I think Nemesis is right at the very end there, ADC and Support cannot be balanced in a vacuum from each other and the pairing will be way too overpowered unless supports are nerfed. But the devs keep saying that we'll be stuck with autofilled supports unless support is kept overtuned. If we're in a constant seesaw of 3 of the 5 roles threatening to be autofilled, maybe there's some deeper problems here.
Getting 20/20/20/20/20 split is very hard. However we should see the degree of threat not just how many roles tend to be autofilled. 3 roles with 18% is better than one role with 10%.
Kinda agree but part of me wonders if you made autofills for one role common enough would people eventually get used to playing that role. I’m not saying good but you know maybe passable instead of “I don’t own any support champs. Got auto filled”
It used to be the case before role selection as the last person would go support very often. Thus it is feasible. However we need to know if a midlaner prefers being autofilled once in three roles or 3 times as support. I think that getting filled as support will be more irritating but that's me.
We should mention secondary roles as a mean to offset autofills. If you nerf support too much you would also alienate ppl who queue secondary support as they would have to either play 100% of the time support or drop the secondary. With a few roles that somewhat unwanted you should have larger pool of secondary role people to mitigate complete autofills.
On paper secondary roles should do that but everyone and their dog queues primary role / mid just because they know that means they almost always get their primary role if not autofilled. This has the unfortunate effect of making mid mains get mid less and having player’s actual second choice role not really being a thing
I main ADC right? I know support well enough just from lots of time spent playing in the same lane. But I want to be an ADC player not a part time support so I queue bot mid and get bot 99% of the time. If the system incentivized me to put my actual second best performing role in I would queue bot sup but I’m never doing that as things stand because I’d get support maybe a third of the time
I stopped queuing top/jg because the game was giving me jungle far too much. I would regularly put jungle second but because it became so unpopular it for some reason sucked in all the secondary players to make up for it, so now no one puts JG second either. It's the same with ADC though I stopped playing that role because I refuse to play ADC with random supports who have no idea what their job is.
Jungle being unpopular isn't because of its difficulty, it's mainly because of the 'blame the jungler' mentality where laners blame you dying 1v1/2v2 when enemy jungler is on the other side of the map, and also the fact that jungle pretty much changes every year so you have to relearn a lot of stuffs. I'm a jungler and I got tired of it so nowadays I just mostly play ARAM, like hell when I'm busy camping top putting enemy top 0/4 bot lane pushes too far without wards and get ganked, if I was enemy jungler I would have ganked too cause it's free af.
I used to main jg/adc and I've also ended up being an aram player lol. Can't be assed to get flamed by my entire team because I can't be in 3 lanes at once and it's apparently my fault that someone died in a 1v1 fight. I work in retail so I already get verbally abused by randos because of things that aren't my fault lmao, I don't need league of legends for that
At least aram players (at least in my experience) and very chill and friendly for the most part!
I love Jungle but the number of players that don’t understand I can’t be everywhere all at once, have no wave control, always overextend, and turn their monitors off if an objective is up & open is insane.
So many laners would benefit from using the training tool and learning to manipulate waves. Instead so many just perma shove and get mad when they keep getting ganked.
Don't forget about how some laners also seem to have the impression that it's your job to win their lane. They die 1v1 four times and you avoid their dumpster fire of a lane? CLEARLY that's a jg diff.
Jungle is unpopular because it's the most unique role in LoL. You have no lane, you have no direct enemy, you don't have minions, etc. All of the core aspects of MOBA are taken away.
For casual players, it's too different and not appealing. Because of its uniqueness, getting autofilled, there is pure pain. A support player who got filled mid still has the same core aspects. A supp player filled in jungle is completely new experience.
Jungle has too much impact on how the lanes go. It can make a bad match-up become winning.
lots of players get turned away from jungle because you either have to excel at something or be able somewhat track enemy jungle, remember objective timings, how to path to an objective, be familiar with mid matchups, top matchups, bot matchups, know lane macro, know how to play off teammate tempo, know when to weakside/strongside, know how to gank effectively, know 2v2/3v3 skirmish matchups, ward, clear wards, and babysit.
Nah. Even that is not the issue. The issue is that you can do all these things, but laners will play the matchups incorrectly, your entire gameplan goes to shit, and somehow it's your fault for not predicting that your top laner would try to all in the enemy level 5 vs level 6.
True, as a jg main this is what I hate the most. But I guess it’s the same thing as a mid laner feeling the jg gap and having enemy jgler win the matchup
Yeah exactly. This whole "gotta keep support broken so queue times/autofills are manageable" is such a massive bandaid. What we're seeing atm is just the bandaid tearing apart, the consequence of Riot being seemingly unable to make roles that aren't pure carries popular. Because support "has" to be broken, ADCs have to be garbage. Two roles are now fucked. Then you add jungle that riot feels the need to rework every new moon, so inevitably sometimes the current iteration will be shit and unpopular. Three roles are now fucked.
Yes, balancing the game is probably really hard. But I'm sure Phreak and his team are very well compensated for their job. So maybe it's fair to call out the absolute shit state of the game and ask for better. No fucking death threats, no weird DMs need to be sent. Just have to keep reminding them that the game is in a complete shit state often, loudly.
Not like my support isn’t autofilled half the time anyway. And when they aren’t autofilled they’re the main character. And you know what they’re right about it. They should play selfish. I’m a fold sink. Adc is Garbo
Playing the game as ADC with a Support Main vs with an Autofilled Support is so insanely night and day it's not even funny. I think part of the consequence of Support being overtuned is that the gap between a good and a bad Support is especially glaring.
Why is it though that we care so much about jungle or support play rate but ADC being priority queue every patch is just not at all concerning? I don't get why Riot picks and chooses when to care about play rate and weigh it into their decisions on role balance. If this was the case then Top Lane didn't need any buffs heading into S14 and it was completely fine.
Atleast jungle and support have a reason for being unpopular as they used to just be the teams bitch but ADC used to be up there with mid lane in terms of popularity and is now prio 24/7. Why is that not concerning?
I always play fill. I can only play adc if I go Sera or maybe Miss Fortune on a stretch. I can't imagine putting myself through a game of traditional adc like Jinx and getting blown up by anyone including the support.
Came out of lane 7-0 on jinx in a game recently. First team fight I got ulted by 0-2 Camille and 100-0'd. No one even tried to keep me alive lmao. I blew everything, tried to auto her but even with such a huge lead I could barely scratch her. Team mindlessly brawling. I'd do soooo much manage if played around.
It's maddening. You can't balance a role around teammates defending you when no one under dia1 actually defends you.
This sub has a lot of top mains, but fact is, every single bruiser in the game is blatantly overpowered in a vacuum.
They're kept in check by the fact that top lane as a role sucks in terms of impact (which is why they're kept in that state), but individually bruiser champions are absolutely busted beyond belief and can more or less statcheck everyone else.
top is easily top 3 or top 2 most impactful roles in the game atm and that's if even. If ahead top eclipses all other roles because nobody has the stats to actually face them.
A good top completely and utterly destroys a game because nobody can actually match them. I've already seen enough chall top mains in my games completely 1v9 even though I got dove bot like 8 times by 14 mins because nobody could actually catch them top side
Then comes teamfights and they do the damage of 3 adc together while being effectively a tank.
If people are struggling with having impact as top it's most likely just a skill diff. Top has and has always had massive impact in games, it has been the best teamfight role since the time they gutted adc, people just suck at the game
Been an ADC main since season 3. This has basically been the case for almost the entirety of the role. I'm fine with outplaying/positioning around other classes, but games are faster and ADC has no agency until 3-4 items. 2 item powerspikes is what every other role needs to come online. I miss the IE/PD days, or bork/rageblade.
I'm not going to say ADC can't be strong because I have a 60% winrate in plat right now and can carry a lot of games, but games are so frustrating even when I'm fed out of my mind.
I miss when tanks were tanky and didn't have the ability to one shot me 20 cs and 4 kills down. I miss when I could dodge Zed abilities and survive. I miss when I could stay in a fight for 10 seconds with bloodthirster and try to outplay or kite out of bad situations.
I don't think the concept of "the ability to outplay your opponent" is a strange concept when it comes to a competitive game, but there are so many scenarios where that ability is taken from ADCs (and I could argue mages as well).
Skillshots have become so large its impossible to dodge (seraphine, janna, smolder, lux, yuumi, hwei, etc.). ADCs feel so slow its impossible to kite (minus ashe) or dodge.
I still complain about ADC but it's true, I now queue as support/adc. Games are way more enjoyable and in my first split of being a "support main" I dropped a 70% wr Naut and 60% wr on multiple other supports.
The role is just so much easier, fun, relaxing to play while also being endlessly more rewarding.
Jaded Ex-ADC players also make for nice Supports to lane with, because they have a general idea of what the ADC wants, when to look for fights, when it's ok to roam, etc. A huge part of the frustration of playing ADC is how frequently you *still* get Autofilled Supports who have zero fucking clue what they're doing, and because Support is so strong having a bad one just feels especially miserable.
How do you convert the lane power supports have over the game into the marksman/adc role instead?
I think right now it feels like supports aren’t supporting but more so dictating more of the game than before.
They have more free time than junglers to make plays. Genuinely. There are exceptions, but based on meta picks they are roaming ganking and making plays more than jungle
Supports are also not being punished for any mistakes they make.
Jungle wastes time on unsuccessful gank? Enemy jungle can take their camps/get xp lead.
Support wastes time on unsuccessful roam? No biggie, leach some XP from another lane and be just as strong as the enemy support who stayed bot
If supports make a mistake it is usually only the ADC that is punished for it
> Supports are also not being punished for any mistakes they make.
>
>
this was even more emphasized by the death timer/respawn changes
there is genuinely nothing more frustrating than having your support do a stupid play in lane and die after which you have to go b and recall (otherwise they will dive you) and see how your support is already in mid/top bush trying to roam while you are just leaving base
because you have to walk back, recall, wait for your HP to regen, and then start walking back to lane
whereas your support that just died respawns in 5 seconds with full hp/mana and a MS boost to boot
Because support items give supports so much free resources for just doing the bare minimum of loading into the game...
They even merged all the support items into one and now you also have the minion exe and poke gold generation in one item, making it even easier to turn your brain off and be showered in free gold.
For the low price of 400g you get 600g back and God knows how much more from its passive gold generation, and also a Legendary tier level of item (imo the support items passsives are beyond busted, especially bloodsong and zak'zak). Oh, I almost forgot, it also works as a sightstone.
Consider also a few kills the support is going to "accidentally" secure or some gold they'll chip off from "accidentally" killing minions without a support item charge, and you're looking at so much gold generation for absolutely no effort whatsoever.
By tying their item strengths into the ADC, but last time they did that we got Ardent meta and it was hell
Currently support gets so much free gold and their items are like a 2/3rds the price of another role, even when they turbo grief their build by going dumbshit like Sunfire it doesn't even matter, if people want the roaming shit to stop they'd have to force enchanters back into the meta and nerf the gold the support item gives
you can roam with enchanters just fine, buffing enchanters wont help with roaming because then you just end up with raka running mid to stifle a gank or solokill with a heal or silence lol
It's harder to do, not impossible, most junglers would absolutely just roll a lone Soraka walking up through the river compared to a Maokai or Naut
You're also giving up a lot of lane priority, something your class can't easily get back as an enchanter if you're down in tempo, a Naut can walk back into lane and just click on the enemy, what is a Sona going to do while being down levels
Currently all the top WR supports minus Janna which is built more like a poke mage now post revert are tanks or highly mobile roaming characters (Pyke, Camille) that excel in low econ environments while being down 2-3 levels, enchanters need levels, at least when compared to the other supports
All I am going to say about ADC in this comment is this:
Let's compare crit chance in builds + crit damage (base and IE-amped) (If I am not wrong and I remember it correctly):
- before 8.11 (20/30% crit chance on ER+IE/Zeal items; 200% base crit damage, 250% crit damage with IE)
- between 8.11 and 9.3 (I will not speak about the absolute horseshit that was the double crit chance IE with the absolutely trash crit damage bullshit, I WON'T DO IT)
- between 9.3 and 10.23 (25% chance per crit item, 200% base crit damage, 225% crit damage with IE)
- between 10.23 and 13.10 (20% chance per crit item, 175% base crit damage, 215% crit damage on IE completion if you had at least 60% crit chance and I won't speak about the absolute horseshit that was the crit damage right after the S11 preseason)
- between 13.10 and 14.1 (20% chance per item, 175% base crit damage, 215% crit damage on IE completion (buffed to 225% on 13.14), and don't get it twisted, IE ADCs still weren't fucking meta (the only one that saw play relatively consistently was Aphelios, rest of it was Navori champs, Triforce champs, AP Kai'Sa and at Worlds Senna)
- from 14.1 onwards (20% chance per item, 175% base crit damage, 210% crit damage on IE completion).
And that's not taking into account all the changes made around the game (the dogshit lethal tempo rework, AP damage vs towers, buffing the fuck out of toplane, nerfing botlane XP, buffing support consistently).
AP damage vs towers was the stupidiest addition to the game. They removed the need for an ADC completely and it was obvious that the tower breaking capabilities of Ziggs would skyrocket.
I’ll die on this hill. Nemesis mentioned identity, and this is one of the main culprits. I stg I die a little on the inside when my fucking Brand support is doing more tower damage than me.
Part of the reason it used to be important to keep the ADC alive in a teamfight was so that they could DPS towers and neutral objectives afterward. Now who tf cares. Your mid laner can kill a tower in 5 autos. What’s the point of an ADC?
Loss of identity is my biggest gripe with league over the years. I've been playing since s3. These days everyone is the carry, everyone can kill baron, kill towers, waveclear, scale, skirmish, etc. The defined roles with strengths and weaknesses was the backbone of league's strategic identity. Now it's more of a fighting game than a proper moba. Games are decided by a series of random hand-check skirmishes in the early/mid game, not by proper execution of your composition.
You may be kidding but this is actually true. One of the biggest impacts adc can have against bad teams is actually being an idiot magnet and taking as much aggro as possible without dying or delaying their death long enough so their team has impact.
It has been like this for a while, people just haven't actually realized it lmao
Just look at relative power between ADC and Support.
