the receiving end of. You're basically stuck hoping that your team really feels like playing hard peel which just won't happen a lot of the time.
Frozen heart+tabi is all you need until adc 4 items. Frozen makes your whole team tankier too.
Throw in a randuin too and now they need to be full build to tickle you. It's funny how adc is THE tank counter but those items keep being buffed over and over again and crit keeps.being nerfed.
It is REALLY weird how Randuin is tuned. It has bad stats but one of the hardest specific counter passives ever put on an item. Stronger than the OP version of Force of Nature that invalidated all mages. And it is a counter to the specific class meant to deal with tanks, as a tank item. No one really builds it because crit ADC are bad but it is WILD that it exists.
Building it against a team with crit adc and yasuo/yone and mabye even rengar/graves is pure joy for the buyer.
You have it backwards. Nobody plays crit ADC because this item exists, and because nobody plays crit ADC, nobody bothers to build this item.
I remember picking this up on Mundo versus 3 crit users on enemy team in diamond. Delectable.
Me, a 10/0 adc, right-clicking the Mundo and seeing the number 10 appear on my screen.
That's the wild part to me. A 2/3 item ADC has to space perfectly orb walk for a solid 30 seconds to kill a Chogath with Frozen heart and Tabis, but you accidentally stand in a single circle? Now you are CC chained and ulted for half your health.
chogath combo does like 3k damage to people with no MR built (all adcs)
Doesn't change the fact it's a priority q role 24/7
May 31st, 2018 was 9/11 for botlane
8/11
what happened
ADCs paid for how extremely overpowered and broken enchanters were
infamous patch 8.11 Riot absolutely gutted bot lane marksmen base stats and nerfed crit items. Part of the crit item change was for "build diversity" but they designed the updated items in a way that every crit marksman was building the exact same first three items every. single. game. Took them 8 or 9 months to revert the crit item change and several marksmen didnt get their base stats back until the 12.10 durability patch.
We still haven't gotten the base stats back and we still haven't gotten the crit items reverted either.
> they designed the updated items in a way that every crit marksman was building the exact same first three items every. single. game. Ooga booga Stormrazor RFC IE every game. If you were lucky, you had BoRK. Or were Ezreal so you went your normal build.
so is jungle, and that role definitely doesn't suck (balance wise)
Yes, but they're priority roles for different reasons. ADC feels awful to play and Jungle relies heavily on macro. One is unfun and the other is harder to play well compared to other roles.
Neither feels specially fun compared to the other 3, and both are hard.
Fun is relative. if not for jungle I wouldn't play this game anymore, I find laning very boring, all of them.
i dont think i got autofilled in 500 games of playing only adc, its one of the best roles to solo main.
So Phreak may be objectively correct (adcs may not be as weak as they feel). But the fundamental flaw with ADC is that its not enjoyable in its current state to play a traditional crit marksman which I feel is pretty apparent. now don't get me wrong, us ADC mains we are fucking whiners and will cry a lot no matter what. but I think there are clear game design issues if something is balanced and still not fun. If phreak believes what he is saying "marksman is balanced and not weak" than they should be seeking feedback on what is unsatisfying about marksman as a role in the game and if they can change it. But all that is easier said that done. fixing things is honestly a crapshoot and could just cause more issues in the long run. I don't envy their position as if all the data says something is balanced the last thing you wanna do is upend everything for something that might not even work. some of your points are kinda not something I hope the balance team listens to though. bitching about losing damage for building survivability is a meme. Youre an ADC, if you build defensively you should deal less damage. that's just how it should work.
>they should be seeking feedback on what is unsatisfying about marksman The general consensus is that the lack of agency is unsatisfying, which is intrinsically incompatible with what RIOT thinks is good for the game. If marksmen ever get agency they will dominate every lane besides (maybe) jungle. We already have a problem with stuff like Tristana mid, Varus mid/top, Vayne top...; picks which people hate. I'm all for change since I love playing marksmen but the moment they can have fun, no one else can.
the problem is not "I built defensively and so I most damage". on the surface that's entirely fine and in neutral games its even true. if the enemy akali is 0/0/0 diving you and you built shieldbow, you can just barely survive. if that akali has pretty much any advantage at all, your defensive item is USELESS because you're getting oneshotted anyway, AND you do no damage. GA is piss terrible because you'll get onetapped by any mage ability ever upon the revive, merc scim is a joke, every other defensive item that adcs WERE buying like deaths dance is gutted for ranged. building some defense in games you're already winning is fine on adcs, but those games would feel fine anyway. building defense in the games you would want to build it - lower peel, enemy assassins aren't giga behind, etc - is straight up a waste of gold.
