Talk:Aatrox/@comment-26203093-20170315115258/@comment-24496127-20170317000943

It's kind of his theme that he murders things, If he doesn't have the dive potential to threaten carries, but he needs to hit things in order to survive, he needs to function while being able to hit tanks, but not be opressive while hitting squishy things. That's why percent damage exists. Theorectically, pure sustain could be used in liue of any percent damage, but then the issue is, just because Aatrox can survive while wailing on a malphite for two minutes, doesn't mean his team won't die while he's doing that. So...it just doesn't really work like I wish it did.

My ideal Aatrox would be a crazy cleaving thing that not even a full build adc could take down if he was hitting 3 people at once. There's not a melee fighter character in the game who actually wants to be hitting tanks. The closest is probably Fiora or Darius, but both of them have better targets, and Fiora is easily killed if she's surrounded by tanks in most cases.

For clarity, I use the term tank rather loosely in the following paragraphs. I'm also referring to things such as Darius, and anyone else that can build semi tank in order to disregard positioning.

I like things that kill beefy targets. I don't like the current dueling strenth of tanks - health pools and resists that are near impossible to get through without being killed by their cc and base damages - and it feels bad to focus a tank in a teamfight and just have them heal up instantly, ignore you to kill someone else, or outright burst you. It's caused a pretty large bias towards things that can punish their face tanking, because tanks surviving being in bad positions is just...ugh.

Not everything should kill them, but melee fighters should...at least late game. The late game used to be balanced around a triangle of mages killing carries, tanks killing/negating mages, and carries killing tanks. At some point, that dynamic got skewed in a way where AD's are constantly at a disadvantage to bruisers and tanks, and tanks are a huge kill threat to basically anything, not just things that rely on burst rather than sustained damage.

An example of what I'm saying: Yesterday, I played a Draven game where I literally couldn't fight a Zac because of his sustain and a thornmail just slow killing me, even if I dodged everything he had, I had to be the one running. That's despite me being full build and having a merc scim. When it can reach a point where sustained tanking is stronger than sustained damage, something is wrong.

Arguably, you could say they should be equally able to fight each other, and in a 1v1 game, that would be correct. However, an ADC's job is literally just damage, so, even though damage is hard to quantify, when the answer to "How much damage do adc's do" ends up simply being "not enough", the position feels bad to play. They just can't do the one thing they're good at well enough. Except for Vayne. Vayne still works. Being tanky, even if not a pure tank, is just the more safe and strong option in lack of powerful threats.

^I think I said something similar to that years ago, in regards to Kalista, No correlation to my point, just nostalgia.

So, yeah, I want more powerful glass cannon champions to be strong. The lethality meta was a nice break, but even that was just such a heavy snowball meta that my current problems with the game balancing rarely became as apparent, rather than them actually being fixed.

There's much more I could say on this, but for now, this is long enough.