Ashe has always been the marksman that every beginner learned since she was always played in the tutorial. As beginners progressed and gained summoner levels, they learned it is wrong to purchase thornmail as the first item and that Ashe is a strong champion characterized by a kit filled with utility, sustained damage and strong crowd control. Before the rework, Ashe had been played as more of a support AD carry since she had no offensive steroid to compensate for her wealth of crowd control. Historically, Ashe had more influence on the League of Legends metagame than any other champion. Ashe’s longstanding kit and strength is one of the biggest causes to the “mobility creep” that many players criticize today.

Her frost shot ability made any melee character without a dash or blink useless because they could be continuously kited using Ashe’s slows and superior range. This led to Riot’s design direction to designing characters with much more mobility such as Irelia and Xin Zhao. As League of Legends grew older, faster and more mobile champions were released which no longer justified Ashe’s immobility, mana costs and lack of damage steroid as a counterweight to her crowd control. On patch 5.9, released on May 14, 2015, Riot finally released Ashe’s rework which featured an attack damage/attack speed steroid, global hawkshot and the frost shot ability on her passive.

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While Ashe’s kit as a whole seems to have been preserved through the rework, there are several major changes to her optimal playstyle. Before the rework, Ashe’s laning phase was based around building up her critical chance with her focus passive, utilizing Ashe’s long range to land a strong critical hit then using her slows and volley to stifle retaliation. It was a very hit-and-run playstyle which complement her slows well. In the laning phase, the new Ashe is very different. Her critical chance is always present due to her passive and with the way her new Q works, Ranger’s Focus, it is better to focus on sustained damage rather than a single empowered auto-attack. This long-sustained damage playstyle fits Ashe’s identity as a ice-themed Freljord archer than the poke-based playstyle of pre-rework Ashe. Unlike fire which has a tendency to cause pain immediately after contact, ice tends to freeze the body slowly until the cold becomes unbearable. This is analogous to Ashe’s playstyle where the longer you are in a fight with her, the more deadly she becomes due to her powerful autoattacks.

Another aspect that changed about Ashe is her role in team compositions. In general, marksman can be classified as hyper carry, support and caster. Long-ranged auto-attackers include champions like Caitlyn, Jinx, Twitch and Kog’Maw. These champions utilize long ranged and strong steroids in order to damage with their autoattack from afar to dominate the late game. Usually these champion’s abilities contain utility or steroids. Some examples of support marksman include champions like old Ashe, Varus and Sivir who have incredibly strong utility in their kit but are usually lacking the offensive power of other marksman.

Caster marksman are defined as short-ranged carries that do the brunt of their damage with their abilities which can be seen in champions like Graves, Lucian and Corki. These are basic roles and of course there are some caveats, overlaps and minor exceptions to this system of categorization. Pre-rework Ashe functioned as a support marksman since she has relatively low offensive power due to her lack of steroid which was compensated by her crowd-control loaded kit. The rework added in the ability, Ranger’s Focus, which completely changed Ashe’s role from a support marksman to a hyper carry. The only aspect that prevented pre-rework Ashe from being classified as a hyper carry was the lack of any bonus attack damage or attack speed in her kit which meant that she did not have nearly the same offensive power as other marksman. Ranger’s Focus was the offensive steroid that Ashe was looking for and grants her the equivalent of 23 to 27 percent attack damage on five autoattacks along with a 20 to 40 percent attack speed.

The attack speed buff is not too shabby but the multiplicative attack damage buff is extremely strong. To put into perspective, Tryndamere is a champion that is well known for abusing his crits and has a 35% critical chance at maximum rage. Critical chance can be thought of as a percent attack damage increase which is illustrated in Ashe’s passive. It is also important to remember that Ashe’s passive has a value of 110% without any critical chance so the total percent attack damage increase is actually 33 to 37% which is about equal to Tryndamere’s offensive power.

Ashe's Q: Ranger's Focus Ingame

While it may seem strange that Riot added such a strong offensive aspect to Ashe’s kit without toning down her utility to compensate, it should be noted that Ashe was not in a particularly strong place in the meta-game before the rework. Ashe was the only immobile marksman without an offensive bonus in her kit which made her pale in comparison to the rest. The risk of playing a champion that was too easy to pick off was not worth the mediocre damage that Ashe could output. Immobile marksman are defined in this article as champions without an on-demand dash, blink or speed buff which only includes Jinx, Kog’Maw and Varus. Jinx has mobility after a kill while having extremely strong steroids on the rocket and minigun. Kog’Maw has the second highest range in the game behind Twitch along with arguably the strongest offensive steroid in the game with his W ability, Bio-Arcane Barrage.

Varus, as a marksman, is not considered very strong although has seen some play in the midlane. However, even Varus has a strong magic damage on-hit passive on his autoattacks and has very strong percent health damage. Ashe had absolutely no offensive steroid which made her the weakest out of all the hyper carries since there was too much danger in playing Ashe with comparably small reward. With the rework, Ashe can be reasonably placed third behind Kog’Maw and Jinx as a hyper carry. A spreadsheet showing a comparison between marksman and their offensive steroid can be seen here.

Overall, Ashe’s playstyle dramatically improved thematically and conceptually. An aspect I have always been impressed with Riot was their ability to cohesively link a champion’s kit to their identities both in gameplay and in lore. Unlike pre-rework Ashe, she now has so much more synergy with her abilities. This rework is absolutely a buff to the power of Ashe and allowed her to take on both the support and the hyper carry role in a teamfight composition. It is safe to say that no other hyper carry has as much utility as Ashe does and if LCS teams can circumvent her weakness as an immobile carry, than it would not be surprising if Ashe makes numerous appearances in professional matches. Expect her to be found in teamfight and pick compositions and chilling her foes in their tracks.