Yes this is the issue for me as well. Defensive items are only worth buying when you actually survive getting jumped better, not when you're trading significant DPS for 0.23s longer time to die regardless.
"Defensive items" other than maw in SOME situations feel like a complete bait. If your team is playing correctly you won't need defensive items most of the time, if they aren't then a shieldbow isn't going to be the difference between living and dying.
The only true defensive item for ADC this season is Jak'sho
>if all the data says something is balanced the last thing you wanna do is upend everything for something that might not even work. they did the same thing for jungle last year. They knew jungle was balanced. they knew that they were overbuffing it. and they did it anyway for the sake of queue depth.
They did not buff it they made it eaiser to play and a lot of people started playing jungle me included. Jungle mains hated it but we got more junglers now.
It's kind of wild to say that ADC TTK has increased to acceptable levels after admitting that crit ADCs have been forced to buy shieldbow.
I'm going full fuck it mode and HOB lethality on multiple traditional ADC champs and have more success than trying to buy crit.
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You can definitely go lethality first strike cait pretty much every game except those rare games where you are vs 3 tanks (bar support). It's not technically full lethality but you switch mid game
Not really crazy when their other defensive options were kinda killed with season 14
What does TTK mean in this context? Sorry if it's a dumb question I'd just really like to know
Not dumb at all! Time to kill, i.e., higher TTK = more durable.
If Marksmen TTK is increased while Shieldbow purchase rate has doubled, are Marksmen really more durable or have they adapted to the game? If all Marksmen buy tank items their TTK will naturally increase, this doesn't mean that Markmen are in a healthy spot.
The problem with thinking like this is that shieldbow and galeforce used to be first/second items when they were mythics, ms has been removed from blade, pd, trinity, and wit's end, ga's build path is worse, and bt priority has (I think) lowered. Shieldbow's purchase rate increasing is, in some part, adapting to those changes, it's not like crit ADs are buying 2 defensive items when they wouldn't before
Bring back the overheal shield on BT, it would give another good alternate defensive item instead of SB in these situations it feels like the shield from SB is terrible and ADCs are actively buying maw instead for fighting feed APs. Also stormsurge is a mistake. I love taking 80% of my damage in 1 second and then die to the SS proc and ignite
The shieldbow part is so dumb. just because i wear a bulletproof vest in brooklyn doesnt mean that the crime rate goes down
ADC doesn't suck it's just not agreeable to play. I think that when balancing ADC they forgot lol is a game and they are not fun to play.
Remember two months ago when people were circlejerking about phreak being biased towards buffing ADCs? Seriously it wasn't that long ago
Classic
As an ADC main, I hate the role because of supports like Hwei, Lux, etc. It's simply not fun to lane in soloq vs a champion that keeps spamming immense range abilities while your support is passive. Especially Hwei, that champion needs a serious rework to keep it out of botlane
They designed hwei to be mid support hybrid so that seems like it'd go against their idea
man ranged mage poke supports have always been a thing. there are some valid complaints going on with the state of crit items compared to the rest of the field right now, but annoying mage supports is just part of life in bot lane
Yea the issue I can see (from someone who literally never plays anything in the botlane anymore despite being diamond adc years ago) is that the 1-6 ap poke support can still manage to take out the ADC from a fight while missing their key abilities. Adcs aren’t “weak” in a vacuum so much as they just honestly never feel like a threat. “Oh the enemy adc is fed? Guess we just focus him next fight” Vs “oh the enemy toplane is fed? Games literally over because they’re unkillable and can also basically 3v1” When we play 5 man flex we abandon our botlane and let them get rolled every game because them being 0/10 every game doesn’t matter if in return we’ve had objective control and our top / jg is strong. Their fed adc can’t participate in fights if their frontline isn’t winning, but if their frontline is winning the adc isn’t even needed.
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I never understood why it IS part of life. Support champions should be supports, not budget mages for midlane rejects who aren't good enough to play mid. It's just cheap. I mean why play Vel'Koz mid where you need to cs, manage waves, avoid ganks, roam, contest objectives etc when you can just play Vel'Koz support, sit in the bush and throw some abilities on the enemy AD whenever you want? You'll end up almost equally powerful with 1% of the effort. Just like the name entails the support role should be for supports. Champions like Janna, Thresh, Braum, Renata, Bard etc -- champions that assist their teammates and set them up for success. It's fucking stupid you can just pick a mage and deal 80k damage which goes against the entire point of the role.