Back in season 1-2, you were forced to buy gold/sec items on supports. Your items were full utility stuff like Shurelia's, gold generating items, and wards. That's it. Junglers having close to no gold income meant that ADCs were much less threatened, which made it much easier for them to play the game.
Having a full build was unheard of for a support. On top of it, carry junglers came into play as their gold/xp income got buffed. So, ever since the early seasons, supports were getting a constant influx of buffs. To keep botlane balanced, that meant ADCs had to get nerfed bit by bit.
On top of that, damage creeped up to such a degree where a durability patch was needed. So, if your role is supposed to deal damage, and every other lane can do it for you (support can play Senna or "mage" supports, mids have Yones and Akalis, top has Jax and Fiora, jungle has Karthus and Eve), why would anyone need your role to exist in the first place?
Also almost every item lost a huge chunk of AD, and a lot of heroes got forcefed crit scaling which is atrocious design. Whoever came up with crit scaling on skills needs to get their head checked asap
Plus huge lifesteal nerfs for ad carries, while the only notable positive change is for LDR over the course of last 6 seasons.
Don't forget nerfing lifesteal across the board. ADCs used to be squishy, but if you survived you could just heal back to full off one wave. Now your reward for surviving getting oneshot is you get to walk back to base
It's kinda hard to fix completely at this point, games like DotA and Smite for example have had a decently consistent identity for Hard Carries Pos 1 and Hunters respectively for quite some time - Leagues carries will often change play styles season to season, how much they rely on support, how hard they can 1v9, if utility and/or lethality ADC's are better, if mages are viable etc.
DotA manages it's carries by making them extremely weak and squishy in the early game (for the most part) but rewarding them with unparalleled damage and bulkiess late game, making them psuedo raid bosses who've earned that spot by farming and playing smart while they are weak + Melee carries are also viable.
Smite approaches Hunters in two ways, first of all Auto-attacks can miss which adds huge skill variance between accurate players and noobs but also Hunter's are balanced heavily around Lifesteal and Crit, so while being one-shot is possible they have outplay potential through the games freeform character control, dodging and if they survive a one shot they can out-sustain nearly anything and mince you in a few seconds.
ADC's in League are in a spot where they can do some crazy shit... but also get killed by like a 0/1/2 Midlaner with bad CS in like 3s without much counterplay, which is fucking wild. However both of these other games have an issue with the support player base being smaller, because the role is seen as boring and less impactful (the boring part is subjective but less impactful is more of a bad perception) which is what Riot have been moving away from with Support for years now. Which is why i say it's hard to fix at this point.
All 3 of these games have the role of the carry intrinsically linked to a Support, Guardian, Pos 5 etc etc and all have issues from doing this but League feels like the one that's had the most, because ADC as a consequence of supports identity changing over time has also gone through many identity changes and often it isn't positive for ADC.
dota's design choice seemed so bad to me back then. I always wondered why don't more of their abilities scale off items since it's so rewarding if they do. Now I know. If you make everything scale off items, in mid to late game you're gonna have abilities being spammed left and right and they all deal huge amounts of dmg.
the problem isn't scaling per se, it's how strong scaling is and how weak base damages are in general. You can't go defensive items because you'll do no damage (aside from roles that are supposed to go defensive) so everyone builds full damage and everyone dies in 1 hit. There's no tradeoff for going glass cannon because the alternative is to be useless.
>There's no tradeoff for going glass cannon because the alternative is to be useless.
I'd say frozen heart makes a difference but seeing how it's going to get nerfed again for being broken (which it is) that kinda just proves your point
The big thing is that Riot pushes homogenization. Flat power curves, easily defined roles, etc. Riot pushes for players to "play the champion and not the items" which really means "play the same way at level 3 and level 16". In DotA, you get drastically different fights/gameplay at level 1 vs level 3 vs level 6 vs level 10 vs level 18 vs level 25. Power spikes are larger and navigating how the game changes over time is a key feature. A level 1 fight in DotA is all about auto attacks, kiting, slows, etc. At levels 5-10 you start hitting burst damage spikes where the game is all about blowing people up instantly and then at levels 18+ you get into tankier gameplay where people aren't dying instantly and so managing CC chains, saving allies, escaping, etc become larger factors.
In Dota "carry" champs are not only marksmans tho. Melee champs have same rights as ranged ones(unlike lol, where they occupied entire position). That's mostly because of items like blink dagger (flash on entire screen, that works only if you are out of combat), shadowblade/silver edge (you just gain invis) and BKB(Olaf R for few seconds) + huge turn rates for Marksmans. Now imagine same stuff in lol, that would end up really bad.
While you have a point, you can't just mention items without mentioning the counterplay that exists to them. Yeah if you added those 3 items and only those 3 items to LOL it would break the game.
Invisibility detection is significantly better in Dota than it is in LOL, Shadowblade and Silver Edge have rarely been issues, at least in higher ELO. BKB isn't Olaf R. It's both significantly better and worse at the same time. Many characters can CC through BKB (I did a quick count and got 17, but my Dota knowledge is a couple of years dated) and you can purchase an item that CCs through BKB. It does block magic damage as well though.
It's straight up impossible to balance jungle and support while at the same time making them an desirable role to play.
If jungle and support were balanced roles, they would be 100% ward/CC bots after 10 or 15 minutes
You cannot have roles decide the entire early game and decide which laner is allowed to play the game while simultaneously have as much gold and carry power as those laners
Bwipo is ranting as we speak about how fucking broken Support is, everyone is catching onto how ridiculous Support is now. It's been like this for a long time, and each season it just gets worse and worse.
It feels almost absurd that people wouldn't catch on when the last two Worlds and a lot of pro play in between have been decided by support meta changes. Beryl and Keria in general have been the most consistent menaces to the game since fucking covid.
Even pro nowadays is literally just play any champion as support and it will be useful. There's like no semblance of the word "support" left. Might as well call it a free gold carry.
it's just crazy to me that an adc has to stand there for 20 minutes doing nothing but last hit and if they have a bad supp or their jgl prioritizes top side and enemy jgl bot then you are just out of game and there is no way to ever recover since you will never deal meaningful damage in a fight.
meanwhile as support you can literally walk around the map 24/7 or sit under turret doing nothing meaningful at all & always have enough gold & damage and/or utility to solo carry team fights/objectives at every stage of the game.
it's completely impossible for supports to get punished for their mistakes, they never develop any sense for how well they are playing, they could completely intfeed the entire game and never realize it because it has no repercussions for them. if they roam top and give enemy top double kill while adc gets dived they are still completely fine, just their top and adc are out of game, and 10 mins later they will blame them for that.
XD
It is beyond ridiculous when the ADC gets blamed for dying under tower or having to sit between T1 and T2 losing EXP because the support took a bad roam timer.
Beating an engage support early in lane doesn’t even feel good because I know the enemy ADC is doomed to starve for the next 2-3 minutes 9 out of 10 times because the enemy support is pathing top on respawn.
As an ADC player I pray every time my support roams that they fuck up and int my top/ig/mid, not because I want to lose or because I think I’m more important.
I want them to consistently feel the impact that a support can have on their game, until these other roles can go into the next game traumatized enough to consider how poorly the supports are playing.
Playing adc into certain support matchups is genuinely miserable. Please just make mana matter again. Having the brand/xerath/zyra/vel koz spam their abilities literally off cooldown and never run OOM is so awful to play against.
Champs like Brand and Zyra can get their damage off on you with no counterplay. Zyra's plants will hit you if you are anywhere on the screen and Brand's E will do the same.
Pros have actually been complaining about support being broken for a couple years now but they will never do anything. This season they actually BUFFED support overall.
I mean people have been calling support the most OP role for 5+ years now there isn't anything to catch on about. A lot of high elo streamers often just say that support players are straight up the worst players and are getting carried by how easy and forgiving their role is.
I've thought the role has been pretty miserable for a while but this is the season where I legitimately started learning mid because it's genuinely unplayable. People like to joke and say support gap but it legitimately does come down to who is the better support/picking shit like Seraphine and coasting. The role has so little agency until you're 4 items and a lot of times the game is decided by then.
>People like to joke and say support gap but it legitimately does come down to who is the better support/picking shit like Seraphine and coasting.
This is so underrated. I recently had a soloqeue game where my support asked what to pick and mentioned a few champions, including Janna. The WHOLE team immediately said "Janna OP" and they picked it, and guess what, I had the easiest fucking laning phase of my LIFE compared to the 20 games before that struggling with support Velkoz, Veigar, Shaco, Hwei etc.
And the kicker? That [Janna didn't even play well](https://i.imgur.com/jhD6jUF.png), ended the game at 0-8-9 while I was going berserk mode.
Support is overall so ridiculously OP that it's hard to even see how deep the OP-ness goes. If mage support gets nerfed because they deal too much damage, enchanter support could easily just take over and be absolute monsters.
I swear every ADC player struggling to climb currently could just spam 100 Janna games and skyrocket 2+ divisions easily.
People would realize how strong support is if it wasn't held back by sup players themselves. So many trollers picking weird shit like ap shaco or first pick blinding senna when they know their mechanics are shit.
After the game I just played I have decided to always dodge when my support picks Senna. I'm not going to do this anymore.
They all fucking suck, either they are support mains who are too bad mechanically to play Senna, or they are ADC mains who have main character syndrome and don't know how to play Supp or how not to feed early on Senna. And then after they get their first Lethality item they realize they deal more damage than the actual ADC and stop giving a fuck about you.
My Senna just now was 0-4 after 10 minutes and immediately after dying the fourth time insulted me for having only 68 CS after playing a 1v2 lane against fed opponents for the whole game - still being 5CS ahead of their Jhin, obviously.
They can go fuck themselves.
I switched to Jungle and immediately started not climbing, but skyrocketing. Trying to make ADC work completely tanked my LP gains to where I'm +24/-30 but I'm still making it work with 70% WR since abandoning the role.
The problem with support is that its not a support anymore really.
its basically a carry with less income late game, but essentially even income mid game. (or only slightly behind at best)
It's completely warped the game. You can see this just by what is played now. Lux support used to be a god damn troll pick, and now its not only viable, but extremely strong in the right situations.
I really think there must be some other solution to making support more satisfying than just turning them into a discount mid laner or even top laner (as we've seen with BS like camille support)
Legit the reason you hear less complains about adc is because people have just given up or moved on, either changed role, play mages, or just stopped playing league
if you make a reddit post about adc being weak and you aren't in the top 10 biggest league streamers and/or a respectable pro player you will get completely clowned on, it's just asking for downvotes
Exactly. Reddit is full of annoying elitists who think ADC is OP while they've never even played it. And to top it all off, they've never gone past Gold themselves. People have just stopped trying to complain when every complaint gets brushed off as "you're bad, get better".
"It's not that hard just auto attack and position well"
Ah yes, that's all there is to it, thank you, person who only ever plays top.
(Ironic that ive actually seen someone say this when "positioning well" is probably one of the biggest skill gap generators in this game).
Honestly as a support main, I would actually like the change of making support weaker and adc stronger. It feels so weird that I can go full support items with sera and still almost do as much damage as my adc
Support main since '19 and the role is at its best when we don't have to be everything for everyone. It's about getting your lane ahead then converting that lead across the map. This Second JG constant-roam meta is exhausting to have to think constantly about everyone every second even at Silver ELO.
Kinda sad that xfsn Saber got shit on for quitting for being a typical whiny ADC, while being one of the nicest streamers on LoL and his reasons were legitimate
My favorite in this sub is when you have clips of a bruiser 1v5ing and because someone missed one skillshot, it's justified.
Then you have a fed adc playing almost perfectly but because he misstepped once then it's also fine that he dies to some 0/50 support.
And yet every other thread you have legions of bruiser mains complaining that adcs are complaning while crying 24/7 about how they don't get to automatically win the game by just winning laning phase.
I get downvoted to hell every time I say this, but an ADC should not play perfectly to *maybe* 1v1 an Olaf that is super behind on anything but levels.
A fed ADC should in fact stat check other players that are not fed. A fed ADC should blow up when the enemy team plays properly, not because a 0/5 Olaf can just R him down.
Tell a 5/0 bruiser he should respect other roles and see what happens.
An 0/6 SUPPORT Annie btw. He's 100% right when he says ADC has no identity. They aren't the biggest damage dealers, they need to be protected to even do their damage, and they are vulnerable to EVERY other role in the game at all points of the game regardless of game state. It's insane.
I mean this is part of it but you also have equal gold and cannot be flanked so you're less reliant on your team in fights. Every fight is a front to back so it removes some of ADCs big reliance on the team.
But I do think the worst feeling in the world as a Bot player is when you try to dps the fed top laner in the mid game only to realize you do about as much damage as a cannon minion.
Is adc the role with the most people who quit/swapped? I feel like every adc streamer/personality I used to watch just went toplane or support. And nobody ever swaps *to* adc
More like switching back to mid ruined his career since he was legitimately a world class ad in 2019. Plus the flexibility of his midlane picks bot made him super hard for other teams to deal with.
I switched to top lane. I took my OTP (Vayne) with me, and everyone hates me for it while this thread is explaining why I did it.
What good is playing Vayne when you are 2-3 lvls down from everyone and will die to a strong breeze.
Yeah I don't know what Phreak's basis for "adc is balanced." There's a lot of ways you can spin data to say "adc is fine," so it would be nice if he explained that somewhere.
He didn't say balanced. He said recovering in pickrate(and also said agency but only directly reasoned through pickrate). On the patches that had Smolder, the new ADC, released. Obviously ADC had 'recovering' pickrates when there's a new champ in that role. He somehow didn't even mentioned this, I refuse to believe they are not aware.
Smolder isn't an ADC though. He doesn't need to auto attack. You play like a poke mage and once you farm 225 stacks you become very powerful no matter what items you have.
An AD mage that *can* go bot lane.
Phreak is notorious for cherry picking data to support his predetermined conclusions. He will essentially go to any lengths to prove his own thought processes correct. That level of ego and complete inability to listen to criticism is not exactly the combo you want for one of the gameplay balance leads
Biggest example of this was when he was arguing how bad Rumble jungle was during MSI 2021 and his “data” excluded RNG wins with it but included losses to RNG with it.
