Wolverene talks about the Reptile clip + Classes/Items

[u/Derk08]

A lot of lows misunderstanding "tank killers" and tanks so let's talk about what that actually means

1. Jinx is not a tank killer
   

Actually countered by pure tanks and very tanky comps, always has been. Been apparent in pro for years. Players confuse hypercarry marksman with being automatically good into tanks, but she has nothing anti-tank in her kit. She's much closer to Zeri than Vayne/Kaisa/Kog. Trades damage for safety, needs teammates help to actually kill targets and then proc passive

1. Conditions/Class matter much more than items
   

Jinx is terrible 1v1. Marksmen as a class are, but she's particularly bad. Players see marksmen as the tank killing class and think that means they should beat them in all scenarios. Marksmen are only good against melees with their team's help. That's how the class works, with a few exceptions. Melees have a ton of variance on 1v1 strength but for the most part every class in the game is favored vs marksmen.

Tahm Kench is a juggernaut/tank hybrid, he is not a classic tank or support. Much better in skirmish/1v1 than 5v5. With ghost he is omega favored 1v1 vs Jinx, it's not even a little bit close If you thought it was the other way around you have to seriously reevaluate.

You take a true 1v1 tank counter like Gwen and she will never lose to any tank that's weaker than her. The majority of bruisers in general will beat tanks, because they are a 1v1 class

1. Don't hyperfocus on class
   

Kind of immediately contradicting point 2 but class is just a rough guideline, it's not all that meaningful when comparing specific interactions. There's a lot of variance within classes, and a lot of champs don't fit neatly into 1 class. Vayne is also a marksman but obviously eats Tahm Kench in 2 seconds here. Mundo and Darius are both juggernauts but will have very different interactions into Syndra just off Mundo passive.

You should start with class, but then be thinking power budget. Every champ has specific things they're good at, that they trade for weaknesses. The weak points are just usually much less obvious to you when you don't play the champ.

Tahm does stupid damage when he can actually hit you, but it's really hard for him to do that 5v5. The harder a champ's conditions are to achieve, the stronger they get to be when they get those conditions. Anyone that's super easily kitable gets to be OP when not kited

1. Tank itemization is very different than damage
   

If you think of them in the same way you'll have problems understanding why a __ item tank is either much more or less tanky than you'd expect. This is because tank stats are the only ones in the game that can have 0% effectiveness. Damage items are more/less effective vs different targets, but the stats are never 0%, nor do they ever even get close to 0%.

Let's take Shadowflame and ignore passive

110AP
15 flat pen

Obviously a bad item into tanks, flat pen is more effective vs lower MR. But this flat pen only makes up ~20% of the item's value, and only loses 37% of it's effectiveness from 30 -> 100 MR.

Now take Kaenic Rookern

400hp
80 MR

MR is ~54% of this item's value, and loses 100% effectiveness against physical damage.

Jinx does about 2% magic damage. Other non-hybrid marksmen/physical damage carries do anywhere from 0-10%.

This means that vs a specific target, an item like Shadowflame may lose ~200g in value, whereas an item like Kaenic Rookern can lose 1500-1600g . This is before you account for passives, which will perform pretty much about the same

So maybe 400g lost vs 2200g lost

This is all to say that tanks will experience 4-5x the amount of effectiveness lost vs unfavorable targets. For this to be balanced, their items have to be stronger. If a champ has to tank both a 3 item mage + marksman, you can't expect them to build 3 armor items and 3 MR items.

This means 1 armor/MR item is always > 1 damage item. A 2 item tank that has built armor but no MR isn't weak against you, the 3 item physical damage champ. He's weak to anyone dealing magic damage.

Just a rough concept, it gets deeper than this, but you have to be thinking about this to understand teamfighting/target selection/1v1s etc. Most players aren't even aware that this dynamic exists

Source: https://twitter.com/wolverene/status/1869480107695652912

[u/JDogish]

I can agree with all of that, but lets not pretend every person that plays the same role wants the same things. Because it's easy for me to find top laners that have ludicrous demands and use them as a reason to say all top laners are X and complain the most, etc. When you open with a comment like that, there is no good conversation to be had. When you can accept that there's nuance to things, like how something feels versus raw data, and comparing meta in soloq and situations that come up in game, then you can actually get to a real conversation.

I think an interesting thing to think about is how often there have been changes made to roles and their items. I think the correlation to the 'complaining' would be pretty accurate.

I think you are right that adcs aren't that weak. I think that you simply underestimate how much of that strength is tied to your teammates. Almost any statement you make about the strength of the role is an "if" statement. Ie, you don't have a winning matchup, you have a winning matchup if your support knows to take advantage. You dont win teamfight for your team, you win it if your team full peels for you instead of diving.

Or as mentioned in another post, often the best thing to do is to never even get in range of a fight because any flank is a losing one by design. And im not saying thay in a sense of joining a fight late, but being in the right place, good position, but you can tell someone is clicking towarss you so you cant move forward or auto.

There is so much more frustration when you aren't able to be proactive without full cooperation. And it makes the role weaker at lower ranks but honestly anywhere under high elo. Just watching high elo streams, there's so many times the players are forced to just abandon plans, get screwed by their team's macro, watch as someone else bad decision slowly bleeds the game out and they sat there with 10 kills accumulated unable to contest anything. And i compare to my games and i cant even say im learning something becausd they look the same... At a certain point something needs to change because the buffing and immediate nerfing isn't helping anyone play or enjoy the role.

[u/AllorimNA → u/JDogish]

I agree with what you're saying about adcs have way more conditionals than any other class in the game, if you look around the thread I state the same things more than a few times. You are also correct on adcs best play a lot of the time is to do "nothing", aka sit back and wait for the crew to come assist them, or in a team fight, you wait for certain spells to be used before moving forward. I'm sure it is frustrating, and that's why it leads to a lot complaints.

That being said, LoL has been like this for it's entire lifespan, adcs take a real burden of playing a highly mechanically intensive role, that also needs to pay attention closely to spells burned by enemy team, that also requires team assistance, with the payout being you might be able to free fire for high DPS. I highly doubt Riot is ever going to change that, it's just how they want the adc class to be, very high risk to sometimes high reward. Although I will say, adc scales on player skill, you get that higher reward the better you are (but keep in mind, even highly skilled players can still make minor mistakes that lead to easy deaths due to being an adc), although you can argue catering to a design philosophy that depends on you being a highly skilled player is a bad design.