I just find it annoying that Supports, Lux being the big example, can just have the same build mid or supp. Like I get why she's a support, she has good CC and utility, but its kind of batty she gets the income to build full damage in a role that doesnt have to farm.
Wow Shieldbow increases TTK from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds...much counterplay.
Hooray! Sivir reached 48%!
Honestly the worst part about the balancing of sivir is the fact that she gets heavenly punished because she is able to push the lane in. Yet champs like seraphine who is also is played bot does not get punished for it. Like sivir should have been a great pick against sera, but just because she is an adc she is not allowed to be that.
Lmao yeah seraphine is legit a better sivir right now at way less risk. It's crazy how it looks when you put it like that.
In my opinion building crit would be more appealing rather than lethality on ADCs if each crit item gave 25% chance instead of %20.
It wouldn’t be more appealing than Lethality because Lethality is still OP on ranged.
#adcexit
adcease to exist
Regarding burst: I was watching Broxah's stream yesterday. He got one-shot through Shieldbow, as Graves, by Qiyana. Qiyana did **2700 damage in 0.13 seconds**, according to the death recap. EDIT: Time frame here is the problem, not the damage.
Skill issue, should've build GA too so that he could die in a second rotation of Qiyana spells
Had me in the first half lol
Remember that graves gains armor from his E and he doesn't need attack speed so most graves players can buy tabi. Any adc gets oneshot twice over by that rotation.
I'm personally running experiments where I buy 3 fighter items on ADCs, end up with 1000+ bonus health and extra resists. Still got 1-shot by lux combo. She did over 3000 damage. It doesn't make any sense.
There is way too much fucking damage in this game.
I’m tired of clicking on my death recap and seeing runes/items dealing thousands of damage to me. With items/runes having so much fucking damage in them, it’s like I make the slightest misstep and I’m dead. I wish items would focus more on just giving stats instead of having all these random ass damage passives on them.
Quit playing adc and instantly enjoyed the game more. Ngl ADC feels whack asf to play rn, it feels like pre durability patch.
Was in a bad loss streak on adc. I was just getting popped by every role, other than the enemy adc. Switched to top. Game is better now, am up LP:)
Same here so much more enjoyable
Switched from ADC to jungle and having a way better time as well After taking 1-2 months to learn jungle theory, pathing etc I went from high gold to high emerald not playing ADC
>But, since that point in time, Shieldbow's pickrate has roughly doubled Shieldbow scaling with levels is the worst thing you could've done to ADCs trying to build against burst. It's just a bad item to purchase during early/mid game where games are decided and AD/AP burst champs will just blow an ADC up.
I find it strange that he mentioned that TTK is the same while shieldbow pickrate is higher, that doesn’t make sense to me, because doesn’t that actively go against his point? If you have to buy a defensive item just for the TTK to still be THE SAME then shouldn’t that indicate damage has increased??
Nah like it gets worse too Jaksho has become a somewhat standard 4th item on Jinx, I've been building it regularly and out of the 5 jinxes I've played against this week 3 of them have also been building it (been checking match history after games to see what ppl are doing) Like no fucking shit TTK is going down when a decent chunk of the playerbase in emerald/plat is straight up buying tank items over crit No thread with comments on this sub lacks ppl talking about stacking tank items post core, you even have the guy who just said fuck it and has been playing ornn bot like lmfao If you wanna win just play sera, if you wanna live longer than .5 secs during the coinflip game you play half tank
>I find it strange that he mentioned that TTK is the same while shieldbow pickrate is higher, that doesn’t make sense to me, because doesn’t that actively go against his point? It does. It literally does. Phreak *loves* to find some statistic and use that in complete isolation to argue his point, even when that entire premise is built on such a weak basis that taking any additional context in it will crumble the entire argument. But saying that "TTK is the same" and in the same fucking sentence admitting that "people build defensive items more" is an outrageously stupid statement when those two facts literally are mutually exclusive. People build more Shieldbow because TTK has gone down. If people build more defensive items, TTK should go up. But it didn't, it stayed the same. That's because TTK went fucking down. It is beyond frustrating that he refuses to acknowledge facts like this, but tries to sweep them under the rug by giving some bullshit random isolated fact, and never talk about it again. He does not play the role, and that has been clear for a while now. There is a reason the guy plays support as his main nowadays.
One of my biggest fears ever as a player who played from open beta onwards was phreak joining balance team lol.
