Upcoming ADC changes are focused on making marksmen more fun

There’s a delicate balancing act between making marksmen champions that are reliant on critical strike. If they’re too good, no other type of champion has a chance against them, like we saw at the end of last season. If they aren’t good, then they feel bad to play because no matter how many basic attacks you land, you can’t kill anyone.

Riot is trying to find the middle ground, or making some new ground entirely. In patch 8.11, Riot nerfed crit marksmen hard enough that they really weren’t viable in the meta anymore. This led to a few less played bot laners coming up like Miss Fortune, Lucian and even a few mages. Since then, Riot has steadily buffed crit champions back into viability, but it has been careful to ensure that crit champions never made it back to the their old ways of killing champions with just a few attacks. While that may make them a little more balance, it also makes them pretty boring to play.

Thankfully Riot is well aware of this problem and is currently taking a look at crit champions and finding a way to make them stay viable, but also fun to play. According to a post on the League of Legends forums on Monday afternoon from Riot Maple Nectar, this is going to happen mostly by giving ADCs a more defined power curve. In other words, crit marksmen are going to have slightly cheaper base items with a little less power. That way, when those champions have several of the items they need they can feel powerful as the game transitions from mid to late.

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Hopefully, according to Maple Nectar, this should give champions like Caitlyn and Tristana a well defined place in the game as the go-to champions for mid and late game, but they’ll struggle against their more aggressive marksmen companions in early game. They won’t quite be able to compete with mages early on either. If this works out, it should take crit champions back to their original idea of a carry who can win your team late game, but might be a bit of liability early on.

Maple Nectar’s post doesn’t get into many more specifics than that and doesn’t give much of a time table on when we can expect these changes to come through. While it’s likely that these changes will be on their way to the game soon, Riot does have the deadline of locking in a patch for the World Championships which will start in just a few months.