Recently, Sneaky shared his thoughts about how bad Marksmen currently are.
In League of Legends, Marksmen are well known for dealing tons of damage, with their powerful right clicks and their ability to carry their teams. But lately, things have changed, when the junglers, the top laners, and the mid laners can handle the role of carrying the team as well as the marksmen, sometimes even better.
Champions with abilities focused on utilities are being preferred in the role of marksmen and late-game hyper carry champions are becoming a past. Even the well known ex-Cloud9 marksmen-Sneaky said it himself, marksmen are the second support of these days, all you need to do is help the junglers.
“What is my opinion of Kai’Sa? Oh, you don’t know? She is just a terrible champion, she doesn’t deal damage, she can’t lane, she can’t trade. Her best trade is the enemy overextends and gives you an isolated Q, and that’s it, and your W too, the condition is really hard to get”
“The thing about ADC right now, the meta is entirely just: you want to help your jungler. So if you are someone who’s gonna get *beep* in the *beep* and get snowballed on then you are not helping your jungler. So you have to have some sort of utility and be good in the lane.
”You can just be trading evenly and farm, not making actions, so your jungler can get really strong. It’s just so weird, the junglers just farm like everyone else and gets stronger than everyone.
If we take a look at the post-Worlds 2020 statistical list, we can see that Sneaky’s opinion is perfectly correct. The current top 3 ADC champions are Ashe, Jhin, and Senna. These 3’s abilities have a lot to provide to their team: Slows, strong CCs, visions, and the ability to initiate team fights. While you can find the real hardcore damage dealers in the current top 4 jungle champions: Graves, Lilia, Nidalee, and Kindred.
Outputting huge damage with just 2 complete items, including the jungle item, jungle champions are being recognized and utilized by the Pro League. Their ability to snowball is extremely good, a jungler can completely make the other jungler’s life miserable through invading. While the ADCs take a lifetime to become a threat, easily suppressed and it’s a risk not worth taking to focus the resources on them anymore, which explain the rise of utilities ADC champions.
Riot Games took some efforts buffing marksmen in Season 10 by increasing their Attack Damage and Health, but the downfall of this class is also a result of the recent changes of the other roles, Riot will need a huge change in how the game’s system works if it is their wish for the infamous marksmen to get back to their glorious days.