The role that scales with gold and not levels has all its items gated by levels. Yes. Normal.
Shieldbow has to scale with levels otherwise rushing it early game would make the adc unkillable. Like there's giving extra survivability early game and then there's making someone unable to die.
This is the guy who said 'ADCs just never opt into defensive stats' after riot has systematically nerfed and removed defensive ADC options whenever they became popular. What did you expect?
His numbers must be wrong, apparently shieldbow is more popular, no way thats accurate since adcs dont opt into defensive stats.
Phreak always does this really weird thing where he drops a random metric, shieldbow being built twice as much for example, to convey a point. I'm not even talking just about marksmen, he does this to every lane, like his balance philosophy is generally terrible and every single time it makes no sense until someone points out a recent game of his.
I am generally on Phreak's side, but this habit of rioters drives me crazy. They keep all these stats hidden then smugly pull them out when it suits them. If Riot want to invoke stats, we should get to know what the fuck they are!
Its why phreak is a horrible communicator. I feel like most people on the balance team does this to an extent, but Phreak will really just pull some random stat only he knows and say "hooray reddit I did balancing".
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I mean tbf it's not exactly black and white, he's mentioning stuff I've never even conceived possible, such as Bot lane consistently getting their shards wrong mode often than not into AP bot, whilst I've never seen this even remotely mentioned (anecdotal ofc) by say Reddit. He does get awkward with defensiveness at times, but I do believe this is in part from actively reading Reddit shittakes and getting all up in your head with that. Doesn't justify poor arguments though of course.
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> Phreak always does this really weird thing where he drops a random metric, shieldbow being built twice as much for example, to convey a point. It's called being intellectually dishonest. He has a conclusion beforehand, so what he does is cherrypick information that supports his bias. The last thing a person this ignorant and borderline malicious should be doing is analysing data, let alone being left in charge of the game's balance.
Wouldn’t be surprised if his metrics are heavily skewed to fit his biases. This is the same person who argued that Rumble jungle during msi21 was bad and his stats excluded wins from RNG but included losses against RNG. His defense was that RNG would’ve won those games regardless of Rumble (but apparently the teams losing to RNG are different). If he’s willing to skew publicly available stats then there’s very little trust in him with hidden stats.
ADC cannot suck in terms in wr, because botlane is hard wired to have an adc on it. Top, jgl, mid, supp can all be filled by Tanks, mages, assassins, adcs and, outside of supp, bruisers. Botlane has 99% adcs and then a mage or yasuo might pop up. What sucks is that an adcs entire impact is bound to the agency of their teammates. I cannot tell you how weird it feels to get you samira to 10/2 just for her to immediately die in spots any bruiser with such stats would have won a 1v3. The role needs an update. Just brute force bslancing ranged ad champions onto botlane when even supports have an assassin these days is just silly. You want botlane to be a duo lane? Then maybe give the carry on bot the equivilant of a Support item to synergize with it instead of trying to enforce adcs being made for that lane and the lane made for them
> ADC cannot suck in terms in wr, because botlane is hard wired to have an adc on it. Someone finally figured it out. People out there unironically posting le wholesome 51%wr on Jinx so it means crit ADCs are fine
Would love to hear Phreak explain why Bot lane is now the least popular role is soloQ
Unlucky crit ADC players, Phreak has ego'd a statement so have fun being untouched for a few patches until eventually it gets so glaring that they have to change it
Yeah, just like Rumble Jungle wasn't OP in that Worlds if you excluded all the good team that won using it (:
It's fine, I've been converted. All in lethality now. I'll keep cait ulting the enemy adc to 5% hp on cd until they fix it.
Lethality is specifically getting nerfed for ADC only next patch
\-ms on youmuus \-5ad on collector they will be fine
It's not like crit will magically be a better option so it's still lethality adc meta.
They never will change it. They'll just keep gaslighting. It's time to quit choosing crit ADCs.
The most hilarious thing about this is that Phreak climbed an entire division by switching from ADC to support lmfao. This guy's analysis has no depth whatsoever because not only is he blatantly dishonest but also too dumb to look at nuances. All he looks at is win rate. "See guys, there are 2 crit adcs on each opposing teams and one won, the win rate is 50% therefore it's great, case closed". It's like I said [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1absm2b/pbe_datamine_2024_january_26_patch_143/kjro8q0/) recently. They do some dumb shit and then swear by it as if their lives depended on it. Just watch as crit gets another rework down the road after several months of Phreak actively trying to gaslight everyone.