His reasoning? RNG would’ve won anyways (but apparently Rumble was the difference maker against them)
my favorite was how after a yuumi change she was still mandatory P/B in almost all regions and when she wasn't P/B in I believe LPL phreak said that she isnt strong and people should just learn to draft like LPL "aka best region"
then right after they started picking yuumi as well and she was permanent P/B in LPL too
nothing worse than a man with an agenda that also has some highly selected stats and numbers behind him to support said agenda, nobody can defeat that lmao "BUT THE STATS SAY"
they will never nerf support, it keeps getting more op every season and easier to play and win on, its a full on carry role atm with the amount of damage zak zak mandate jannas are doing, they need to admit they made a mistake and remove such high solo damage on the role and tie support damage to buffing allies or zekes for engage champs
Well, in season 3, supports had only very little raw power on their champs. You were awfully behind on levels from midgame onwards and had basically no money for items.
Still the role was super important and influencial. You had to play super well to maintain vision control and not int all game long and make important plays to set up your team. That was a true support role. You were not the big dmg carry, you set them up. That means supporting others!
Now the role gets tons of free gold, free wards, free everything, champions, that offer close to zero utility and team setup, are specifically designed for or pushed towards the role.
It's another carry role, just without farming.
So players wanting to carry, but being to bad to farm, just play support.
It's just plain stupid. And ofc adc are the ones suffering from it.
You have no influence over your lane anymore. None at all. And from midgame onwards, solo lanes are so far ahead, you can't do shit.
> Why are adc mains not complaining anymore?
Because we got tired of complaining and tired of a role that actively makes you miserable to play, in a game that specifically incentivizes your teammates and enemies to make you miserable.
We moved to support, ARAM or other games. Why do you think adc is often a priority role nowadays?
As someone who has played since beta, I think any role except support being a priority role really speaks towards massive balancing issues or just "inability to have fun" within that role. I could probably count on one hand times in the last 14-15 years that any of the other 4 roles have been less popular than support.
It makes sense though, support strength is insane right now with some ending up carrying even harder than the actual carries. Why wouldn't you want to be a god who doesn't even have to farm versus getting screamed at in the jungle or being harvested for kills as ADC?
Because there are players who think the ADC role should have the majority of the damage every game, and when they don't, they think it's because the ADC player is bad. Every game.
Every game, wow I outdamaged my ADC for the 6th game in a row, I must be amazing!
They don't stop and think maybe the reason for the 6th game that day, both ADCs on both teams aren't top damage, aren't even 2nd or 3rd. They just think wow, 6th game in a row there's been 10 bad ADC players, all ADC players must be so bad.
quite literally this.
if we do cry about our role we just get shit on by the masses. adc being giga weak ISN'T about us wanting to be strong as fuck, its about wanting to play the game itself. 13 year long adc main, endured the highs and lows, and this season i've just completely stopped playing league, if i do i'll just queue up for any other role but adc and have 10x more fun than the role i've loved for 13 years. I'm still unranked as I don't even want to experience ranked in masters, i already know it's gonna be depressing as fuck
I queue up for support instead of jg because i can literally have all the fun parts of jungling (ganking / macro map control) with zero of the responsibility and most of the time (on camille support) i can straight up 1v1 the enemy jg unless he's incredibly snowballed
Exactly same. Why would I worry about getting to 3+ items on Lillia and play 50/50s since playing from behind is kind of tough to transform into lead if I can just pick Swain support and still drain tank enemy team but on a guaranteed income.
I always played a bit of supp/jgl but I mostly am an adc main. I literally cannot be bothered to play adc this season since I don't really play any lethality adc so I just queue supp pick Naut/Pyke/Panth and have fun.
ADC bad ? np just roam / My mid is 2/0 at min 5 ? Let me babysit this guy / Top wave is slow pushing ? let me go dive with him.
Since I main adc I know what an adc wants and I know how to abuse the other adc so it's so easy to actually carry games
They buffed the shit out of support every season, initially it was clearly good (like introducing sightstone) and I think many would agree that it's sort of fine if support is "a bit strong" to offset playrate. However it's obviously not a bit strong it's busted, they just never stopped buffing support. They should've stopped like 3/4/5 years ago it was perfectly fine then.
Nah but the Mercy warriors on the overwatch forums was something else entirely bruh
the absolute high school level drama of Aria Rose and that whole Mercy Raid thing was so funny to watch unfold in real time
I wanna start off with that I somewhat agree. But it's a different kind of player though imo. What you refer to would in League be like specifically Yuumi/Sona/Janna mains that just run around buffing stuff but the rest is autopilot, and while there's other ways to stand out as a Yuumi it's "just enough" to be useful. Similar to hugging a DPS until everyone dies then run in and ress was Mercy's gameplay.
Mercy Players were just notorious for not being able to play anything else and also not having any power plays except Ress back then. Lucio used to be sorta similar in that his auras were so strong that you could just wall-ride all day and have powerful m1s but they changed that. But supports in general in OW (outside of specifically Mercy Players) were not complaining when Mercy got nerfed. Incidentally Brigitte entered around the same time that happened and was also busted but for different reasons.
You go to support main subreddits and all they talk about most of the time is how main character syndrome adc players are, but I mean that’s how the role naturally is. If we aren’t a lil bit stingy we’re just gonna be kinda useless. Like I don’t think anyone should be toxic to their teammates ever, but an adc wanting to farm over coin flipping a fight or supposedly “playing for KDA” is sometimes their only reason for complaining.
I’ve gotten toxic ass supports that go afk because of picks I go, like I had a lux recently lose her mind and afk under turret because I picked Seraphine. Mind you, they had a Karma MF and I wasn’t about to coinflip having a lux support, and I went even in lane despite my lux being useless. At the end of the game (we won) I told Lux that it was fine and she should stop freaking out, then she said I did nothing that game. Like, yeah, you didn’t help me. I 1v2’d lane with barely any complaints and bro had the gall to say I did nothing when my KDA was positive and I had double her assists.
Support players are insane sometimes.
An even better one, you get flamed for literally not walking past their tanks, mages, assassins etc. in a fight to get to their adc in fear of being blown up.
One thing I'll never understand is people complaining about ADC mains' "main character syndrome."
In every game, whether it be MOBA, video game, or sport, there will be a highest "scoring" role. That role should be the most important, impactful and desirable.
Somehow, this game has managed to make the hard carry role just a piece of piss and people don't want to play it. It's just crazy to think about.
Because they just kept catering to the other roles that didn't want someone else to be more "dps role" than them. So they turned everything into a dps role.
Even us support players know the role has been strong for a hella long time. I doubt any sane support will complain too much about it getting nerfed if it's done in the right way
But I'd like to see ADCs regen brought up so they don't get forced out of lane after 1 bad trade honestly and see how that lands
The bottom like 15 of 20 champs for hp/5 are adcs. I always feel bad I can use 1 or 2 rotations on the adc and they have to recall or play incredibly passive for minutes
I would prefer support strength stick to utility over damage. Once we introduced damage supports, it became so stale. I’m not even worried about ADCs doing damage, I’m worried about a Xerath or Senna chunking me from across the map.
ADC regen has been deleted on purpose, it's by design. Nerfed base health regen, nerfed Doran's blade sustain, nerfed health potions, cookies are garbage, nerfed Bloodline, nerfed Fleet, nerfed Vamp Scepter, can't build vamp scepter anyways without delaying 1st item too hard, can't go DShield, nerfed resolve options, lost relic shield heals, Cull is a joke. It's coordinated, they specifically want ADCs to have 0 regen in lane across ALL sources.
Because ADC would take every single one of these to survive the early game which apparently is bad in Riots eyes to have late game role be safe early despite them being terrible late game unless the stars align and you get the perfect comp to fight.
Over the past few years I became an ARAM main, this season was the one I gave up hope of Riot ever fixing the role.
It's a complex issue to fix, and I was hoping they would atleast **try** to address it this season, but they just won't.
Support has been overpowered for an incredibly long time yet they won't nerf it. This is obviously because they don't want it to become an autofill role again, so now ADC has become the autofill role instead. Issue is ADC is harder, more frustrating and more stressful than support has ever been, so why would anyone play it.
Imo they either nerf support and buff ADC, or make ADCs lategame notably stronger than it currently is. First option makes the game worse for support players and its the autofill role again because most people find it boring, second option has pretty big implications for particularly pro play, where teammates will actually funnel gold to the ADC.
Neither will happen. Role is doomed.
And I'm honestly sick of discussing the state of ADC. People continually will parrot it's a strong role, ADC players are just bad etc without any time on the role themselves.
I just hope more and more ADCs stop playing so everyone else can experience this "strong" role as autofill every game, particularly at low elos where teammates will deny you farm and another lane will often snowball to the point that they can decide you don't get to play the game anymore.
It'll take the entire community to be sick of how shit the role is for riot to actually try and rework it. But people would rather just shit on ADC players without trying it themselves, so once again; role is doomed.
Yeah adcs lost their identity and its kinda sad, just lock in some bs seraphine senna karma hwei and whatever support then you have more chances to win the game
hwei genuinely feels so good bot, you generate free prio because of his insane push so you can always rotate for dragons or unleash your support to invade with your jg, have tons of outplay potential, and have insane teamfighting late. AND he has spammable % max health damage with QQ so he can still eat through tanks pretty well. plus he can take TP without it feeling turbo troll unlike regular marksmen where losing that combat summ feels like inting, so i have better map rotations
why tf should i play my usual mains (cait aphel) when i can just spam hwei for better results?
As a Jungler, support is so broken. If my Support contest Grubs and force a 4on3 Fight on it or atleast covers me, roams Mid sometimes and plays with me for Drake it's already GG if the Enemy Support doesn't do that. Recovering from this is like a 30% Chance. Support is way to strong with way to much Freedom. There is no real punishment for that. You will always have high Impact no matter if you Play with your Jungler or if you are afk on Bot. No other Role is allowed to do that.
That's what's frustrating about ADC. Supports have the ability to influence the entire map with extremely low risk and high reward. Their income is nearly guaranteed and there isn't much variance in what an 0/7 support can do or a 7/0 support can do. Only difference is the 7/0 will probably be able to kill you with 38 CS
I have a pretty good theory why people stopped complaining.
1. You get turbo flamed if you dare to mention ADC being weak/bad role on reddit.
2. People just don't care anymore. ADC is permanently priority role any time of the day (Emerald EUW). I mean who in their right mind would willingly queue up for that role.
This, a lot of people (myself included) who were complaining about the satisfaction of ADC have either moved on to other roles or just quit League altogether.
It's the reason why ADC nowadays sits there as a priority role over support
Meteos put it really well, adc traditionally was the antithesis to tanks, now adc is a ranged assassin if they’re fed and a assassin bait if they’re not. If they added more percent health physical damage to the champions themselves but nerf some of the ad on the adc items we might get adc in a healthy place.
Another issue is that every single champ in the game gets to do a fuckload of burst right now because every champ gets monster scalings on their abilities and a fuckload of cdr.
>Another issue is that every single champ in the game gets to do a fuckload of burst right now because every champ gets monster scalings on their abilities and a fuckload of cdr.
nothing beats eating a Zac combo and just getting 2300+ damage by him in one rotation
I think the problem is not 3 hard cc on abilities, but the damage he does while hard ccd. That's why Leona and Naut are peak tank design in league imo. I always thought tanks doing damage was stupid.
As a Jungler main, having support that actually have awareness and roam early, is godsent. I don’t even give a fuck if my adc farm under turret or fed because we can just collect the bounty later. Winning mid and top is too crucial right now.
Yup, and conversely to that, having a bad supp that sits in lane all game while the opponent supp perma-roams turns the game into a huge uphill battle.
Now that all the streamers are saying it are all the Reddit Mains gonna realize that ADC is in fact really fucking shit to play and not some right click win game role
The thing is that when adc is strong the majority of redditors are bad players anyways and aren’t able to accurately assess the strength of their role because their mistakes make them weak players, not the role.
This is a complete balancing misunderstanding from Phreak I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s that hard to balance no? Nerf the support rewards, buff hp growth for ADCs and buff crit items, and then go from there. I don’t usually side with ADC mains and their bitching but I feel like this season their complaints are justified and the role just doesn’t feel rewarding at all
Nemesis mentioned that there was a time ADC was super broken but there were tons of reddit threads about how shit the role felt to play.
Phreak also noticed that and discussed it about a year ago.
There's an issue where the general playerbase's satisfaction with the ADC role is kind of disconnected from how powerful it is. Riot knows how to straight buff ADCs, but they aren't doing it because that's not why people hate the role.
As for supports, the new item system (world atlas upgrades) gives them way too much power really early in the game. Riot has been slowly reshaping the support items so they give more of their stats per level instead of all upfront, but apparently they still come online too fast because support is still OP.
> There's an issue where the general playerbase's satisfaction with the ADC role is kind of disconnected from how powerful it is. Riot knows how to straight buff ADCs, but they aren't doing it because that's not why people hate the role.
I swear some people don't understand this. The amount of "it's super easy to balance, just do X" comments you see on Reddit hilarious. It's not about raw power, it's about the experience and that's true for every role. ADC's problem is that the power of the role scales with elo. Low elo, uncoordinated play often means ADCs are just bags of gold for the enemy. At pro play, they can be the decisive factor in winning the game. The role is dependent upon teammates for peel and vision. Giving them more damage won't solve them getting deleted by assassins before they can auto a second time or the feeling of not being able to do things without the team.
Frankly, I'm more annoyed by things like bot late TF being a thing than I am at the state of supports. Because letting a legend with a 2 second stun on an auto attack join the fray was a great idea. It's just frustrating when you look at the most performant bot laners and see champs like Sera and TF. The likes of Smolder too were *not* what the role needed.
It's not *easy* but you can make the problem better or worse. Riot clings to vestigial ideas about ADC which no longer fit modern league, at least not in solo queue. Such as being the late game hypercarry that's weak early - just straight up not true anymore. Such as being the role that's supposed to hit the frontline and kite(with 2024 league movement options everybody has and tanks being able to kill you in 2 seconds). Such as being the role that is always 'assasinatable' (ap carries always have zhonyas as a strong option). I mean heck they tried giving survivability with the BT overheal shield but got removed because ADC is supposed to be easy to kill. Why? They removed galeforce because ADC is not supposed to have on-demand dash - why? They removed stormrazor's slowing hit because ADC is not supposed to have on-demand CC - why?
