RiotJag – Lead champion designer supposed that ADCs having too much protection can make the role highly imbalanced in League of Legends.
If you follow professional League of Legends tournaments, you will notice Stopwatch, Zhonya Hourglass’s domination. Stopping for 2.5 seconds and avoiding so much damage and lethal abilities causes many champions to “abuse” these items. Even tank supports in the professional leagues, like Nautilus and Leona, tend to buy Zhonya Hourglass early.
Because of this excellent protection, the concept of developing a Zhonya Hourglass-like item for ADCs arose. This concept was even discussed with RiotJag, the Head of League of Legends’ design team, in the most recent episode of the LEC channel’s EUphoria video series. Riot Games, on the other hand, objected to developing a Zhonya Hourglass for ADC.
When asked about the possibility of giving ADCs a Zhonya-like item, RiotJag explained:
The fundamental weakness of marksmen should be burstable and we are willing to somewhat mitigate that weakness by giving them defenses that are like… I will say they are not like unconditional defensive windows so shieldbow is a good example of a meaningful shield but it won’t be able to save you if tons of people are catching you and are pouring damage into you.
I don’t think marksmen should get that sort of stuff given the actual strengths of that class, they should just end up warping up the meta again if they could like on top of what they provide which is like very consistent scaling, damage throughout the game like hyper carry level very powerful objective status super good synergy with like force multipliers supports enchanters also that degree of self peel is just too complete of a class package. So we wouldn’t want to offer them something like a Zhonya’s effect without a huge trade-off.
As RiotJag mentioned above, if the ADC has an overly powerful defensive tool without losing a lot of damage, this class will totally dominate the meta. The most apparent example is Kai’Sa, who can travel to Zhonya Hourglass while still ensuring output damage. This helps to explain Kai’Sa’s domination in the ADC slot in 2018-2019. If every ADC had the identical skill, this class would be far too powerful and imbalanced for the game state.