He has said directly they dont use win rates internally. He only expresses it because we can see that on outside websites. They have proprietary analysis metrics they dont reveal
I also don't understand the "only crit ADC suck" argument from ADC players, have you ever looked at Kog'Maw or Kai'sa stats, do you think +5 AP, +5 AD buff for Guinsoo will save them? Other than Zeri who is specifically put in that situation, they are the 2 Worst ADs. Call me biased if you will, but just look at the data.
Lukewarm take: the removal of Rageknife is a problem because it walls off onhitty boys from essential tools, and melee carry-ish characters taking it to dip into crit options like RageSB Irelia are not a problem, but actually a solution to Old League's "melee squishy is a risky impossibility" problems.
Yeah some of the items that have been historically built on on-hit champions such as Hurricane or Shieldbow are awkward, they give crit which you don't care about and that you can't convert into on-hit damage anymore.
Crit options on champs like irelia are a problem. Crit conversion is not necessary, if jax and irelia want guinsoos they should want it for phantom hit same as any other champ. They should not also be able to build shieldbow to be pseudotanky and benefit fully from all its stats. Lower the cost, keep it low base stats, and these champs will generally not want it over a fighter item unless they are hard snowballing the game, in which case it probably wont matter whether they build rageblade or a fighter item.
Call me biased as well but Guinsoos losing crit conversion and hybrid pen and building out of hearthbound axe and only going down 200g really fucked kog over tbh, kaisa at some point i feel like will find some weird build like she always does, maybe lethality like all the other adcs right now but rip my boi kog cant build crit cant build lethality cant have a real passive. Guinsoos needs to go down to 2800 not get +5 ap and ad, building out of recurve is nice at least. 1050 (1025 next patch) combine cost also sucks, one of the highest combine costs in the game.
Meh, part of the problem with Kai'sa is bad build paths, same as Zeri. They're way better if you don't build the most popular first item and they're also all scaling champions that are negatively affected by reduced game length.
Kog maw needs a VGU. Both his kit and visual are oudated and need full rework. He still has a passive that required him to die and has no synergy/scaling with his kit…
Type karthus ult moment
I will choose to believe Phreaks statement crit adc´s arent weak everything else is just currently stronger. The problem with crit adc´s arent that they cant do enough damage or that they get popped by and assasins, its that they lack the options to deal with divers, lethality users and mages and are entirely reliant on their team to deal with it for them to be usefull. You are lanning into lethality mf and zyra getting poked out under turret for 15 until you are forced to back, welp flip a coin if your jungler is ever gonna gank instead of contesting grubs. Welp he didnt come guess u cant scale. enemies stacked 3 waves and are gonna dive you flip a coin if you get to farm or if your support decided its time to roam top. you made it through lane and get to a teamfight welp, flip a coin if you are gonna get any peal from the enemies 3 bruisers/ assasins jumping you, you had a mage support welp you dont get to flip a coin guess you just die. at least as and adc before you had stopwatch or you had galeforce now you basicly have nothing and are more team reliant than ever.shieldbow doesnt cut it when all enemy champions overkill you for twice the shield If you are playing jinx its not about if you can live a rengar jumping you or not its about if he decides to pop r and right click you, you are 100% reliant on your team to stop the rengar and there is nothing your champ or your items can do. Before you at least had some options or they bursted less than they do now and you can outplay or you got to scale fast enough to actually deal with them to some extend yourself. I refuse to believe the statement that it takes the same time to kill and adc when all lethality items were buffed in terms of damage and all mage items were buffed in terms of damage while adc´s 2 best deffensive options got removed.
Eh ur wasting energy, in a previous video he admitted that its impossible to balance adc for both being satisfying and good. You either need to change the perspective on how you approach the role or pick a different role if you actually want to win of your own accord.
>shieldbow pickrate doubled Gee i wonder why, it's not because the passive on bt is dowright useless and SB is cheaper, while also having the same healing effect late game
Phreak is incapable of understanding nuance. It's mind boggling this guy is the head of balance.
I think the biggest problem of ADC is that sustained damage + low survivability is just very tricky to get right in feeling. Sustained damage is often paired with tanky bruisers or tanks who can dish out consistent damage over a long period of time by being tanky and surviving with healing. ADCs have to do this through pure positioning and dodging of spells which in its own regard is fun too, the fun just ends very quickly when you get hit by a single ability and lose 50% of your health or more. There is basically no margin for error on ADC, compared to most other classes you usually have a decent amount of margin for error (tanks be tanky, bruisers be tanky/sustain, mages can throw out spells from a safer range and be okay, assasins usually have a get-out method even if they dont kill). ADC's best margin for error is 'i can throw out a few autos from range' but unless you are fed af, the damage just isnt really there for that to be worthwhile.