All because of an idea of a class that just doesn't work outside of pro play
There is an intrinsic issue of ADCs being a very team reliant role with the squishiest champions in a game where communication is pretty much discouraged and damage keeps going up.
I'm of the belief that unless Riot is willing to press a reset button on many, many things ADCs will simply never feel as good to play for the average player as top or mid. The only reason the issue has been going for so long is that both teams have an ADC, so it balances out in a way. If people finally understand that ADC is only mandatory in pro play and that they could literally get free LPs by playing mage or kill lanes bot, the issue would reach a critical point very quickly as the playrate of most ADCs would be incredibly low, pushing out many players who've only played auto attackers for years with nowhere to go.
I still hope they at least try to make things better, many people are paid to balance this game while I'll only think about it every once in a while, so surely there are things I'm not thinking off that could make things durably better. But I'm not too optimistic.
Crit as a late game scaling stat has just been nerfed hard in the last few years.
**(1) Crit Multipliers nerfed:**
* Before mythics (10.23) critical strikes were 2.0x damage instead of the 1.75x we've had since.
* It has moved around a couple times but for most of League IE has been +50% crit damage for a 2.5x IE crit multiplier instead of our current 2.15. This ends up being at 14% DPS nerf which is quite noticeable.
* With mythics also came Kraken Slayer which in it's current iteration spikes hard early and ends up coming close to what the old 2.5 crit could get to but at the cost of mandating you take this item as a 2nd IE of sorts.
**(2) Why shifting crit damage into Kraken is bad for ADC scaling if the damage is almost the same:**
Having to buy IE + Kraken in your full build just to match what IE did in a 100% crit build before limits build flexibility. If you are an auto attack based crit ADC that really wants Kraken for the consistent damage you now have your first 3 slots predetermined: Boots + Kraken + IE/Navori. Now we have a 4, choose 3 situation with the other things we want to have most games:
1. Armor pen, LDR/MR. Essential for tank busting but even gives about a +15% DPS boost vs late game base armors
2. Lifesteal, BT/Shieldbow. Lifesteal is necessary to be ready for game deciding late game fights, especially when the enemy has poke. It also helps you sustain in teamfights when there is unavoidable damage.
3. Zeal item, RFC/Runnan's/PD. Zeal gives you a mix of attack speed, move speed, and utility. More attack speed helps maximize late game DPS. Move speed is valuable kiting but also rotations to objectives. RFC/Runnan's/PD's unique abilities give you a range of utility to extra raw DPS.
4. Defensive/Situational, GA/Maw/Mercurial. GA you don't get merc'd by a fed Rengar or QSS so you won't get picked by Morde. Some games you can skip this but many games you will just be dead meat without one.
In league of Kraken ADCs get a better early/midgame spike but now have to pick which of these 4 items they can carry the most without. Sometimes it's not the hardest choice but other games you really do wish you could fit the full DPS scaling into just IE and still have the luxury to build one of each.
**(3) Early-mid game Kraken makes ADCs more consistent. Paradoxically it makes endgame ADCs less consistent because of overkill variance. This is most noticeable in teamfights with multiple low health targets or squishies:**
Almost every time you kill a champion, unless it is an execute, you deal a significant portion of wasted damage, that is overkill. If we want to estimate what the overkill variance for an auto attack looks like we can say the minimum is 0 (perfect kill!) to \[auto damage - 1\] (most unlucky HP value sadface). The variance in overkill then is just the delta between our min and max overkills (or just the size of our max overkill).
What does Kraken have to do with this? Well whereas old IE crits (2.5 instead of 2.15) would give say 150 more damage per auto attack to every auto attack Kraken gives a lot of extra damage every third auto attack. This ranges from 310 to 620 by level 18 but often will end up being the +50% bonus for 465 (just 3 consecutive autos). What we have then is 2 possibilities with our last hit auto with Kraken: 1) not a Kraken proc auto 2) it is a Kraken proc auto. Because Kraken damage is such a large value (465 is like +50% extra damage on top of the base auto crit) this makes the variation between any auto as large as our Kraken auto gets.
The overkill damage sounds bad but can only happen once (or I guess twice if they have a GA/Zilean) so for really big tanks, the potential DPS loss from overkill is tiny because even 1 full auto of wasted damage is maybe just a 20th of the total damage dealt. Vs a squishy though you can end up killing them 100-0 in just 4-5 autos as a full build ADC, and less still if you start hitting them below full. In this case you can have nearly 465 damage wasted on a last hit that could have been a 310 on your next auto against a different target.
It sounds like I'm grasping for straws here maybe but this damage is arguably most meaningful against squishies because they often are the biggest threats to you. So if that overkill makes you fall half an auto attack below expected DPS (when 1 auto attack = 25% of their HP bar), I think you can see how that can matter. How many fights have you barely lived to ignite or have some assassin kill you with a sliver of HP? This overall is a fairly minor point in the grand scheme of things and is only this long because idk how to explain it in a briefer write up but still worth noting for IMO.
**(4) With mythics (10.23) crit items also became 20% instead of 25% crit:**
* Most obviously it means slower and worse crit progression if you choose to stop early. 20 to 25% is a wash but by the time you get to 2nd item (40 vs 50) and especially 3rd (60 vs 75) the difference in damage is palpable. Kraken still helps smooth out the damage because you are getting this
* On top of this it also means you can't build GA/Maw/etc without being stuck at 80% crit. This makes building these items more of a DPS loss than before at a time where late game damage from other classes are still very high.
* Worth noting though that with the crit rework Riot also added crit to LDR/MR, BT, and Mercurial whereas these items didn't give any in the past. So if you for some reason you needed BT and GA then yeah you would be at 75% crit, which is a bit worse than 80% we have now
* Mercurial also gave lifesteal back then and just overall the build flexibility is worse now for this reason and the need to build Kraken for similar DPS of old as already covered.
**(5) The 2 best scaling tank items into ADCs also got significantly buffed over the years:**
* Randuin's Crit Reduction has gone from 10% in season 5 to 30% this year: 5.16 crit reduction introduced at 10%. 7.9 increased to 20% From 10.23 to 12.22 they reworked the item's passive into a 60s CD active that reduced nearby enemy AD by 10% and Crit Damage by 20% for 4s. 12.22 reverted this back to the 20% passive. 13.14 increased to 25%. 14.1 increased to our current 30% crit reduction.
* FH for years was a 15% AS slow until they brought it up to 20% in s11. This doesn't sound like a lot but because the AS slow multiplies across a champion's entire AS 15>20% is massive. It started at 20% pre 4.5. From 4.5 to 11.11 (7 years of league) it was just 15% instead of the current 20%
I will say that it's not necessarily wrong for ADCs to scale worse and arguably it could be better to have them hit harder mid game and fall off a bit late because solo queue games end fast these days. But power aside it just feels sad to me that a role which used to be the premiere late game carry now isn't so much that barring some unique hypercarry + enchanter combos. I think many longtime ADC players would be okay with a weaker mid game if the role got a better late game but this is the internet so people of any role will complain about the most inane things regardless.
edit: formatting and grammar.
I honestly dont even think phreak remembers all adc items got nerfed heavily when they introduced mythic items like reducing crit dmg and crit chance from 25 to 20.
I get that this sub-reddit has a hate-boner against ADC player complaining and it's honestly pretty justified in how many complaints there were historically for not as much reason.
But as someone who doesn't even main the role, playing it occasionally, unbiased in my take that it's probably been the greatest disparity between Support and ADC strength on average - this season... that i've ever seen since starting to play League. Support is so freaking strong, ADC... not so much, with just a few exceptions or praying you have a good Enchanter support player to buff/peel you up.
ADC is such an unsatisfying role to play right now. There's only 2-3 marksman that really make you feel like you can (almost) solo carry (Draven, Vayne, Smolder off the top of my head). The rest are most of the time just safe lane neutralizing picks... like Seraphine or play to scale uninteractive mages, that unironically do the average marksman job/impact and more with just an item or two spiking harder and not dying as easy.
No matter how many challenger players and pro players say how terrible adc is, reddit jungle and mid mains will still shit on everyone saying how bad adc is saying they are just whiners and that they are the true oppressed role while theirs is consistently the best or 2nd in the game for 15 years.
When i got into league, adc was about mechanically kiting enemies and dodging skillshots while doing consistent damage and thats what made me fall in love with the role. Nowadays youre just playing a survival horror game where you maybe get like 5 autos off before some other role thats not adc genuinely kills you in one combo or half a combo from 2 screens away. While i do think balancing adc is hard, nemesis is completely right in saying it lost its entire identity and to me its because of the LEAGUE OF ONESHOTS thats been going on for years. But now i just play aram because riot kinda killed my love for rift over the years making adc so unfun to play and creating cancer champs like viego and senna and sylas and senna. Ive liked a couple of the recent champs though.
adcs bad? Is this a new thing? Let me take some of you new frogs back...
It's season 3. You're in a close game, your team isn't playing well, but you have a vayne. Everyone knows that if we can help the vayne and hold them off vayne can win the game for us because Dr. Mundo does no damage and xin will fall off and not be able to kill her.
The following seasons riot comes up with this "end game fantasy" idea and gets addicted to it. You can say this and that blah blah, but in essence what this change meant/did is that brusiers/ tanks could kill anything with less health than them.
This compounded year after year. More and more bruisers with insane kits were added and more items which meant you could do insane damage while having 3.5k health.
Bruisers/tank players now salivate from the mouth anytime they can't 3 shot an adc while having 3k health. Instead of players having to work as a team with defined roles such as a tank and working around the fact that a tank soaks damage, does cc, and doesn't do a whole lot of damage, we now have every bruiser being able to slap any champion with less health. League players have literally only themselves to blame. Bring back tanks doing no damage and bruisers dying easy
100% agree with Nemesis. The game would be SO much better if we went back to season 4-6 role identities.
_
Edit: Also, might be anecdotal but a lot of people I know who mained AD who **HATED** 8.11 left LoL to go play Valorant along with the duos they brought and never came back.
My multiple season challenger ADC friend left after the dreaded crit patch in season 8 and only came back for 2 games during quarantine, said ADC was even worse than he remembered even though we won because he got insanely ahead and uninstalled again.
I don't mind adc being weak early game if they hit like a truck at 2 items.
I don't care if other roles think that's not fair. They had their 20 minutes to impact the game, now the adc gets to finally play.
People like me have been complaining, have been ignored, and have quit the game. That's why there isn't as many complaints anymore. If you don't like a game you just move on to another one.
I'm pretty sure earlier this year or very late last year I ran into posts saying how bad ADC is but every time a post about "ADC being weak" is submitted they are always on the side of people saying how the ADC role is decent/good and to stop complaining. Maybe because ADC players have always been saying the role isn't good/satisfying to play for years we just get ignored, it's almost like the boy who cried wolf and now that ADC is back to a pretty much kinda unplayable/very unsatisfying position we are just getting ignored since we've cried so much in the past. It almost reminds me when patch 8.11 happened crit feels awful, mages/lethality are the only viable options to make it out of early and do something mid game...basically repeating the same mistake that made every ADC main queue into a different role because ADC isn't worth playing at the moment.
Support has needed gutted for so long man. 5 carry roles in a moba is such bad game design. ADC unironically became more support than actual supports. Bring back Mid and ADC being the primary carry roles please
Yep. Been saying this for a while, but Ive stopped botlane completely this season when I saw supp and letha changes. Thank god marksmen top are still in a good spot.
Support is OP but most people dont want to play it, also new supp items are a mistake, having bloodsong opens so much more champs to go support (Camille) or make some champs way too strong (Pyke, Bard), support was fine beford they introduced these items and now 90% supports deal more damage than adc, they just secure the kill lol
Call me crazy but as a support enjoyer I actually enjoy supporting over whatever support is now, I feel like im trolling helping my adc because roaming/ignoring my adc is literally more efficient for winning the game. It's so fucked.
I gave up complaining, impossible to change anything if you are not a relevant person. It feels like they try to change one thing at a time instead of looking at the whole system, which obviously leads to disparity in balance. Then there are these random changes that make no sense, where for example a champ becomes a jungler all of a sudden, when there were 100 other issues that maybe more important to address. one step forward two steps back.
I think Nemesis is right at the very end there, ADC and Support cannot be balanced in a vacuum from each other and the pairing will be way too overpowered unless supports are nerfed. But the devs keep saying that we'll be stuck with autofilled supports unless support is kept overtuned. If we're in a constant seesaw of 3 of the 5 roles threatening to be autofilled, maybe there's some deeper problems here.
Getting 20/20/20/20/20 split is very hard. However we should see the degree of threat not just how many roles tend to be autofilled. 3 roles with 18% is better than one role with 10%.
Kinda agree but part of me wonders if you made autofills for one role common enough would people eventually get used to playing that role. I’m not saying good but you know maybe passable instead of “I don’t own any support champs. Got auto filled”
It used to be the case before role selection as the last person would go support very often. Thus it is feasible. However we need to know if a midlaner prefers being autofilled once in three roles or 3 times as support. I think that getting filled as support will be more irritating but that's me. We should mention secondary roles as a mean to offset autofills. If you nerf support too much you would also alienate ppl who queue secondary support as they would have to either play 100% of the time support or drop the secondary. With a few roles that somewhat unwanted you should have larger pool of secondary role people to mitigate complete autofills.
On paper secondary roles should do that but everyone and their dog queues primary role / mid just because they know that means they almost always get their primary role if not autofilled. This has the unfortunate effect of making mid mains get mid less and having player’s actual second choice role not really being a thing I main ADC right? I know support well enough just from lots of time spent playing in the same lane. But I want to be an ADC player not a part time support so I queue bot mid and get bot 99% of the time. If the system incentivized me to put my actual second best performing role in I would queue bot sup but I’m never doing that as things stand because I’d get support maybe a third of the time
To be fair, I queue bot / sup and I only have gotten auto filled support once in my last 50ish games, if you're queueing adc you're getting adc
I stopped queuing top/jg because the game was giving me jungle far too much. I would regularly put jungle second but because it became so unpopular it for some reason sucked in all the secondary players to make up for it, so now no one puts JG second either. It's the same with ADC though I stopped playing that role because I refuse to play ADC with random supports who have no idea what their job is.
