Attack Range is perhaps the most powerful stat in League of Legends. For some champions, simply citing their range can be the easiest way to convey to another player why they are powerful (“Caitlyn is 650 range, she’ll always be relevant”). The corollary of that, given that every champion needs to be balanced around comparable power budgets, is that the more attack range a champion has, the less power we can give them in the rest of their kits.

The set of marksman champions contains some of the most similar properties to each other, and we’ve been striving to differentiate the experience of playing one from another. For Kai’Sa and Xayah, both champions had class-stretching strengths we never thought we could put on an ADC (assassination, untargetability), so it was important that we didn’t genericize them by giving the exact same range as their counterparts. Our champions need to be interactive and possess meaningful weaknesses, so being outranged by most other marksmen felt like a reasonable approach.

On the other hand, Kalista and Tristana are two champions that have frequently lacked meaningful weaknesses. Our approach in the past has been to tweak values like base damages or attack speed scaling, which has appeared to work in the short term, but often just deferred the problem to reappear in a few months. Instead of watering down the strengths of these champions, we opted to preserve what is unique about them and instead create new weaknesses with Attack Range reductions. This isn’t a change we do lightly, but we do feel the benefits of the work we’ve done here outweigh the costs.

We will create new long-range marksmen in the future as we find compelling kits or fantasies that would be good fits for the artillery-style gunslingers, and we’re unlikely to reduce the attack range of any other marksmen any time soon.