“Been playing since Season 1 and never have i felt like balance was in such a poor state as it is right now. Most ADC players say that there is no reason to play ADC unless its Vayne, which is supposed to be a late game carry but is two item spiking now more than any other ADC. The undertuned assassins feel terrible to play at all with all the shields and heals that are in the game. And both tank champions and Skirmishers are running rampant with high damage and survivability. Thoughts?”

I’m still catching up on a bunch of data and a lot of conversations with various people, so some of this is my perspective that others on League may disagree with (and this will quickly converge on a team consensus now that work is returning to normal after the break).

I don’t think balance is in a bad state in terms of picks and bans and winrates. I fully admit that is a knee-jerk response and not backed up by a lot of data yet.

I think the problem you’re experiencing about ADC agency has a lot to do with assassins, Lethality as a stat, and whether slower Jungle camps give Junglers more opportunities to gank. We knew a risk of the Assassin update would be that Marksmen would feel picked on, because Assassins like to target them, and likewise, Marksmen feel it when ganking cadence changes much.

When Marskmen feel like they are on the defensive, this usually manifests from the player base as “I lost agency” rather than “I lost power.” I think this is a really reasonable reaction, because Marks can do one thing really well, so when they are prevented (or even slowed) from doing that one thing, they don’t have a lot of secondary options in which to contribute.

We are going to look at individual carry potential and whether ADCs ability to influence a game has decreased too much. Obviously there are risks to going too far in the other direction, because when ADCs are too dominant, other players just feel like they are a cheerleading squad for their carry.

More info as we discuss this more this week.

1/3/2017

EDIT: I’m not going to delete the original response, but some players called me out on this being a bad answer, so I wanted to elaborate.



We made a bunch of broad changes to the game this preseason. That included an Assassin update, Jungle changes, item changes and mastery changes. We knew this was going to be disruptive to balance and that it would cause some player pain, but we still thought the changes were worth doing. So my response was that I wasn’t surprised that we have some follow-up work to do in early 2017.

Yes, I’ve seen the Poppy video. I don’t know if that represents a holistic tank problem, a holistic ADC problem, a Poppy problem, or just a one-off video.

After having a chance to discuss the state of the game a little bit more, we do want to look at whether ganking has increased and whether ADCs are feeling too much pressure because of it. Similarly, we want to look at ADC item builds and see if there is a legit early power spike option, and/or if it takes ADCs too long before they feel like they have a functional item set.

While I apologize for any confusion the original post may have caused, I don’t want to apologize for answering questions quickly or shooting from the hip with my posts or Tweets. I strive to carry on an open conversation with players and I’d rather suffer the occasional bad message than make sure everything is so well polished that I end up communicating a lot less.

1/3/2017