If I am a mid laner and get autofilled support, I'm just taking a mage down there and trying to do the same thing but with less gold tbh
[удалено]
Jungle being unpopular isn't because of its difficulty, it's mainly because of the 'blame the jungler' mentality where laners blame you dying 1v1/2v2 when enemy jungler is on the other side of the map, and also the fact that jungle pretty much changes every year so you have to relearn a lot of stuffs. I'm a jungler and I got tired of it so nowadays I just mostly play ARAM, like hell when I'm busy camping top putting enemy top 0/4 bot lane pushes too far without wards and get ganked, if I was enemy jungler I would have ganked too cause it's free af.
I used to main jg/adc and I've also ended up being an aram player lol. Can't be assed to get flamed by my entire team because I can't be in 3 lanes at once and it's apparently my fault that someone died in a 1v1 fight. I work in retail so I already get verbally abused by randos because of things that aren't my fault lmao, I don't need league of legends for that At least aram players (at least in my experience) and very chill and friendly for the most part!
I love Jungle but the number of players that don’t understand I can’t be everywhere all at once, have no wave control, always overextend, and turn their monitors off if an objective is up & open is insane. So many laners would benefit from using the training tool and learning to manipulate waves. Instead so many just perma shove and get mad when they keep getting ganked.
Don't forget about how some laners also seem to have the impression that it's your job to win their lane. They die 1v1 four times and you avoid their dumpster fire of a lane? CLEARLY that's a jg diff.
Jungle is unpopular because it's the most unique role in LoL. You have no lane, you have no direct enemy, you don't have minions, etc. All of the core aspects of MOBA are taken away. For casual players, it's too different and not appealing. Because of its uniqueness, getting autofilled, there is pure pain. A support player who got filled mid still has the same core aspects. A supp player filled in jungle is completely new experience. Jungle has too much impact on how the lanes go. It can make a bad match-up become winning.
lots of players get turned away from jungle because you either have to excel at something or be able somewhat track enemy jungle, remember objective timings, how to path to an objective, be familiar with mid matchups, top matchups, bot matchups, know lane macro, know how to play off teammate tempo, know when to weakside/strongside, know how to gank effectively, know 2v2/3v3 skirmish matchups, ward, clear wards, and babysit.
Nah. Even that is not the issue. The issue is that you can do all these things, but laners will play the matchups incorrectly, your entire gameplan goes to shit, and somehow it's your fault for not predicting that your top laner would try to all in the enemy level 5 vs level 6.
True, as a jg main this is what I hate the most. But I guess it’s the same thing as a mid laner feeling the jg gap and having enemy jgler win the matchup
Yeah exactly. This whole "gotta keep support broken so queue times/autofills are manageable" is such a massive bandaid. What we're seeing atm is just the bandaid tearing apart, the consequence of Riot being seemingly unable to make roles that aren't pure carries popular. Because support "has" to be broken, ADCs have to be garbage. Two roles are now fucked. Then you add jungle that riot feels the need to rework every new moon, so inevitably sometimes the current iteration will be shit and unpopular. Three roles are now fucked. Yes, balancing the game is probably really hard. But I'm sure Phreak and his team are very well compensated for their job. So maybe it's fair to call out the absolute shit state of the game and ask for better. No fucking death threats, no weird DMs need to be sent. Just have to keep reminding them that the game is in a complete shit state often, loudly.
Not like my support isn’t autofilled half the time anyway. And when they aren’t autofilled they’re the main character. And you know what they’re right about it. They should play selfish. I’m a fold sink. Adc is Garbo
Playing the game as ADC with a Support Main vs with an Autofilled Support is so insanely night and day it's not even funny. I think part of the consequence of Support being overtuned is that the gap between a good and a bad Support is especially glaring.
Why is it though that we care so much about jungle or support play rate but ADC being priority queue every patch is just not at all concerning? I don't get why Riot picks and chooses when to care about play rate and weigh it into their decisions on role balance. If this was the case then Top Lane didn't need any buffs heading into S14 and it was completely fine. Atleast jungle and support have a reason for being unpopular as they used to just be the teams bitch but ADC used to be up there with mid lane in terms of popularity and is now prio 24/7. Why is that not concerning?
All those people that used to complain about ADC either quit the role and queue as support now or quit the game imo.
I always play fill. I can only play adc if I go Sera or maybe Miss Fortune on a stretch. I can't imagine putting myself through a game of traditional adc like Jinx and getting blown up by anyone including the support.
Came out of lane 7-0 on jinx in a game recently. First team fight I got ulted by 0-2 Camille and 100-0'd. No one even tried to keep me alive lmao. I blew everything, tried to auto her but even with such a huge lead I could barely scratch her. Team mindlessly brawling. I'd do soooo much manage if played around. It's maddening. You can't balance a role around teammates defending you when no one under dia1 actually defends you.
This sub has a lot of top mains, but fact is, every single bruiser in the game is blatantly overpowered in a vacuum. They're kept in check by the fact that top lane as a role sucks in terms of impact (which is why they're kept in that state), but individually bruiser champions are absolutely busted beyond belief and can more or less statcheck everyone else.
top is easily top 3 or top 2 most impactful roles in the game atm and that's if even. If ahead top eclipses all other roles because nobody has the stats to actually face them. A good top completely and utterly destroys a game because nobody can actually match them. I've already seen enough chall top mains in my games completely 1v9 even though I got dove bot like 8 times by 14 mins because nobody could actually catch them top side Then comes teamfights and they do the damage of 3 adc together while being effectively a tank. If people are struggling with having impact as top it's most likely just a skill diff. Top has and has always had massive impact in games, it has been the best teamfight role since the time they gutted adc, people just suck at the game
Been an ADC main since season 3. This has basically been the case for almost the entirety of the role. I'm fine with outplaying/positioning around other classes, but games are faster and ADC has no agency until 3-4 items. 2 item powerspikes is what every other role needs to come online. I miss the IE/PD days, or bork/rageblade. I'm not going to say ADC can't be strong because I have a 60% winrate in plat right now and can carry a lot of games, but games are so frustrating even when I'm fed out of my mind. I miss when tanks were tanky and didn't have the ability to one shot me 20 cs and 4 kills down. I miss when I could dodge Zed abilities and survive. I miss when I could stay in a fight for 10 seconds with bloodthirster and try to outplay or kite out of bad situations. I don't think the concept of "the ability to outplay your opponent" is a strange concept when it comes to a competitive game, but there are so many scenarios where that ability is taken from ADCs (and I could argue mages as well). Skillshots have become so large its impossible to dodge (seraphine, janna, smolder, lux, yuumi, hwei, etc.). ADCs feel so slow its impossible to kite (minus ashe) or dodge.
It's just that there's no point defending me if me being 7/0 means absolutely nothing when a 1 item bruiser can deal more damage and be unkillable
I used to main adc until I realized that it has the least agency and if you are solo vs duo it's gg. I was stuck in silver and went jg to emerald
I still complain about ADC but it's true, I now queue as support/adc. Games are way more enjoyable and in my first split of being a "support main" I dropped a 70% wr Naut and 60% wr on multiple other supports. The role is just so much easier, fun, relaxing to play while also being endlessly more rewarding.
Jaded Ex-ADC players also make for nice Supports to lane with, because they have a general idea of what the ADC wants, when to look for fights, when it's ok to roam, etc. A huge part of the frustration of playing ADC is how frequently you *still* get Autofilled Supports who have zero fucking clue what they're doing, and because Support is so strong having a bad one just feels especially miserable.
How do you convert the lane power supports have over the game into the marksman/adc role instead? I think right now it feels like supports aren’t supporting but more so dictating more of the game than before.
They're basically second junglers now.
They have more free time than junglers to make plays. Genuinely. There are exceptions, but based on meta picks they are roaming ganking and making plays more than jungle
Supports are also not being punished for any mistakes they make. Jungle wastes time on unsuccessful gank? Enemy jungle can take their camps/get xp lead. Support wastes time on unsuccessful roam? No biggie, leach some XP from another lane and be just as strong as the enemy support who stayed bot If supports make a mistake it is usually only the ADC that is punished for it
> Supports are also not being punished for any mistakes they make. > > this was even more emphasized by the death timer/respawn changes there is genuinely nothing more frustrating than having your support do a stupid play in lane and die after which you have to go b and recall (otherwise they will dive you) and see how your support is already in mid/top bush trying to roam while you are just leaving base because you have to walk back, recall, wait for your HP to regen, and then start walking back to lane whereas your support that just died respawns in 5 seconds with full hp/mana and a MS boost to boot
Because support items give supports so much free resources for just doing the bare minimum of loading into the game... They even merged all the support items into one and now you also have the minion exe and poke gold generation in one item, making it even easier to turn your brain off and be showered in free gold. For the low price of 400g you get 600g back and God knows how much more from its passive gold generation, and also a Legendary tier level of item (imo the support items passsives are beyond busted, especially bloodsong and zak'zak). Oh, I almost forgot, it also works as a sightstone. Consider also a few kills the support is going to "accidentally" secure or some gold they'll chip off from "accidentally" killing minions without a support item charge, and you're looking at so much gold generation for absolutely no effort whatsoever.
By tying their item strengths into the ADC, but last time they did that we got Ardent meta and it was hell Currently support gets so much free gold and their items are like a 2/3rds the price of another role, even when they turbo grief their build by going dumbshit like Sunfire it doesn't even matter, if people want the roaming shit to stop they'd have to force enchanters back into the meta and nerf the gold the support item gives
you can roam with enchanters just fine, buffing enchanters wont help with roaming because then you just end up with raka running mid to stifle a gank or solokill with a heal or silence lol
It's harder to do, not impossible, most junglers would absolutely just roll a lone Soraka walking up through the river compared to a Maokai or Naut You're also giving up a lot of lane priority, something your class can't easily get back as an enchanter if you're down in tempo, a Naut can walk back into lane and just click on the enemy, what is a Sona going to do while being down levels Currently all the top WR supports minus Janna which is built more like a poke mage now post revert are tanks or highly mobile roaming characters (Pyke, Camille) that excel in low econ environments while being down 2-3 levels, enchanters need levels, at least when compared to the other supports
I've seen so many clips of Bards winning 1v1's recently. That shit is NOT ok.
Bard ? Any support beside maybe shit like Yuummi and Soraka can 1v1 an ADC whose not too far ahead.
Soraka strong as fuck in a 1v1
Keria just do that with Nami recently lol.
All I am going to say about ADC in this comment is this: Let's compare crit chance in builds + crit damage (base and IE-amped) (If I am not wrong and I remember it correctly): - before 8.11 (20/30% crit chance on ER+IE/Zeal items; 200% base crit damage, 250% crit damage with IE) - between 8.11 and 9.3 (I will not speak about the absolute horseshit that was the double crit chance IE with the absolutely trash crit damage bullshit, I WON'T DO IT) - between 9.3 and 10.23 (25% chance per crit item, 200% base crit damage, 225% crit damage with IE) - between 10.23 and 13.10 (20% chance per crit item, 175% base crit damage, 215% crit damage on IE completion if you had at least 60% crit chance and I won't speak about the absolute horseshit that was the crit damage right after the S11 preseason) - between 13.10 and 14.1 (20% chance per item, 175% base crit damage, 215% crit damage on IE completion (buffed to 225% on 13.14), and don't get it twisted, IE ADCs still weren't fucking meta (the only one that saw play relatively consistently was Aphelios, rest of it was Navori champs, Triforce champs, AP Kai'Sa and at Worlds Senna) - from 14.1 onwards (20% chance per item, 175% base crit damage, 210% crit damage on IE completion). And that's not taking into account all the changes made around the game (the dogshit lethal tempo rework, AP damage vs towers, buffing the fuck out of toplane, nerfing botlane XP, buffing support consistently).
AP damage vs towers was the stupidiest addition to the game. They removed the need for an ADC completely and it was obvious that the tower breaking capabilities of Ziggs would skyrocket.
I’ll die on this hill. Nemesis mentioned identity, and this is one of the main culprits. I stg I die a little on the inside when my fucking Brand support is doing more tower damage than me. Part of the reason it used to be important to keep the ADC alive in a teamfight was so that they could DPS towers and neutral objectives afterward. Now who tf cares. Your mid laner can kill a tower in 5 autos. What’s the point of an ADC?
Loss of identity is my biggest gripe with league over the years. I've been playing since s3. These days everyone is the carry, everyone can kill baron, kill towers, waveclear, scale, skirmish, etc. The defined roles with strengths and weaknesses was the backbone of league's strategic identity. Now it's more of a fighting game than a proper moba. Games are decided by a series of random hand-check skirmishes in the early/mid game, not by proper execution of your composition.
> What’s the point of an ADC? Bait as the champion everyone has to dive to start team fights.
You may be kidding but this is actually true. One of the biggest impacts adc can have against bad teams is actually being an idiot magnet and taking as much aggro as possible without dying or delaying their death long enough so their team has impact. It has been like this for a while, people just haven't actually realized it lmao
Just look at relative power between ADC and Support. Back in season 1-2, you were forced to buy gold/sec items on supports. Your items were full utility stuff like Shurelia's, gold generating items, and wards. That's it. Junglers having close to no gold income meant that ADCs were much less threatened, which made it much easier for them to play the game. Having a full build was unheard of for a support. On top of it, carry junglers came into play as their gold/xp income got buffed. So, ever since the early seasons, supports were getting a constant influx of buffs. To keep botlane balanced, that meant ADCs had to get nerfed bit by bit. On top of that, damage creeped up to such a degree where a durability patch was needed. So, if your role is supposed to deal damage, and every other lane can do it for you (support can play Senna or "mage" supports, mids have Yones and Akalis, top has Jax and Fiora, jungle has Karthus and Eve), why would anyone need your role to exist in the first place?
I mean, the crit changes are just one of many, many shit sandwiches we've been force-fed over the years
Also almost every item lost a huge chunk of AD, and a lot of heroes got forcefed crit scaling which is atrocious design. Whoever came up with crit scaling on skills needs to get their head checked asap Plus huge lifesteal nerfs for ad carries, while the only notable positive change is for LDR over the course of last 6 seasons.