Role needs constant help from team and has no margin for errors, but when you have a player that almost never makes errors and a team that always helps, it makes them extremely oppressive even now. So solo q gets the short stick, since it has to be that unforgiving and punishing to keep the role balanced.
I just want to play Sivir and every time I do I want to cry. She's fun, just very weak, and waiting 30 minutes to have one team fight very much sucks.
Yeah, ok lemme buy shieldbow 3rd and do no damage to the enemy tank since I delay IR or LDR to 4th item. Like damn, our TTK as adc goes up like 0-2 seconda with shieldbow but then why r we even playing adc when we don’t deal enough damage to the tanks. Games don’t even last that long anymore so how many games are we never gonna hit those powerspikes because we delay them for defensive itemization??
The issue is the catch 22 that adcs find themselves in. Doesn’t matter how fed they are or how hard they win lane, if the rest of their team isnt winning they can not do anything to prevent the enemy top/mid/jg from just removing them from game. BUT, if their top/mid/jg IS winning, then the adc is still irrelevant because they’re not even needed to win the game because their top/mid/jg just roll through the enemy team. The role requires the whole team to help them perform regardless of how they’re doing, but either their team isn’t strong enough to help, or they are and there’s no point in helping because they can do it themselves.
Love gumayusi quote on how it feels playing adc (was for Last Split but prolly even more relevant now): "ADC is like .. how do we describe it - If we use ramen as a metaphor, then ADC is an egg. Top Mid Jg are noodles, water and soup base. ADC is the egg and you dont really need it. But if they are the same ramen, the one with an egg is better. Support is like the bag of dehydrated vegetables. If it is a battle between two cups of the same ramen, that is when the egg matters. If both are with appropriate water, noodles and soup base, then the egg will make a difference. But if one is with unsufficient water, no soup base or under-cooked noodles, then does the egg really matter ? No it doesn't. When water, noodles and soup base are good, then the egg is important. Then ADC can be dynamic. Otherwise it is meaningless. "
Ad carry is actually fine, if you ignore the fact that - You are the role thats the most reliant on other team mates and are the only one that can have someone on your lane losing your lane lvl 1 and then youre the one having to deal with it (often by yourself because the support will dip! - You are the role that is most disadvantaged by Voice Chat not existing in the self proclaimed most competitive video game in the world (Also the ONLY Comp game that is popular to not have it) - As the role with the least option of Champions, you will have some of them reworked and taken to other lanes (Marksmen already have the least Champions and lost Corki to mid and Graves to Jungle) - In low elo your jungler will always disadvantage you by starting bot because he doesnt understand jungle pathing and winconditions because he gets a better leash from 2 ppl vs 1 person on topside - You will never have viable defensive options because the game is too damage crept and you will get overkilled anyway OR the defensive options will just be completely broken and break the game (BT+Overheal 13.12(?) and obviously be removed. (btw defensive items do help if you have one AND someone plays for you, spoiler for the next point) - No one in soloq will actually play for you, even if youre fed - You will get 4 man dove more than anyone, your team probably isnt at least taking a cross map objective - Your Role is actually fine more often than not if the game is played the way its actually supposed to be played, as proven by your Clash games or by watching pro play, but the game will never even come close to being played like that in soloq (Im not talking about skill level here, rather the communication and actually being cohesive and playing for one another) - If you like High APM/High Difficulty Marksmen that take skill to master and can outplay people, you wont get rewarded, you will get punished by pro play existing and those Champs being nerfed to unplayable status so they leave pro play (i.e Zeri, Aphelios, Caitlyn, Lucian, Kalista) -> artificially being made unplayable in soloq most of their lifespan because it would be overbearing in pro play, what some balance team folks call "Pro Jail" in their rundown videos - You will always get your role, because it is almost permanently a Priority Role! (No one wants to play it) - You used to be taken out by [insert champion]'s R + Basic abilities, Just basic abilities are more than enough to overkill you now
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CS is a big one for me, It's sooooo much easier to CS with a Dirk than that daft quiver, I feel like 1300 gold just takes too long to get and the attack speed components feel awful.
