User blog comment:Willbachbakal/Classes & Subclasses My Way/@comment-28230442-20160427164432/@comment-1330314-20160428040655

Thank you for the reply! If you make your own post, I'd be happy to reply, and I think there's plenty of space on the wiki to have multiple blogs on the same subject. At one point, there was this wave of Ashe reworks that coincidentally happened right before her live changes a while back, and everybody had their own unique take despite often targeting the same parts of her kit.

Thoughts on your points:
 * My point with misnomers wasn't that champions should all fit into a neat little box (I think most champions are hybrids of two subclasses, sometimes even more), but that Riot's classification takes champions who currently fit into a generally accepted subclass very well (e.g. utility mages) and suddenly make them weird hybrids of things that weren't assumed of them until then. I think that the class "meta" here is important, because Riot's trying to set the terms for discussion with the playerbase, but the terms they're setting clash with strong notions that were built from playing the game, and so risk losing in-game applicability (they're never going to stop people from picking supports, for examples, nor should they, and they probably don't even want to in the first place).
 * Re: not taking laning into account, I disagree mainly because most of what I mentioned (e.g. burst, reach, mobility, etc.) applies to all stages of the game, but also because laning has its own combat style that differs completely from the rest of the game (everyone is a "skirmisher" at that point because nobody's strong enough to throw themselves into protracted duels with minions around).
 * I agree, the assassin subcategories are pretty bare-bones, but only because there are a total of 14 primary assassins in the game, and because the assassin class itself is relatively poorly designed. Even so, the two examples I picked in the Reaper category I think do qualify as "pure" Reapers (Talon also kind of qualifies, imo), and there are a few Reaper-something hybrids out there too, with the same applying for Rogues ( is a Rogue-Reaper hybrid, for example, is probably a Rogue-Hunter hybrid, etc.).
 * I feel my classification of different marksmen does have application, though (utility marksmen generally have less damage, for example), and I think it's especially important to create subclasses for marksmen because the class as a whole does too much. If we're going to set the discussion for what each marksman should do and how they should be unique, which is currently an issue with them too, we need to have an environment where marksmen make tradeoffs for their different strengths, instead of just being good at too many things at once (e.g., who isn't so much a Commander-Skirmisher hybrid as she is both classes at once, or , who's both a Skirmisher and an Eradicator, and is balanced around excessive early-game weakness).
 * Harbingers are worth mentioning because there are support fighters out there, and I don't want to lump them in with support tanks because that just ends up conflating fighters and tanks again. It's worth mentioning there are a couple more Harbingers out there (Lee Sin is a Diver-Harbinger hybrid, imo, even if he's a bit difficult to pigeonhole by nature, and Illaoi could probably be defined as a Juggernaut-Harbinger hybrid too, with some other examples out there too).
 * I disagree that Jailors and Disruptors are the same because their playstyles and contributions are fundamentally different, which is why I made the distinction in the first place. A Disruptor is never going to be able to lock a single target down as well as a Jailor, and that's an important point of distinction because players often make a conscious choice between single-target lockdown and multi-opponent disruption. Similarly, a Jailor isn't going to position themselves like a Disruptor in combat, or apply the same kind of focus, or even fight in the same way.