User blog comment:Poisonshark/Ideas on classes/@comment-1330314-20140731212940

Thoughts on this: The result is a class with clear strengths (massive DPS, great mobility, good situational resilience) and clear weaknesses (squishiness, limited defensive capabilities) that is healthy to play against. The model still isn't perfect ( is fairly binary in that he steamrolls low-elo teams but gets hard-countered in high elo, struggles in teamfights), but it's a significant improvement over the previous implementation of melee carries, and can lead to even better melee carry kits.
 * Assassins: While I agree that assassins and super-high-burst champions in general are tricky to balance properly, I think the class in general is being improved upon with the removal of anti-counterplay measures, namely and 's silences. The latter may need a bit of balancing, but her play patterns are pretty good now, and do allow for retaliation (she has no way of preventing you from casting spells, as her E is a root). I think assassins are pretty well-defined right now (single-target mobile burst champions), although some old assassins may need a bit of sprucing up ( and, especially).
 * Fighters: While I definitely agree that fighters specialize in DPS, I disagree that abilities don't help in achieving that. Steroids aside, many champions have damaging actives on a low enough cooldown to be used multiple times in a fight (,, , etc.). The current problem is that, bar a few exceptions (such as Siphoning Strike), these abilities aren't too impactful, which is why top lane duels devolve into stat-offs. I think the solution here would be to take out a significant amount of base stats out of bruisers (as opposed to melee carries) and put that power into their abilities instead. It could potentially solve a lot of other issues as well, such as the binary relationship between ranged and melee and the overlap between fighters and tanks.
 * Marksmen: If you're getting consistently obliterated by marksmen, the problem may lie with you not itemizing against them, rather than ADCs being overpowered. Literally ever class, including squishy classes such as assassins, mages and other marksmen, has access to armor, health, and other forms of resilience. Armor in particular is one of the easiest stats to build, precisely because of how powerful marksmen can become. While the issue of ranged vs melee tends to be fairly binary, and the advantage has flipped several times over (bruisers had the clear lead at the beginning of S4), this is more of an issue of melee champions being poorly equipped in general to deal with kiting, rather than marksmen being untouchable. There are obviously exceptions to this ( and are a nightmare to any melee champ), but marksmen in general have healthy play patterns and clear weaknesses, including in the late game. It's also worth noting that marksmen are never at any point the only thing that matters in the game: even in the late game, the poorest scaling champions (bruisers, some assassins) play a critical part in teamfights, and marksmen heavily rely on their team to output damage.
 * Supports: You complain that supports lack uniqueness and are only meant to support the marksman, but as someone who frequently plays support, I can tell you this is patently untrue. While the support does start out by laning with the marksman, supports do a lot more than just babysit them in teamfights. Even the most babysitter-focused supports (,, etc.) are equipped to assist their whole team and exert direct control over the enemy. I do think supports need more build variety (proper access to AP, access to vision that doesn't constrain them to fewer item slots or force them to provide the vast majority of team vision), but I also think they're already unique, as their utility and control is unparalleled. Even the most utility-centric utility mages, such as or , cannot match the utility of a "traditional" support (even if Morg is strong in the current meta).
 * Tanks: Tanks are not "glorified supports." You can have tank supports, but that is a niche in itself within the tank class. While tanks are focused around tankiness, crowd control and (sometimes) utility, I don't think they need utility ratios to their non-tanky abilities. Tanks are defined by their tankiness first and foremost, and currently nearly every tank has some sort of item-based scaling to their tankiness (and sometimes tankiness-to-damage scalings), so if anything this is how tanks should scale. The CC and utility tanks output tend to be designed in such a way that you would absolutely not want a scaling on them (hard CC, ...), and the other forms of utility, namely heals and shields, already do scale.
 * Melee Carries: The reason the class didn't exist for a long time was because Riot's original solution was to overload fighters with raw stats and effects, creating a class of champions that was tanky enough to wade through the entire enemy team up to the enemy backline, but also strong enough to output some of the best DPS in the game. The end result was a class that was super-snowbally, super-low on interaction (melee carries were designed to kill anyone and survive their damage through the sheer strength of their stats) and just plain overpowered, to the point where melee carries were replacing not only marksmen, but also tanks and even some mages. Champions like and  can be overwhelmingly strong and excessively difficult to deal with, and they're only at a fraction of their initial power (they were both introduced as the "solution" to melee, and were meant to be the first of a new generation of melee carries). Riot's only just beginning to "fix" the class, with 's rework and  being the first iterations. Currently, the ideal model seems to be:
 * Strong autoattack steroids.
 * Strong ability scaling around autoattack-focused stats (AD, attack speed, critical strike).
 * Top-tier mobility.
 * Innate squishiness, compensated for by clutch defensive abilities.
 * Junglers: The reason there is no dedicated jungler class is that it would make no sense: the jungle is simply a location on the map like any lane, and having a jungler class would be the equivalent of having a dedicated mid lane or top lane class. Junglers do accomplish functions that laners can't do as well (buff control, early game jungle farming, ganking and roaming, jungle objective control), but most of these strengths only work in the context of laning: past the laning phase, you're going to engage in teamfights, and you're going to accomplish a certain function in your team, one that has no relation to jungling. In the mid to late game, you're also not going to be the only one roaming the jungle, and you're not going to be spending as much time there as in the early game, due to the importance of lane objectives. I do think there needs to be more than one starting jungler item, if only because no single item is going to cater to every class in the game.