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[frostshotgg]

Doesn't matter, Mercurial is a trap.

[Flying Dice]

Depends on the enemy team comp and how the game is going (especially with the nerf to Mikael's). Unless you're trying to flat-out claim that no ADC should ever build QSS in any situation.

[frostshotgg]

Pretty much yes. Mikael's is basically QSS except it doesn't eat an item slot. If you want MR as an AD, you have better options.

[IronyOwl]

I wish the community could go "Yeah this is a problem" without acting like every problem is killing the game.

I always enjoy the "Yeah this champion was overnerfed, but isn't crippled" posts nestled within the WTF USELESS URGOT II RITO Y and STILL FACEROLL STILL RITO FANBOYS BUFF IN DISGUISE clusters.

[frostshotgg]

Riot has a strange tendencies to only make huge changes for the worse, and only make tiny positive changes. In this particular case, any change at all was going to totally rebalance the marksman power levels, because of how closely grouped most are, and not only did Riot rebalance, they did it pretty heavily, which is why this is getting such a huge reaction. For another example this patch, nobody's crying over Leblanc getting the nerf bat because she's still decently playable. BT being removed from the game before 5/6th item removed several champs from playability with it.

[Frumple]

That... sounds like it was a good thing to do, then. If several champions were completely reliant on access to a single item like that to be playable, I'd say there was a problem that needed to be dealt with.

[Putnam]

That... sounds like it was a good thing to do, then. If several champions were completely reliant on access to a single item like that to be playable, I'd say there was a problem that needed to be dealt with.

This is a pretty game-agnostic discussion, so I actually have something to contribute here. I disagree with this. As long as either the item or champion is always available regardless of conditions (and the former is true AFAIK in LoL), it shouldn't be problematic that an item is an absolute core item for a champion or even multiple.

[Arcvasti]

As far as I can tell, Riot is doing the gaming equivalent of writing a book, publishing it, and continuing to make occasional tiny edits and then ripping out all the pages in a flawed story arc so they can start from the ground up. It'll probably balance out in a few patches. Although I wish the PBE was larger so they could test this stuff more before putting it live. Living with it could be annoying for those people affected by it. I hope they don't restructure the AP or support item things any time soon. AD items WERE due for an overhaul. BT was a pretty snowbally item, now it isn't. BotRK's burst was absurd, now it isn't. Lifesteal was really weird, now it is less so. Riot definitely needs to make some adjustments to their changes soon though. And then I bet they're going to need to tweak the adjustments to their changes afterward.

[frostshotgg]

The way to do it was NOT to delete BT. It hit the two dominant carries into line, but it made most of the underplayed carries unplayable. Sivir, Graves, Varus, Corki, and probably someone I'm forgetting all got hit hard, and not one of them deserved it. If several champions are reliant on a single item, the solution is not to remove the item and send several champions tumbling to the bottom of the tier list. Given that Jinx and Lucian were problematic, the solution was to do something to those two that makes them not get as massive of a power boost from it, or to make everybody else better in a comparable amount of gold.

[frostshotgg]

80 AD. And yes, I believe it was Morello who said they were intentionally standardizing AP and AD items, which I really feel like was not a good way to do it. Doing 10 AP's worth more damage getting X item over Y item with slightly better utility should be a tradeoff I can make. It really shouldn't be full blown Pure Damage/Utility with Damage/Incidental Damage with clear divisions in tier like it is now.

[Frumple]

This is a pretty game-agnostic discussion, so I actually have something to contribute here. I disagree with this. As long as either the item or champion is always available regardless of conditions (and the former is true AFAIK in LoL), it shouldn't be problematic that an item is an absolute core item for a champion or even multiple.

See, the way I see it, if you're going to make an item so core to a character that they're effectively unplayable without it, you might as well just force it on the characters in question ala Viktor (or Rengar, I guess), and probably delete it from the shop entirely. If there's literally not a choice in regards to making the character function, make it explicit. Or give them an option, instead. Otherwise, all you're doing is giving them a fake item slot and baiting the unexperienced into failure.

[Putnam]

I don't really know what said items do, so I can only speak in terms of analogues. In Dota 2, the hero [champion] Tinker (a mid gank-happy nuker intelligence carry) pretty much requires the item "Boots of Travel" (adds +100 movement speed and allows every 60 seconds for the hero who owns it to teleport to any allied building or creep [minion]) to function, as his ultimate ends the cooldown of all abilities and items on him and thus allows him to teleport to any part of a good chunk of the map (based around how far the creeps have pushed) most of the map every 20 seconds or so. Simply adding the ability to teleport randomly at will would simultaneously be very overpowered (as he can get a crazy amount of farm extremely early) and nerf him greatly (as all of his skills and the nuking item Dagon are core to his abilities and have large cooldowns). I'm not sure if there's quite as delicate a balance issue as that in LoL, though. Basically, just buffing the champions to make use of the items might not actually be practical, as building a certain amount of gold in order to be able to use certain abilities effectively is not necessarily a bad thing or else the hero would suddenly become a level-6-insta-win or whatever.

[frostshotgg]

Morello has talked about that a few times, and it's a policy I actually really disagree with. If an item becomes so good on a character that it's basically a requirement, then the design goal should be to find a way to separate the two, not just nerf one into oblivion as a band-aid solution. Amusingly the latter is a thing Riot has repeatedly said they hate, but they do it anyways. We're rapidly approaching the part of Riot's design philosophy that I despise.

Putnam: It's similar to Tinker, but not quite. It's kinda like that, except the item is much, much more critical for some champions, because it was the largest useful source of the most important stat on carries, and many carries are dependent on getting massive amounts of that stat early because their abilities do more damage based on it. So, because the item is no longer a good source of the stat, those carries get humongous indirect nerfs. The best parallel I can think of is Heart no longer gives the flat health to Strength heroes.

[Flying Dice]

I'm in total agreement on that point. The heart of the issue is that the move made to stop certain ADCs from snowballing really hard also kicked a bunch of others into the rubbish bin. Moreover, the nerfs to BotRK aren't just hurting ADCs, but also all of the bruiser types that built it, especially because they all relied on the burst and catch potential of the active, whereas certain ADCs can potentially still function with the increased % current health.

And the BT shield is fucking stupid.

On the bright side, AD Tristana is potentially set for a comeback now. And of course Rito just created a new problem now that 2x Dorans into IE is core for every ADC, because Caitlyn.

[Arcvasti]

I haven't seen Caitlyn in a while actually, which makes me happy. I really don't like playing against her. Its mostly been Jinx and Lucian and Sona down in the bot lane recently. All of THEM are mostly manageable. But Caitlyn's obnoxiously long ranged poke just drives me up the wall.

So basically, this patch nerfs adcs pretty hard[BT nerf, BotRK nerf], nerfs bruisers a lot[BotRK nerf, Randuins Nerf] and a few patches before that, junglers got hit hard by Feral Flare nerfs.

Do you know what this means?

Spoiler: What it means (click to show/hide)

The world has passed into the age of the support.
And it is glorious