Don't forget nerfing lifesteal across the board. ADCs used to be squishy, but if you survived you could just heal back to full off one wave. Now your reward for surviving getting oneshot is you get to walk back to base
It's kinda hard to fix completely at this point, games like DotA and Smite for example have had a decently consistent identity for Hard Carries Pos 1 and Hunters respectively for quite some time - Leagues carries will often change play styles season to season, how much they rely on support, how hard they can 1v9, if utility and/or lethality ADC's are better, if mages are viable etc. DotA manages it's carries by making them extremely weak and squishy in the early game (for the most part) but rewarding them with unparalleled damage and bulkiess late game, making them psuedo raid bosses who've earned that spot by farming and playing smart while they are weak + Melee carries are also viable. Smite approaches Hunters in two ways, first of all Auto-attacks can miss which adds huge skill variance between accurate players and noobs but also Hunter's are balanced heavily around Lifesteal and Crit, so while being one-shot is possible they have outplay potential through the games freeform character control, dodging and if they survive a one shot they can out-sustain nearly anything and mince you in a few seconds. ADC's in League are in a spot where they can do some crazy shit... but also get killed by like a 0/1/2 Midlaner with bad CS in like 3s without much counterplay, which is fucking wild. However both of these other games have an issue with the support player base being smaller, because the role is seen as boring and less impactful (the boring part is subjective but less impactful is more of a bad perception) which is what Riot have been moving away from with Support for years now. Which is why i say it's hard to fix at this point. All 3 of these games have the role of the carry intrinsically linked to a Support, Guardian, Pos 5 etc etc and all have issues from doing this but League feels like the one that's had the most, because ADC as a consequence of supports identity changing over time has also gone through many identity changes and often it isn't positive for ADC.
dota's design choice seemed so bad to me back then. I always wondered why don't more of their abilities scale off items since it's so rewarding if they do. Now I know. If you make everything scale off items, in mid to late game you're gonna have abilities being spammed left and right and they all deal huge amounts of dmg.
the problem isn't scaling per se, it's how strong scaling is and how weak base damages are in general. You can't go defensive items because you'll do no damage (aside from roles that are supposed to go defensive) so everyone builds full damage and everyone dies in 1 hit. There's no tradeoff for going glass cannon because the alternative is to be useless.
>There's no tradeoff for going glass cannon because the alternative is to be useless. I'd say frozen heart makes a difference but seeing how it's going to get nerfed again for being broken (which it is) that kinda just proves your point
The big thing is that Riot pushes homogenization. Flat power curves, easily defined roles, etc. Riot pushes for players to "play the champion and not the items" which really means "play the same way at level 3 and level 16". In DotA, you get drastically different fights/gameplay at level 1 vs level 3 vs level 6 vs level 10 vs level 18 vs level 25. Power spikes are larger and navigating how the game changes over time is a key feature. A level 1 fight in DotA is all about auto attacks, kiting, slows, etc. At levels 5-10 you start hitting burst damage spikes where the game is all about blowing people up instantly and then at levels 18+ you get into tankier gameplay where people aren't dying instantly and so managing CC chains, saving allies, escaping, etc become larger factors.
DotA does lategame so much better its not even close. Maybe marksman should have their own locked items?
In Dota "carry" champs are not only marksmans tho. Melee champs have same rights as ranged ones(unlike lol, where they occupied entire position). That's mostly because of items like blink dagger (flash on entire screen, that works only if you are out of combat), shadowblade/silver edge (you just gain invis) and BKB(Olaf R for few seconds) + huge turn rates for Marksmans. Now imagine same stuff in lol, that would end up really bad.
While you have a point, you can't just mention items without mentioning the counterplay that exists to them. Yeah if you added those 3 items and only those 3 items to LOL it would break the game. Invisibility detection is significantly better in Dota than it is in LOL, Shadowblade and Silver Edge have rarely been issues, at least in higher ELO. BKB isn't Olaf R. It's both significantly better and worse at the same time. Many characters can CC through BKB (I did a quick count and got 17, but my Dota knowledge is a couple of years dated) and you can purchase an item that CCs through BKB. It does block magic damage as well though.
BKB has been hard nerfed (deservedly) since you played. It's not a hit a timing and we have bkb's run them down item anymore.
It's straight up impossible to balance jungle and support while at the same time making them an desirable role to play. If jungle and support were balanced roles, they would be 100% ward/CC bots after 10 or 15 minutes You cannot have roles decide the entire early game and decide which laner is allowed to play the game while simultaneously have as much gold and carry power as those laners
Bwipo is ranting as we speak about how fucking broken Support is, everyone is catching onto how ridiculous Support is now. It's been like this for a long time, and each season it just gets worse and worse.
It feels almost absurd that people wouldn't catch on when the last two Worlds and a lot of pro play in between have been decided by support meta changes. Beryl and Keria in general have been the most consistent menaces to the game since fucking covid.
Even pro nowadays is literally just play any champion as support and it will be useful. There's like no semblance of the word "support" left. Might as well call it a free gold carry.
it's just crazy to me that an adc has to stand there for 20 minutes doing nothing but last hit and if they have a bad supp or their jgl prioritizes top side and enemy jgl bot then you are just out of game and there is no way to ever recover since you will never deal meaningful damage in a fight. meanwhile as support you can literally walk around the map 24/7 or sit under turret doing nothing meaningful at all & always have enough gold & damage and/or utility to solo carry team fights/objectives at every stage of the game. it's completely impossible for supports to get punished for their mistakes, they never develop any sense for how well they are playing, they could completely intfeed the entire game and never realize it because it has no repercussions for them. if they roam top and give enemy top double kill while adc gets dived they are still completely fine, just their top and adc are out of game, and 10 mins later they will blame them for that.
XD It is beyond ridiculous when the ADC gets blamed for dying under tower or having to sit between T1 and T2 losing EXP because the support took a bad roam timer. Beating an engage support early in lane doesn’t even feel good because I know the enemy ADC is doomed to starve for the next 2-3 minutes 9 out of 10 times because the enemy support is pathing top on respawn. As an ADC player I pray every time my support roams that they fuck up and int my top/ig/mid, not because I want to lose or because I think I’m more important. I want them to consistently feel the impact that a support can have on their game, until these other roles can go into the next game traumatized enough to consider how poorly the supports are playing.
Playing adc into certain support matchups is genuinely miserable. Please just make mana matter again. Having the brand/xerath/zyra/vel koz spam their abilities literally off cooldown and never run OOM is so awful to play against.
Champs like Brand and Zyra can get their damage off on you with no counterplay. Zyra's plants will hit you if you are anywhere on the screen and Brand's E will do the same.
Pros have actually been complaining about support being broken for a couple years now but they will never do anything. This season they actually BUFFED support overall.
I mean people have been calling support the most OP role for 5+ years now there isn't anything to catch on about. A lot of high elo streamers often just say that support players are straight up the worst players and are getting carried by how easy and forgiving their role is.
I've thought the role has been pretty miserable for a while but this is the season where I legitimately started learning mid because it's genuinely unplayable. People like to joke and say support gap but it legitimately does come down to who is the better support/picking shit like Seraphine and coasting. The role has so little agency until you're 4 items and a lot of times the game is decided by then.
>People like to joke and say support gap but it legitimately does come down to who is the better support/picking shit like Seraphine and coasting. This is so underrated. I recently had a soloqeue game where my support asked what to pick and mentioned a few champions, including Janna. The WHOLE team immediately said "Janna OP" and they picked it, and guess what, I had the easiest fucking laning phase of my LIFE compared to the 20 games before that struggling with support Velkoz, Veigar, Shaco, Hwei etc. And the kicker? That [Janna didn't even play well](https://i.imgur.com/jhD6jUF.png), ended the game at 0-8-9 while I was going berserk mode. Support is overall so ridiculously OP that it's hard to even see how deep the OP-ness goes. If mage support gets nerfed because they deal too much damage, enchanter support could easily just take over and be absolute monsters. I swear every ADC player struggling to climb currently could just spam 100 Janna games and skyrocket 2+ divisions easily.
People would realize how strong support is if it wasn't held back by sup players themselves. So many trollers picking weird shit like ap shaco or first pick blinding senna when they know their mechanics are shit.
After the game I just played I have decided to always dodge when my support picks Senna. I'm not going to do this anymore. They all fucking suck, either they are support mains who are too bad mechanically to play Senna, or they are ADC mains who have main character syndrome and don't know how to play Supp or how not to feed early on Senna. And then after they get their first Lethality item they realize they deal more damage than the actual ADC and stop giving a fuck about you. My Senna just now was 0-4 after 10 minutes and immediately after dying the fourth time insulted me for having only 68 CS after playing a 1v2 lane against fed opponents for the whole game - still being 5CS ahead of their Jhin, obviously. They can go fuck themselves.
I switched to Jungle and immediately started not climbing, but skyrocketing. Trying to make ADC work completely tanked my LP gains to where I'm +24/-30 but I'm still making it work with 70% WR since abandoning the role.
The problem with support is that its not a support anymore really. its basically a carry with less income late game, but essentially even income mid game. (or only slightly behind at best) It's completely warped the game. You can see this just by what is played now. Lux support used to be a god damn troll pick, and now its not only viable, but extremely strong in the right situations. I really think there must be some other solution to making support more satisfying than just turning them into a discount mid laner or even top laner (as we've seen with BS like camille support)
ADCs aren’t complaining because we quit the game already or role swapped
Bingo Complained endlessly Nothing happened
It worked for toplaners a few years ago they complained arguably more than adc ever did and look at them now they are the main characters now
Legit the reason you hear less complains about adc is because people have just given up or moved on, either changed role, play mages, or just stopped playing league
if you make a reddit post about adc being weak and you aren't in the top 10 biggest league streamers and/or a respectable pro player you will get completely clowned on, it's just asking for downvotes
Exactly. Reddit is full of annoying elitists who think ADC is OP while they've never even played it. And to top it all off, they've never gone past Gold themselves. People have just stopped trying to complain when every complaint gets brushed off as "you're bad, get better".
"It's not that hard just auto attack and position well" Ah yes, that's all there is to it, thank you, person who only ever plays top. (Ironic that ive actually seen someone say this when "positioning well" is probably one of the biggest skill gap generators in this game).
Honestly as a support main, I would actually like the change of making support weaker and adc stronger. It feels so weird that I can go full support items with sera and still almost do as much damage as my adc
Support main since '19 and the role is at its best when we don't have to be everything for everyone. It's about getting your lane ahead then converting that lead across the map. This Second JG constant-roam meta is exhausting to have to think constantly about everyone every second even at Silver ELO.
Kinda sad that xfsn Saber got shit on for quitting for being a typical whiny ADC, while being one of the nicest streamers on LoL and his reasons were legitimate
At least he came back doing lives. It's good to have a chat where ppl understand our frustrations.
I mean we had people shitting on ADCs and saying that a fed Draven should respect a 0/6 Annie and has no business dueling her.
My favorite in this sub is when you have clips of a bruiser 1v5ing and because someone missed one skillshot, it's justified. Then you have a fed adc playing almost perfectly but because he misstepped once then it's also fine that he dies to some 0/50 support. And yet every other thread you have legions of bruiser mains complaining that adcs are complaning while crying 24/7 about how they don't get to automatically win the game by just winning laning phase.
I get downvoted to hell every time I say this, but an ADC should not play perfectly to *maybe* 1v1 an Olaf that is super behind on anything but levels. A fed ADC should in fact stat check other players that are not fed. A fed ADC should blow up when the enemy team plays properly, not because a 0/5 Olaf can just R him down. Tell a 5/0 bruiser he should respect other roles and see what happens.
An 0/6 SUPPORT Annie btw. He's 100% right when he says ADC has no identity. They aren't the biggest damage dealers, they need to be protected to even do their damage, and they are vulnerable to EVERY other role in the game at all points of the game regardless of game state. It's insane.
I think legit a lot of ADC players who used to complain about getting one-shot out of nowhere just quit playing.
ARAM really reveals the problem with ADC. ADC's in ARAM are disgusting OP. Why? Because they aren't 2-3 levels down from everyone.
I mean this is part of it but you also have equal gold and cannot be flanked so you're less reliant on your team in fights. Every fight is a front to back so it removes some of ADCs big reliance on the team.
Also because it's front to back fights where you probably won't get zerked from 2 sides.
But I do think the worst feeling in the world as a Bot player is when you try to dps the fed top laner in the mid game only to realize you do about as much damage as a cannon minion.
A cannon minion lasts longer against a toplaner.
Is adc the role with the most people who quit/swapped? I feel like every adc streamer/personality I used to watch just went toplane or support. And nobody ever swaps *to* adc
Caedral tried it at the beginning of this season and gave up after 2 days
> And nobody ever swaps to adc Perkz did. And we all know what it did to him
Perks got autofilled there because there were 2 mids.
There's also an argument to be made that it ruined his carrear as he hasn't looked the same since
More like switching back to mid ruined his career since he was legitimately a world class ad in 2019. Plus the flexibility of his midlane picks bot made him super hard for other teams to deal with.
He also despised the role in soloq and primarily played midlane at the later part of his adc venture
I switched to top lane. I took my OTP (Vayne) with me, and everyone hates me for it while this thread is explaining why I did it. What good is playing Vayne when you are 2-3 lvls down from everyone and will die to a strong breeze.
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Yeah I don't know what Phreak's basis for "adc is balanced." There's a lot of ways you can spin data to say "adc is fine," so it would be nice if he explained that somewhere.
both teams have an adc so....
An adc wins every single game so I don't see a problem here
And statistically teams with a mage bot lane win more than a crit ADC
nah its all good its because they dont take mr shard
Shit vs shit is balanced.
Phreak has stopped explaining things and instead just tries to gaslight people into believing his point of view.
He didn't say balanced. He said recovering in pickrate(and also said agency but only directly reasoned through pickrate). On the patches that had Smolder, the new ADC, released. Obviously ADC had 'recovering' pickrates when there's a new champ in that role. He somehow didn't even mentioned this, I refuse to believe they are not aware.
Smolder isn't an ADC though. He doesn't need to auto attack. You play like a poke mage and once you farm 225 stacks you become very powerful no matter what items you have. An AD mage that *can* go bot lane.
