Ghostcrawler issues Riot’s first response to the ADC problem

If you’ve been around League of Legends social media at all the last few weeks, you may have noticed a particular theme emerging within the numerous complaints that pop up every day: the ADC role feels useless. Pros and amateurs alike have been routinely popping in with their “one fix” for the role, which has appeared to suffer since the new season update brought in a rework for assassins and a new keystone mastery (Courage of the Colossus) for initiating tanks.

Riot’s been on winter break for the last few weeks, which has led to the community getting more and more anxious about the state of the position, which has recently seen Ziggs, a mage, have great success down there. Riot lead game designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street posted one of the first responses we’ve seen from a Rioter to the ADC situation on his Tumblr Tuesday.

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.

As you can imagine, many players did not like this response. Pros took to Twitter to complain about Ghostcrawler being out of touch with the meta or not familiar enough with their role, while others criticized his citation of the Lethality stat as part of the problem.

A few hours later, Ghostcrawler updated his Tumblr post with some clarification:

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.

Patrick “Scarizard” Scarborough, from Riot comms, confirmed a few of the desired changes are coming in Patch 7.1.

The following changes to jungle XP have been made on the current PBE patch, via SurrenderAt20:

Jungle

Non-buff camps now reward about 25% less XP on the First Clear*

Experience Changes

[NOTE: When comparing values, remember big camps all get +50 bonus experience from jungle items]

Blue - XP lowered to 200 from 210

Red - XP lowered to 200 from 210

Gromp - XP lowered to 200 from 210

Little Krugs - XP lowered to 35 from 45

Mini Krugs - XP lowered 7 from 15

Crimson Raptor- XP increased to 20 from 15

Small Raptors - XP increased to 35 from 15.

In a separate post, Ghostcrawler said Ziggs Bot is “the sort of thing we’d like to see more of,” as long as it didn’t get in the way of marksmen having a place in the game.