Season 1 unc take on the mage bot meta
Hey, I’ve been playing league since xin zhao was a new champ, so for quite a while now (had some minor gaps over the years, but played semi consistently). When focusing on playing ranked, I usually reached mid platinum from season 3 onwards (divisions got inflated since then, no idea what the equivalent would be today). Currently hovering around emerald, so not super high but I think that I have enough experience and knowledge of the game at this point to be able to make some quasi-educated takes on the current meta state. I like to switch champs often so climbing is hard, but I would argue more enjoyable. So gather around and listen kids, grandpa needs to let some farts out.
As you can all now see with classic, current league is way different than the early days, and classic is not even anywhere close to S1. A lot has changed, and I would argue that pretty much everything is better now. You can queue for your role, there are things like lobby auto bans and loss mitigation, afk checks and what not. Quality of life for solo queue has improved tremendously over the years, compared to S1 at least. Not all changes are perfect, there will always be some bumps on the road, but the general direction is IMO up. I can queue solo, and expect at least a decent experience playing my selected roles 90% of the time.
That being said, not all roles are created equal, and I do think that is either by design, or it’s the result of years of tweaks by riot. A lot of people now complain about support being op and having too much gold and agency over the game, especially AP supports. These people probably don’t remember how much it fucking sucked to play a support in 2012, when all you had was gold per 5 items, and the passive gold income was lower. All you had was your level, and maybe 1-2 finished items by the end of the game. Maybe. Nobody wanted to play support, and I don’t blame them. Riot made a lot of changes that made a lot of champions viable for the support role, and that is an objectively good thing. Again, not all changes are perfect, but the direction is right.
Personally I’ve played all lanes for at least a year each, and I must say that one thing has been always consistent, the ADC average experience always felt the least enjoyable. Not because the role is not fun, the power fantasy of melting people from a distance is definitely there, but it’s very difficult to reach it consistently, and that is in my opinion the main source of frustration. League games got shorter over the years. Uncs like me have less time to play, so for me personally it’s nice that the game ends after 20-30 minutes, and not 45+. Unfortunately for most adcs, that means they need to play most of the game before they get their biggest power spike at 3 items. Early game for ADC is difficult, low agency, most other champions can explode you in under 2 seconds. Hardly fun at all. You bear all of that for the promise of the late-game amazing carry experience, which unfortunately doesn’t come to you consistently (game ends early, you got camped and can’t get back to the game etc.). All other roles have more consistency in how they provide fun, and ADC is really a lot of delayed gratification. Top and mid have stuff going on from the start, you usually see champs there that can do things on their own (fight, roam, shove lane for turret gold etc.). You get what you want from the get go.
I mained ADC for a few years, it’s my favorite role in general, and only switched to jungle main again the last few months, and oh boy is it a different experience. I play what I signed for from the start, and haven’t had that much fun in years. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing ADC and still do on occasion, but it often feels more like a chore than a game, and I have enough chores outside of league.
All that being said, I think I know why riot is hesitant in buffing the ADC role in general. Things can go haywire very quickly if not handled correctly. I still remember the early days when Twitch got a few early kills, and then just proceeded to terrorize everyone all game long. If you got an early lead, due to a heavier focus in getting gold from farming/kills, some ADC would just turn into uncontrollable blenders that would kill anything. The overall damage in game was lower, so it was harder to burst people, which means that a fed ADC was much harder to remove from a fight, especially if they had lifesteal to heal back up from the initial burst. And lifesteal was higher and easier to buy back then, vampiric scepter just gave flat 10% for something like 450 gold iirc. Or they could just buy a warmog, what is your 1/8/2 ass going to do about that huh? And it wasn’t really a fun experience in general, the snowball was real. Games were sometimes decided in the first 5 minutes, and then you were held captive for the next 30+, because it took way longer to destroy all the turrets etc.
So, all in all, I think that the game is generally in a much better state than 15 years ago (Jesus Christ time flies by). The ADC role just didn’t evolve with the times as much as others did, and that is on riot. They should rethink the whole role in general, and rescale its power curve to current game length better. Maybe take off some of the max damage potential for the sake for a slightly better early game? Maybe not. I think that the ADC quest is a step in the right direction, it helps getting more gold a bit earlier in the mid game, which is nice. Maybe they are close to actually fixing ADC sometime soon? Who knows?
And as a mandatory grumpy old man comment, you little shits don’t even know how good you have now. Look at the current bot lane meta as ADC holidays. Play other roles, pick some new champs, try to enjoy the game in other ways for some time. Send emails to riot support, be vocal but respectful. They probably don’t read Reddit a lot, but they will definitely notice an uptick is support cases reported as they most likely pay some other company to handle them, and that costs money. I’m pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence that miss fortune has that many skins, and if those stop selling because people play veigar now, I’m sure they’ll notice. Vote with your wallet, that’s the best thing you can do to make a big company notice, trust this corporate unc on this one.
For anyone that got to this point, thank you for reading and I hope you can still find a way to have fun in league.