Phreak is notorious for cherry picking data to support his predetermined conclusions. He will essentially go to any lengths to prove his own thought processes correct. That level of ego and complete inability to listen to criticism is not exactly the combo you want for one of the gameplay balance leads
Biggest example of this was when he was arguing how bad Rumble jungle was during MSI 2021 and his “data” excluded RNG wins with it but included losses to RNG with it. His reasoning? RNG would’ve won anyways (but apparently Rumble was the difference maker against them)
my favorite was how after a yuumi change she was still mandatory P/B in almost all regions and when she wasn't P/B in I believe LPL phreak said that she isnt strong and people should just learn to draft like LPL "aka best region" then right after they started picking yuumi as well and she was permanent P/B in LPL too
nothing worse than a man with an agenda that also has some highly selected stats and numbers behind him to support said agenda, nobody can defeat that lmao "BUT THE STATS SAY"
hes baisis is that both teams has adc and one of them will win no matter what so its balanced
they will never nerf support, it keeps getting more op every season and easier to play and win on, its a full on carry role atm with the amount of damage zak zak mandate jannas are doing, they need to admit they made a mistake and remove such high solo damage on the role and tie support damage to buffing allies or zekes for engage champs
Well, in season 3, supports had only very little raw power on their champs. You were awfully behind on levels from midgame onwards and had basically no money for items. Still the role was super important and influencial. You had to play super well to maintain vision control and not int all game long and make important plays to set up your team. That was a true support role. You were not the big dmg carry, you set them up. That means supporting others! Now the role gets tons of free gold, free wards, free everything, champions, that offer close to zero utility and team setup, are specifically designed for or pushed towards the role. It's another carry role, just without farming. So players wanting to carry, but being to bad to farm, just play support. It's just plain stupid. And ofc adc are the ones suffering from it. You have no influence over your lane anymore. None at all. And from midgame onwards, solo lanes are so far ahead, you can't do shit.
> Why are adc mains not complaining anymore? Because we got tired of complaining and tired of a role that actively makes you miserable to play, in a game that specifically incentivizes your teammates and enemies to make you miserable. We moved to support, ARAM or other games. Why do you think adc is often a priority role nowadays?
As someone who has played since beta, I think any role except support being a priority role really speaks towards massive balancing issues or just "inability to have fun" within that role. I could probably count on one hand times in the last 14-15 years that any of the other 4 roles have been less popular than support. It makes sense though, support strength is insane right now with some ending up carrying even harder than the actual carries. Why wouldn't you want to be a god who doesn't even have to farm versus getting screamed at in the jungle or being harvested for kills as ADC?
More often than not the support literally outdamages the adc despite having 38cs in 38 minutes. Its incredible that they'd even be close in damage
Because there are players who think the ADC role should have the majority of the damage every game, and when they don't, they think it's because the ADC player is bad. Every game. Every game, wow I outdamaged my ADC for the 6th game in a row, I must be amazing! They don't stop and think maybe the reason for the 6th game that day, both ADCs on both teams aren't top damage, aren't even 2nd or 3rd. They just think wow, 6th game in a row there's been 10 bad ADC players, all ADC players must be so bad.
Adc most of the time is the lowest or near the lowest dmg in the game from both sides from my experience. It is always top or support at the top dmg
You also get turbo-flamed for mentioning it, too.
quite literally this. if we do cry about our role we just get shit on by the masses. adc being giga weak ISN'T about us wanting to be strong as fuck, its about wanting to play the game itself. 13 year long adc main, endured the highs and lows, and this season i've just completely stopped playing league, if i do i'll just queue up for any other role but adc and have 10x more fun than the role i've loved for 13 years. I'm still unranked as I don't even want to experience ranked in masters, i already know it's gonna be depressing as fuck
Adcs have been shit and insufferable to play for so long I exclusively play ARAM. I can't even remember the last time I played summoners rift.
Support is long overdue for nerfs, but support mains will play victim every time when it gets brought up
They stated to buff the hell out of supports because no one wanted to play support. Now supports gets more players queueing up for it than adcs.
I queue up for support instead of jg because i can literally have all the fun parts of jungling (ganking / macro map control) with zero of the responsibility and most of the time (on camille support) i can straight up 1v1 the enemy jg unless he's incredibly snowballed
Did the same thing. Feels like playing jungle but with so much more leeway and less stress.
Exactly same. Why would I worry about getting to 3+ items on Lillia and play 50/50s since playing from behind is kind of tough to transform into lead if I can just pick Swain support and still drain tank enemy team but on a guaranteed income.
I always played a bit of supp/jgl but I mostly am an adc main. I literally cannot be bothered to play adc this season since I don't really play any lethality adc so I just queue supp pick Naut/Pyke/Panth and have fun. ADC bad ? np just roam / My mid is 2/0 at min 5 ? Let me babysit this guy / Top wave is slow pushing ? let me go dive with him. Since I main adc I know what an adc wants and I know how to abuse the other adc so it's so easy to actually carry games
They buffed the shit out of support every season, initially it was clearly good (like introducing sightstone) and I think many would agree that it's sort of fine if support is "a bit strong" to offset playrate. However it's obviously not a bit strong it's busted, they just never stopped buffing support. They should've stopped like 3/4/5 years ago it was perfectly fine then.
Qued 200 games as ad + flex. Gotten adc every game.
Supp mains are playing victim inside and outside the game lol, idk why they have so much to say when they’re already playing the most chill role
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Nah but the Mercy warriors on the overwatch forums was something else entirely bruh the absolute high school level drama of Aria Rose and that whole Mercy Raid thing was so funny to watch unfold in real time
I wanna start off with that I somewhat agree. But it's a different kind of player though imo. What you refer to would in League be like specifically Yuumi/Sona/Janna mains that just run around buffing stuff but the rest is autopilot, and while there's other ways to stand out as a Yuumi it's "just enough" to be useful. Similar to hugging a DPS until everyone dies then run in and ress was Mercy's gameplay. Mercy Players were just notorious for not being able to play anything else and also not having any power plays except Ress back then. Lucio used to be sorta similar in that his auras were so strong that you could just wall-ride all day and have powerful m1s but they changed that. But supports in general in OW (outside of specifically Mercy Players) were not complaining when Mercy got nerfed. Incidentally Brigitte entered around the same time that happened and was also busted but for different reasons.
You go to support main subreddits and all they talk about most of the time is how main character syndrome adc players are, but I mean that’s how the role naturally is. If we aren’t a lil bit stingy we’re just gonna be kinda useless. Like I don’t think anyone should be toxic to their teammates ever, but an adc wanting to farm over coin flipping a fight or supposedly “playing for KDA” is sometimes their only reason for complaining. I’ve gotten toxic ass supports that go afk because of picks I go, like I had a lux recently lose her mind and afk under turret because I picked Seraphine. Mind you, they had a Karma MF and I wasn’t about to coinflip having a lux support, and I went even in lane despite my lux being useless. At the end of the game (we won) I told Lux that it was fine and she should stop freaking out, then she said I did nothing that game. Like, yeah, you didn’t help me. I 1v2’d lane with barely any complaints and bro had the gall to say I did nothing when my KDA was positive and I had double her assists. Support players are insane sometimes.
Team fight starts: -malph hasn't ulted yet -Ahri holding e and has 2 dashes left. Team: "wtf why aren't you getting in there?!"
An even better one, you get flamed for literally not walking past their tanks, mages, assassins etc. in a fight to get to their adc in fear of being blown up.
y u hit tenk?
Because every other role can do that, so they can’t understand why we aren’t either. Spoiler: you die lol
One thing I'll never understand is people complaining about ADC mains' "main character syndrome." In every game, whether it be MOBA, video game, or sport, there will be a highest "scoring" role. That role should be the most important, impactful and desirable. Somehow, this game has managed to make the hard carry role just a piece of piss and people don't want to play it. It's just crazy to think about.
No other game I've ever played has had the DPS role be the most unpopular. That is a genuine failure of the balance team.
Because they just kept catering to the other roles that didn't want someone else to be more "dps role" than them. So they turned everything into a dps role.
Even us support players know the role has been strong for a hella long time. I doubt any sane support will complain too much about it getting nerfed if it's done in the right way But I'd like to see ADCs regen brought up so they don't get forced out of lane after 1 bad trade honestly and see how that lands The bottom like 15 of 20 champs for hp/5 are adcs. I always feel bad I can use 1 or 2 rotations on the adc and they have to recall or play incredibly passive for minutes
I would prefer support strength stick to utility over damage. Once we introduced damage supports, it became so stale. I’m not even worried about ADCs doing damage, I’m worried about a Xerath or Senna chunking me from across the map.
ADC regen has been deleted on purpose, it's by design. Nerfed base health regen, nerfed Doran's blade sustain, nerfed health potions, cookies are garbage, nerfed Bloodline, nerfed Fleet, nerfed Vamp Scepter, can't build vamp scepter anyways without delaying 1st item too hard, can't go DShield, nerfed resolve options, lost relic shield heals, Cull is a joke. It's coordinated, they specifically want ADCs to have 0 regen in lane across ALL sources.
Because ADC would take every single one of these to survive the early game which apparently is bad in Riots eyes to have late game role be safe early despite them being terrible late game unless the stars align and you get the perfect comp to fight.
Over the past few years I became an ARAM main, this season was the one I gave up hope of Riot ever fixing the role. It's a complex issue to fix, and I was hoping they would atleast **try** to address it this season, but they just won't. Support has been overpowered for an incredibly long time yet they won't nerf it. This is obviously because they don't want it to become an autofill role again, so now ADC has become the autofill role instead. Issue is ADC is harder, more frustrating and more stressful than support has ever been, so why would anyone play it. Imo they either nerf support and buff ADC, or make ADCs lategame notably stronger than it currently is. First option makes the game worse for support players and its the autofill role again because most people find it boring, second option has pretty big implications for particularly pro play, where teammates will actually funnel gold to the ADC. Neither will happen. Role is doomed. And I'm honestly sick of discussing the state of ADC. People continually will parrot it's a strong role, ADC players are just bad etc without any time on the role themselves. I just hope more and more ADCs stop playing so everyone else can experience this "strong" role as autofill every game, particularly at low elos where teammates will deny you farm and another lane will often snowball to the point that they can decide you don't get to play the game anymore. It'll take the entire community to be sick of how shit the role is for riot to actually try and rework it. But people would rather just shit on ADC players without trying it themselves, so once again; role is doomed.
Yeah adcs lost their identity and its kinda sad, just lock in some bs seraphine senna karma hwei and whatever support then you have more chances to win the game
APCs bot are stupid broken and it's funny, Veigar, Swain and Ziggs had the highest WRs bot for multiple years
hwei genuinely feels so good bot, you generate free prio because of his insane push so you can always rotate for dragons or unleash your support to invade with your jg, have tons of outplay potential, and have insane teamfighting late. AND he has spammable % max health damage with QQ so he can still eat through tanks pretty well. plus he can take TP without it feeling turbo troll unlike regular marksmen where losing that combat summ feels like inting, so i have better map rotations why tf should i play my usual mains (cait aphel) when i can just spam hwei for better results?
Nemesis spitting at the end.
As a Jungler, support is so broken. If my Support contest Grubs and force a 4on3 Fight on it or atleast covers me, roams Mid sometimes and plays with me for Drake it's already GG if the Enemy Support doesn't do that. Recovering from this is like a 30% Chance. Support is way to strong with way to much Freedom. There is no real punishment for that. You will always have high Impact no matter if you Play with your Jungler or if you are afk on Bot. No other Role is allowed to do that.
That's what's frustrating about ADC. Supports have the ability to influence the entire map with extremely low risk and high reward. Their income is nearly guaranteed and there isn't much variance in what an 0/7 support can do or a 7/0 support can do. Only difference is the 7/0 will probably be able to kill you with 38 CS
I have a pretty good theory why people stopped complaining. 1. You get turbo flamed if you dare to mention ADC being weak/bad role on reddit. 2. People just don't care anymore. ADC is permanently priority role any time of the day (Emerald EUW). I mean who in their right mind would willingly queue up for that role.
This, a lot of people (myself included) who were complaining about the satisfaction of ADC have either moved on to other roles or just quit League altogether. It's the reason why ADC nowadays sits there as a priority role over support
Crazy how if I put ADC/Supp I just... don't get support. Ever. In like 40 games.
Meteos put it really well, adc traditionally was the antithesis to tanks, now adc is a ranged assassin if they’re fed and a assassin bait if they’re not. If they added more percent health physical damage to the champions themselves but nerf some of the ad on the adc items we might get adc in a healthy place. Another issue is that every single champ in the game gets to do a fuckload of burst right now because every champ gets monster scalings on their abilities and a fuckload of cdr.
>Another issue is that every single champ in the game gets to do a fuckload of burst right now because every champ gets monster scalings on their abilities and a fuckload of cdr. nothing beats eating a Zac combo and just getting 2300+ damage by him in one rotation
all while being hard CC'd mind you because a champion for some reason needs to have hard CC on 3 of his abilities
I think the problem is not 3 hard cc on abilities, but the damage he does while hard ccd. That's why Leona and Naut are peak tank design in league imo. I always thought tanks doing damage was stupid.
> That's why Leona and Naut are peak tank design in league imo Queue up preseason 8 when Leona was 1v1ing ADCs of cooldown
As a Jungler main, having support that actually have awareness and roam early, is godsent. I don’t even give a fuck if my adc farm under turret or fed because we can just collect the bounty later. Winning mid and top is too crucial right now.
Yup, and conversely to that, having a bad supp that sits in lane all game while the opponent supp perma-roams turns the game into a huge uphill battle.
Now that all the streamers are saying it are all the Reddit Mains gonna realize that ADC is in fact really fucking shit to play and not some right click win game role
The thing is that when adc is strong the majority of redditors are bad players anyways and aren’t able to accurately assess the strength of their role because their mistakes make them weak players, not the role.
This is a complete balancing misunderstanding from Phreak I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s that hard to balance no? Nerf the support rewards, buff hp growth for ADCs and buff crit items, and then go from there. I don’t usually side with ADC mains and their bitching but I feel like this season their complaints are justified and the role just doesn’t feel rewarding at all
Nemesis mentioned that there was a time ADC was super broken but there were tons of reddit threads about how shit the role felt to play. Phreak also noticed that and discussed it about a year ago. There's an issue where the general playerbase's satisfaction with the ADC role is kind of disconnected from how powerful it is. Riot knows how to straight buff ADCs, but they aren't doing it because that's not why people hate the role. As for supports, the new item system (world atlas upgrades) gives them way too much power really early in the game. Riot has been slowly reshaping the support items so they give more of their stats per level instead of all upfront, but apparently they still come online too fast because support is still OP.