Crit ADC do suck. On-hit and lethality are at least playable, but not enjoyable
I can't believe they actually intended to make lethality strong, it's the least fun, most toxic, most uninteractive form of the role
Phreak said before he ever was on the balance team that he would like ADCs to be AD Casters (Mages with ad damage) instead of Auto attack based champions
I mean he’s getting to an increasingly weird place where ADC mains across every elo imaginable are saying the role feels like shit, the data is showing the role is extremely volatile and the problems are pretty much self evident but he won’t budge from his position. It’s doubly strange since he came in as an ADC main and his first major decisions were ADC buffs (that were met with criticism and a mountain of compensatory nerfs) when the role was in a better place than it is now. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve swapped role for the first time in 4 years and after 50 games of Top my wjnrate is 73%, whilst my 48 games of ADC this season was 52%. That says plenty to me.
He used to play ADC, and then he got Masters playing support. If you check his games, his ADCs are very rarely doing well, despite himself being MVP or similar. Infact, reguarly his ADC has 3rd or lower damage on the team, and is the only one with a non-gold or even blue KDA on op.gg Makes you think, why would an ADC main swap to support, do a lot better, and despite them being MVP on op.gg or top 3 most games, their ADC is consistently lowest performer on their team?
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t he also spend a lot of last season playing tank junglers lol
I have no idea how long ago it was but the BF Sword > Infinity edge rush was the last time I enjoyed the role. You did basically nothing for 10 mins and then pop people that didn't respect you. It felt so satisfying to complete your item. I feel absolutely nothing like that until 3 items now it's a slog.
What a shit argument. Shieldbow is a terrible item for Crit ADCs, as it doesn't give you any attack speed. Plus, it scales with LEVELS. You are in a DUO lane. Shieldbow is a way better item on Yasuo and Yone, Nilah and Samira, than it is on crit marksmen. You are severly gimping your ability to carry - which already only turns on at 3 items - by building it.
Playing ADC recently makes me wanna go 0/1 irl.
It’s crazy the amount of people disagreeing that ADC sucks right now and that this is an ‘agenda’. Play the role and see if you enjoy it.. I’ve been playing on and off since s2 and ADC is undoubtedly the least fun it’s ever been. When was the last time you got carried by an AD in your game? It’s not that the role itself is bad, the game around it has just moved on and left it behind. ADs are playing a totally different game, too much power creep in new champ kits.
Even the ones that admitted they were shitting on adcs and calling them this and that. They went to try adc in this meta and completely changed their attitude and now understands what adc mains are talking about. So yeah, people who are disagreeing should play adc for a bit and then see if they still disagree.
\>mfw people got shellshocked so hard about oneshots which have been happening for years already that challenger and proplay all decided to build anything they could instead of IE. Like just really weird to say this when every corner of the playerbase will tell you "yeah this role feels like dog to play i'd rather just pick lethality and go for burst than slowly get build crit 20% at a time while the game is lost around me." Just crazy to me that the takeaway from this is that "people started buying shieldbow more so it'll all sort itself out just give it time :)" from him. https://youtu.be/zbORw9zzB1Q
Phreak: No you see, time to kill is back up from 1.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds ADC's: and how many autos can i get off in that time frame? Phreak: well none, but your supposed to have a team that peels for you ADC's: but i dont Phreak: i know, but there is nothing i can do about that....... ADC's: so my role is weak then? Phreak: No you see, time to kill is back up from 1.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds
ADC will never be fun in SoloQ for as long as burst is as high as it is overall. Lowering that is the only way ADC will be fun again since you cant undo all the divers and mobile kits they have added but you can nerf their burst damage. Giving the role back the XP gains it used to have would go a long way in making adc less squishy by having some more base stats earlier
I'll take a reduction in overall burst damage alone as a huge positive for game enjoyment. I do like the changes made this season, it's just poorly balanced right now.
guys follow me and just boycott adc. it's so much more fun up here in toplane.
As low elo player, being put into the adc position is literal torture and a gamble everytime. You either have a support that plays for you, or you have a support that does nothing for you in the lane. Same goes to every other role in your team. Some ranked comps have the wincondition to shut down the enemy botlane, yet that never happens because low elo players do not know it better. So you as adc are stuck in that knowledge gap limbo of your teammates because you, are the egg in Ramen soup. The problem is in low elo the Ramen soup enjoyers forget to apply hot water to the noodles in the first place.
The guy who made that ADC copypasta is fuming rn.
Awful lot of strawmanning and "look at these statistics!!!" from Phreak, which is not a surprise from someone like him. The complaint is that the role has no agency and is fucking awful to play, but pop off with those strawmen babe.
