The picture above is what the bottom lane carry use to look like. Not anymore;
things for the bottom lane in the last few patches have changed... Drastically. No longer is the Summoner's Rift dominated by high-damage ranged marksmen. No, now everyone else gets their chance and the marksmen are a relic of the past.
In today's post we'll be looking over the recent crit-item changes, how it's affected the game and my personal opinion on the new changes. But before we get into that, here's a short overview on the game League of Legends:
Above is short and perfect description taken from the League of Legends website that quickly sums up what League of Legends is all about. To put it short, League of Legends is a MOBA. What's a MOBA? Good question!
A MOBA is short for multiplayer online battle arena, a sub genre of the real time strategy genre. If you ask me though, MOBA is a genre of its own. I mean, it does support one of the older and largest games out there with an incredible competitive scene through e-sports. But League isn't just for competitive players. It's for the casual too! Anyone can pick up, play and enjoy League once they get into it!
So if you haven't, make sure to download League of Legends tonight and give it a go. It doesn't take a lot out of your PC and after all, it's free! You can download League of Legends from Riot game's official website here.
So why have marksmen lost their touch? Because items have changed!
The biggest factor on why most marksmen are no longer viable is very simple and straight forward. Item changes, more specifically crit-items. The Riot balance team has decided that marksmen have been too strong for too long and have finally decided to do something about it. They gutted marksmen.
They started by giving direct nerfss to almost all marksmen byhalving their regen and armor, therefore making it harder for them to survive. After that, they took most crit-items and completely changed them. They made them weaker and more expensive to buy. Most marksmen heavily rely on getting their crit-items to be useful. Now those items are harder to get and the pay off is nowhere near as good as it use to be. Crit-based marksmen now take significantly longer to get to their power-spikes and in the game's new early game meta, that's not good.
So what's being played if crit-marksmen are no longer good?...
Swain's definitely one of the best replacements right now. So are other mages like Brand. Bruisers like Irelia are also taking over. You know times are grim for the bot lane when your support would rather have a melee carry than a ranged marksman. Any other ADC mains out there like me will tell you; this is seriously messed up. Despite it all, some marksmen are defying the odds, though few and far between. On-hit marksmen like Kai'sa and Varus, alongside few ability marksmen for example Ezreal have proven to still be viable options in the current meta. Cool... I guess?
What are my thoughts on all this? I refuse to play Swain in the bot lane!
I won't do it. I refuse to play anything but a marksman in the bot lane. If that means my options are limited and that I'll have to be spamming the likes of Kai'sa and Varus, so be it. To me it's better than playing something that's somewhere I believe it shouldn't be. But don't like my ignorance fool you guys. Change in League's meta is something that certain, and something that happens often. Adapt to survive.
It's hard playing against Brand and Swain. I can see why people are choosing to play them over traditional crit-marksmen. Although I despise the changes going on, perhaps one day I'll give a shot. That's unlikely though.
Thanks for reading!
If you've made it this far that means you've read the post which hopefully means you like it. If that's the case, remember to drop an upvote and if you want to see more League of Legends' posts, make sure to follow @ggt. If you have any questions or just anything to say about the post in general, feel free to drop a comment below. Otherwise once again thanks for reading and make sure all you guys have a wonderful day!