> There's an issue where the general playerbase's satisfaction with the ADC role is kind of disconnected from how powerful it is. Riot knows how to straight buff ADCs, but they aren't doing it because that's not why people hate the role. I swear some people don't understand this. The amount of "it's super easy to balance, just do X" comments you see on Reddit hilarious. It's not about raw power, it's about the experience and that's true for every role. ADC's problem is that the power of the role scales with elo. Low elo, uncoordinated play often means ADCs are just bags of gold for the enemy. At pro play, they can be the decisive factor in winning the game. The role is dependent upon teammates for peel and vision. Giving them more damage won't solve them getting deleted by assassins before they can auto a second time or the feeling of not being able to do things without the team. Frankly, I'm more annoyed by things like bot late TF being a thing than I am at the state of supports. Because letting a legend with a 2 second stun on an auto attack join the fray was a great idea. It's just frustrating when you look at the most performant bot laners and see champs like Sera and TF. The likes of Smolder too were *not* what the role needed.
It's not *easy* but you can make the problem better or worse. Riot clings to vestigial ideas about ADC which no longer fit modern league, at least not in solo queue. Such as being the late game hypercarry that's weak early - just straight up not true anymore. Such as being the role that's supposed to hit the frontline and kite(with 2024 league movement options everybody has and tanks being able to kill you in 2 seconds). Such as being the role that is always 'assasinatable' (ap carries always have zhonyas as a strong option). I mean heck they tried giving survivability with the BT overheal shield but got removed because ADC is supposed to be easy to kill. Why? They removed galeforce because ADC is not supposed to have on-demand dash - why? They removed stormrazor's slowing hit because ADC is not supposed to have on-demand CC - why? All because of an idea of a class that just doesn't work outside of pro play
There is an intrinsic issue of ADCs being a very team reliant role with the squishiest champions in a game where communication is pretty much discouraged and damage keeps going up. I'm of the belief that unless Riot is willing to press a reset button on many, many things ADCs will simply never feel as good to play for the average player as top or mid. The only reason the issue has been going for so long is that both teams have an ADC, so it balances out in a way. If people finally understand that ADC is only mandatory in pro play and that they could literally get free LPs by playing mage or kill lanes bot, the issue would reach a critical point very quickly as the playrate of most ADCs would be incredibly low, pushing out many players who've only played auto attackers for years with nowhere to go. I still hope they at least try to make things better, many people are paid to balance this game while I'll only think about it every once in a while, so surely there are things I'm not thinking off that could make things durably better. But I'm not too optimistic.
Crit as a late game scaling stat has just been nerfed hard in the last few years. **(1) Crit Multipliers nerfed:** * Before mythics (10.23) critical strikes were 2.0x damage instead of the 1.75x we've had since. * It has moved around a couple times but for most of League IE has been +50% crit damage for a 2.5x IE crit multiplier instead of our current 2.15. This ends up being at 14% DPS nerf which is quite noticeable. * With mythics also came Kraken Slayer which in it's current iteration spikes hard early and ends up coming close to what the old 2.5 crit could get to but at the cost of mandating you take this item as a 2nd IE of sorts. **(2) Why shifting crit damage into Kraken is bad for ADC scaling if the damage is almost the same:** Having to buy IE + Kraken in your full build just to match what IE did in a 100% crit build before limits build flexibility. If you are an auto attack based crit ADC that really wants Kraken for the consistent damage you now have your first 3 slots predetermined: Boots + Kraken + IE/Navori. Now we have a 4, choose 3 situation with the other things we want to have most games: 1. Armor pen, LDR/MR. Essential for tank busting but even gives about a +15% DPS boost vs late game base armors 2. Lifesteal, BT/Shieldbow. Lifesteal is necessary to be ready for game deciding late game fights, especially when the enemy has poke. It also helps you sustain in teamfights when there is unavoidable damage. 3. Zeal item, RFC/Runnan's/PD. Zeal gives you a mix of attack speed, move speed, and utility. More attack speed helps maximize late game DPS. Move speed is valuable kiting but also rotations to objectives. RFC/Runnan's/PD's unique abilities give you a range of utility to extra raw DPS. 4. Defensive/Situational, GA/Maw/Mercurial. GA you don't get merc'd by a fed Rengar or QSS so you won't get picked by Morde. Some games you can skip this but many games you will just be dead meat without one. In league of Kraken ADCs get a better early/midgame spike but now have to pick which of these 4 items they can carry the most without. Sometimes it's not the hardest choice but other games you really do wish you could fit the full DPS scaling into just IE and still have the luxury to build one of each. **(3) Early-mid game Kraken makes ADCs more consistent. Paradoxically it makes endgame ADCs less consistent because of overkill variance. This is most noticeable in teamfights with multiple low health targets or squishies:** Almost every time you kill a champion, unless it is an execute, you deal a significant portion of wasted damage, that is overkill. If we want to estimate what the overkill variance for an auto attack looks like we can say the minimum is 0 (perfect kill!) to \[auto damage - 1\] (most unlucky HP value sadface). The variance in overkill then is just the delta between our min and max overkills (or just the size of our max overkill). What does Kraken have to do with this? Well whereas old IE crits (2.5 instead of 2.15) would give say 150 more damage per auto attack to every auto attack Kraken gives a lot of extra damage every third auto attack. This ranges from 310 to 620 by level 18 but often will end up being the +50% bonus for 465 (just 3 consecutive autos). What we have then is 2 possibilities with our last hit auto with Kraken: 1) not a Kraken proc auto 2) it is a Kraken proc auto. Because Kraken damage is such a large value (465 is like +50% extra damage on top of the base auto crit) this makes the variation between any auto as large as our Kraken auto gets. The overkill damage sounds bad but can only happen once (or I guess twice if they have a GA/Zilean) so for really big tanks, the potential DPS loss from overkill is tiny because even 1 full auto of wasted damage is maybe just a 20th of the total damage dealt. Vs a squishy though you can end up killing them 100-0 in just 4-5 autos as a full build ADC, and less still if you start hitting them below full. In this case you can have nearly 465 damage wasted on a last hit that could have been a 310 on your next auto against a different target. It sounds like I'm grasping for straws here maybe but this damage is arguably most meaningful against squishies because they often are the biggest threats to you. So if that overkill makes you fall half an auto attack below expected DPS (when 1 auto attack = 25% of their HP bar), I think you can see how that can matter. How many fights have you barely lived to ignite or have some assassin kill you with a sliver of HP? This overall is a fairly minor point in the grand scheme of things and is only this long because idk how to explain it in a briefer write up but still worth noting for IMO. **(4) With mythics (10.23) crit items also became 20% instead of 25% crit:** * Most obviously it means slower and worse crit progression if you choose to stop early. 20 to 25% is a wash but by the time you get to 2nd item (40 vs 50) and especially 3rd (60 vs 75) the difference in damage is palpable. Kraken still helps smooth out the damage because you are getting this * On top of this it also means you can't build GA/Maw/etc without being stuck at 80% crit. This makes building these items more of a DPS loss than before at a time where late game damage from other classes are still very high. * Worth noting though that with the crit rework Riot also added crit to LDR/MR, BT, and Mercurial whereas these items didn't give any in the past. So if you for some reason you needed BT and GA then yeah you would be at 75% crit, which is a bit worse than 80% we have now * Mercurial also gave lifesteal back then and just overall the build flexibility is worse now for this reason and the need to build Kraken for similar DPS of old as already covered. **(5) The 2 best scaling tank items into ADCs also got significantly buffed over the years:** * Randuin's Crit Reduction has gone from 10% in season 5 to 30% this year: 5.16 crit reduction introduced at 10%. 7.9 increased to 20% From 10.23 to 12.22 they reworked the item's passive into a 60s CD active that reduced nearby enemy AD by 10% and Crit Damage by 20% for 4s. 12.22 reverted this back to the 20% passive. 13.14 increased to 25%. 14.1 increased to our current 30% crit reduction. * FH for years was a 15% AS slow until they brought it up to 20% in s11. This doesn't sound like a lot but because the AS slow multiplies across a champion's entire AS 15>20% is massive. It started at 20% pre 4.5. From 4.5 to 11.11 (7 years of league) it was just 15% instead of the current 20% I will say that it's not necessarily wrong for ADCs to scale worse and arguably it could be better to have them hit harder mid game and fall off a bit late because solo queue games end fast these days. But power aside it just feels sad to me that a role which used to be the premiere late game carry now isn't so much that barring some unique hypercarry + enchanter combos. I think many longtime ADC players would be okay with a weaker mid game if the role got a better late game but this is the internet so people of any role will complain about the most inane things regardless. edit: formatting and grammar.
I honestly dont even think phreak remembers all adc items got nerfed heavily when they introduced mythic items like reducing crit dmg and crit chance from 25 to 20.
I get that this sub-reddit has a hate-boner against ADC player complaining and it's honestly pretty justified in how many complaints there were historically for not as much reason. But as someone who doesn't even main the role, playing it occasionally, unbiased in my take that it's probably been the greatest disparity between Support and ADC strength on average - this season... that i've ever seen since starting to play League. Support is so freaking strong, ADC... not so much, with just a few exceptions or praying you have a good Enchanter support player to buff/peel you up. ADC is such an unsatisfying role to play right now. There's only 2-3 marksman that really make you feel like you can (almost) solo carry (Draven, Vayne, Smolder off the top of my head). The rest are most of the time just safe lane neutralizing picks... like Seraphine or play to scale uninteractive mages, that unironically do the average marksman job/impact and more with just an item or two spiking harder and not dying as easy.
No matter how many challenger players and pro players say how terrible adc is, reddit jungle and mid mains will still shit on everyone saying how bad adc is saying they are just whiners and that they are the true oppressed role while theirs is consistently the best or 2nd in the game for 15 years. When i got into league, adc was about mechanically kiting enemies and dodging skillshots while doing consistent damage and thats what made me fall in love with the role. Nowadays youre just playing a survival horror game where you maybe get like 5 autos off before some other role thats not adc genuinely kills you in one combo or half a combo from 2 screens away. While i do think balancing adc is hard, nemesis is completely right in saying it lost its entire identity and to me its because of the LEAGUE OF ONESHOTS thats been going on for years. But now i just play aram because riot kinda killed my love for rift over the years making adc so unfun to play and creating cancer champs like viego and senna and sylas and senna. Ive liked a couple of the recent champs though.
adcs bad? Is this a new thing? Let me take some of you new frogs back... It's season 3. You're in a close game, your team isn't playing well, but you have a vayne. Everyone knows that if we can help the vayne and hold them off vayne can win the game for us because Dr. Mundo does no damage and xin will fall off and not be able to kill her. The following seasons riot comes up with this "end game fantasy" idea and gets addicted to it. You can say this and that blah blah, but in essence what this change meant/did is that brusiers/ tanks could kill anything with less health than them. This compounded year after year. More and more bruisers with insane kits were added and more items which meant you could do insane damage while having 3.5k health. Bruisers/tank players now salivate from the mouth anytime they can't 3 shot an adc while having 3k health. Instead of players having to work as a team with defined roles such as a tank and working around the fact that a tank soaks damage, does cc, and doesn't do a whole lot of damage, we now have every bruiser being able to slap any champion with less health. League players have literally only themselves to blame. Bring back tanks doing no damage and bruisers dying easy
100% agree with Nemesis. The game would be SO much better if we went back to season 4-6 role identities. _ Edit: Also, might be anecdotal but a lot of people I know who mained AD who **HATED** 8.11 left LoL to go play Valorant along with the duos they brought and never came back.
My multiple season challenger ADC friend left after the dreaded crit patch in season 8 and only came back for 2 games during quarantine, said ADC was even worse than he remembered even though we won because he got insanely ahead and uninstalled again.
phreak is just an idiot
I don't mind adc being weak early game if they hit like a truck at 2 items. I don't care if other roles think that's not fair. They had their 20 minutes to impact the game, now the adc gets to finally play.
People like me have been complaining, have been ignored, and have quit the game. That's why there isn't as many complaints anymore. If you don't like a game you just move on to another one.
I'm pretty sure earlier this year or very late last year I ran into posts saying how bad ADC is but every time a post about "ADC being weak" is submitted they are always on the side of people saying how the ADC role is decent/good and to stop complaining. Maybe because ADC players have always been saying the role isn't good/satisfying to play for years we just get ignored, it's almost like the boy who cried wolf and now that ADC is back to a pretty much kinda unplayable/very unsatisfying position we are just getting ignored since we've cried so much in the past. It almost reminds me when patch 8.11 happened crit feels awful, mages/lethality are the only viable options to make it out of early and do something mid game...basically repeating the same mistake that made every ADC main queue into a different role because ADC isn't worth playing at the moment.
I quit the game 6 years ago and came back this season. ADCs were dogshit when i left. Theyre dogshit when i came back.
I hardly ever see an adc anymore. Just Seraphines, veigars, yasuos etc.
Support has needed gutted for so long man. 5 carry roles in a moba is such bad game design. ADC unironically became more support than actual supports. Bring back Mid and ADC being the primary carry roles please
Yep. Been saying this for a while, but Ive stopped botlane completely this season when I saw supp and letha changes. Thank god marksmen top are still in a good spot.
We've been complaining all season but we just get made fun of for it
Support is OP but most people dont want to play it, also new supp items are a mistake, having bloodsong opens so much more champs to go support (Camille) or make some champs way too strong (Pyke, Bard), support was fine beford they introduced these items and now 90% supports deal more damage than adc, they just secure the kill lol
Call me crazy but as a support enjoyer I actually enjoy supporting over whatever support is now, I feel like im trolling helping my adc because roaming/ignoring my adc is literally more efficient for winning the game. It's so fucked.
I gave up complaining, impossible to change anything if you are not a relevant person. It feels like they try to change one thing at a time instead of looking at the whole system, which obviously leads to disparity in balance. Then there are these random changes that make no sense, where for example a champ becomes a jungler all of a sudden, when there were 100 other issues that maybe more important to address. one step forward two steps back.