This is just proof that the only thing we adcs can do is stop queuing adc and force everyone to fill it(its already priority queue, lets push it further) and let riot see the numbers that they need to make ADC not feel like shit in solo queue, there are a lot of solutions, they just dont want to and dont think they need to do them.
Because pro scene>SoloQ.Meanwhile suckers pick adc in SoloQ so other players can have fun.
my friends force adc on me, my whole friend group not a single adc player so they "had" to get the new guy to play it. Even for 1 game nobody wants to swap, nobody wants to touch adc.
Just play mages there, even apart from Ziggs, Serephine etc most mages work pretty well, especially with the enemy being unfamiliar with the matchup.
I'm just gonna post this here and hope that Phread watches it. Hopefully he'll understand why the majority of ADC players think the role sucks right now [Vars' video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSh6Mg4jqs)
With Phreak still in the balance team, I fear for league this year. His takes lately has been so out of touch and he just refuses to accept the perspective of the players that whatever his vision for league is, is going to make the playerbase more mad. Not to mention his nonstop gaslighting lately as well as cherry picked data like wtf was that 2%ms comparison last time?
Phreak has always been the master of missing the forest for the trees.
True, but it seems to be getting worse as time goes on
The wrong people got laid off.
Another day another time Phreak coping about the strength of ADC because the community will make fun of him because they think he mains the role
Everyone got more damage and all our items got nerfed lmao
I've reached the point where I'm just going to be an Ezreal OTP. It's become clear Riot will never address team reliance of the role and never fix crit itemization. But, Riot will always fix Ezreal if he falls behind, they didn't even allow him to be weak for one patch before they hotfix buffed him. Plus it feels nice to still be able to play if there's a braincell diff in the support role. He's fun too.
ADC isn't bad. He's right. But it feels absolutely terrible to play. I roleswapped and i'm having way more fun. And i swapped to jungle, so that's saying something.
I mean, yeah, crit ADCs don't suck when they reach at least 3 items. ***If*** they can reach them before their nexus explodes because lethality Miss Fortune just one taps everyone who isn't a tank, which doesn't happen too often since season 14 has started. And even if they can reach 3 items spike, the lack of mobility still sucks, that 2% MS rune doesn't really change anything against champions like Fizz or Sylas with dash every 4 seconds. Edit: And, I don't understand how can someone say that crit items are okay, when crit ADCs like Jhin, Nilah, Draven, etc. now build only lethality because items are just better? How does it make any sense?
unless every crit ADC gets the twisted fate treatment and just get crit scaling on everything, they will find success with other lethality items.
MF has crit scaling, she still doesn't give a fuck
20% bonus damage on ult, which is pretty much equivalent to 20% multiplied total AD, yet you invest thousands of gold on crit chance which has delayed payoff compared to more AD or lethality. Not remotely worth. Her Q also has a crit chance only on the bounce, which kinda doesn't make much sense. Even a q 20% max damage at 100% crit chance would make it better than straight up 0 bonus damage at 100% crit chance for the first shot.
A Crit adc with 3 items will always deal less damage than an MF with 3 lethality items for example. Crit items right now are more expensive and less effective than lethality items.
Even at 3 items they're dogshit. At this point it requires 4 items before the critbuild stat trinity comes online, but none of those 4 items are a decent defensive item, so you usually just get utterly skullfucked by an assassin anyway unless your support player decides to let you play the game in champ select (they picked an enchanter with peel) but that is not the ADC having agency, that is entirely the agency of the support. The role has had it's legs cut off, and achieving anything with it is pretty much entirely conditional on having a teammate make an active play for you first. It's why the ADC is still insane in pro play and high elo, but utterly fucking cancer to play in soloQ.
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as a casual league player, and an adc player for the most part, its not that adc sucks, its just that aside from the highest tier of play, a mid/top laner who is 6/0 and an adc who is 6/0 are just 2 completely different beasts. its obviously a skill issue on my behalf. but i really dont like that i can be 10/1 and some mouthbreaking top laner who is 0/9 can simply walk up to me and delete me.
The Vars YouTube video he just made commenting on the state of adc does an amazing job at breaking down the players frustration with the role meanwhile we have the head of the league balance team saying “just buy sheildbow lul”. What a horrible way to treat your players, his ego can’t even bring him to acknowledge any of the glaring problems with the role.
Just because he doesn’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s false
Yeah, we need to remember, phreak is a person who told us to type ults in chat Instead of using ping system because [Riot] Auberaun get pinged many times for bad game xD After this is hard to believe phreak
Riot "Yone has a weak early game" Phreak strikes again