Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160604031245

I don't think crit-based marksmen are disappearing, particularly since there are significantly more crit items than in previous seasons (plus crit's still a mainstay on champions who've naturally synergized with it instead of on-hit, even on Lucian). However, I do agree that the marksman role and its itemization needs another rework. The marksman update in preseason 6 was much-needed and helpful, but it's clear that there's still a huge amount of work that needs to be done: not only is marksman item selection still far too stat-centric and formulaic (it's just that we have more options now than simply picking between and  depending on whether you're a crit or on-hit marksman), but Riot flat-out admitted that they still don't know how to break down the marksman role after giving the class the biggest update it has ever received in League's history.

Tying into these issues is crit, which was my biggest disappointment with the marksman update. I've told you this before, but I think the marksman update was a golden opportunity to overhaul the stat, and in fact reworking crit should have probably been the number one priority for fixing marksman itemization, because crit has a ton of power, no gameplay and a method of delivery that feels unfair by design and inappropriate to the rest of the game. Because of this, I think the crit scalings in marksmen kits (plus Gangplank's) are a mistake that will be painful to rectify in the future once crit inevitably gets redone: none of those mechanics enriched the gameplay of those champions besides adding in more itemization synergy, and in the case of GP and Yasuo (also Tryndamere, obviously) I think the random variance in their power is actually seriously harming the quality of their gameplay by giving them wildly inappropriate rewards on either extremity for accomplishing the same actions. There was never any real effort done to improve crit besides inflating it to a point where it became reliable, and so the stat still offers no real room for interesting items.

Technically is the AA-focused multiplier item right now, but I think its current design hinges on really terrible compromises ("Let's make this item cater to autoattackers, who are mostly AD, but pack its recipe with large amounts of AP, a stat none of them would normally want to build, just to artificially inflate its cost"), and I think the item's eventually going to be redone without AP in its recipe (and hopefully without AD either, so that it can work more smoothly for AP autoattackers as well), which hopefully will eventually lead to the removal of those nonsensical AP ratios that were slapped onto champions so that they'd feel less awful about getting a near-useless stat on an item designed for them.

Going back to the issue of marksmen still having design issues, one of the most serious problems with the marksman role, imo, and one the community I think is well aware of at this point, is that marksmen do far too much at the same time. One of the reasons I suspect it's hard for Riot to separate marksmen is because, even though some marksmen are meant to do better at certain things (i.e. some marksmen are duelists, others are great objective-takers, others have great team synergy, etc.), every marksman is good at all of those things at once, which means pretty much every marksman has the strengths of multiple would-be subclasses with very poorly-indicated tradeoffs. It's also because of this, among other reasons, that I think marksmen are so essential to the game: there's no point in replacing them with anyone from another class, even if they're great at DPS, objective control, tank-busting, teamfighting, etc., because any marksman can do all of that at once, and well. We need to start breaking down marksmen into subclasses and giving each serious weaknesses beyond just "squishy and weak early", but until then, League's still going to be a game revolving around, and dominated by, marksmen and marksmen only.