The history of the Attack Damage Carry or ADC role is one that has changed, evolved, and de-evolved into what is currently the meta. Today, I will recount the history of the ADC role through Season 8 to the present, and how its journey has been full of changes, nerfs, buffs, and how all these events have led to its current state today.
After over 12 Seasons, the state of the ADC role has diversified and changed greatly. In the earlier seasons, the state of the role was pretty simplistic. During this time, you had a pretty large impact on the game as an ADC. You were able to earn leads early on in the game, and then use it to your advantage to buy items faster than your opponent and effectively be able to work with your team to close out in a victory. This would continue on with minimal nerfs to the ADC role until that one fateful season.
Leading up to this season’s start, Riot Games felt that the ADC and Marksman role was a little too overpowered with their items and in their current meta. From my understanding and memory, they felt that the ADC role was becoming too reliant for teams and that they wanted to diversify and hit the role with some nerfs. Although their intentions were well-meaning, the end result was a marksman role that was completely gutted and changed to the point that marksman ADCs were not being played Bot Lane hardly at all.
All ADCs had their base stats changed and base AD was forfeited in favor of AD per level. This means that during the early game they were significantly weaker than their old selves. During this time, Riot also nerfed the health regen a marksman would usually rely on for sustain in lane. Fleet Footwork was also nerfed during this time as well as removing the Critical Strike (Crit) Chance element it once had before. During the early patches, they also made large changes to all Crit items and not only made these items more expensive but also lowered the AD on some and adjusted the Crit on one of the biggest ADC items: Infinity Edge. Infinity Edge used to be a second item pick for most ADCs that wanted to build the extra damage with added Crit. The item became too expensive with not enough AD and Crit to be an effective second or even first item for ADCs.
After all of these changes, it became difficult to feel impactful during the game when you were not able to deal damage effectively. As a result, traditional marksmen were scrapped and players in the Bot Lane would instead choose champions like Vlad, Ryze, Heimerdinger, Mordekaiser, and other champions who would scale faster than a traditional Marksman would during these nerfs. The state of the game called for champions that could pressure Scuttle Crab control, take objectives like Baron faster, and in general, have much shorter game times.
With the immediate and relentless backlash at the ADC changes, Riot kept the changes but would roll back a little bit and adjust on a champion-to-champion basis after the initial changes in Season 8. Despite these changes, the marksman role would continue to feel clunky and underwhelming. It wasn’t until the middle of the season with Patch 9.3 where Riot would revert some of the item changes and reduce the gold on quite a few Crit items. They also changed Infinity Edge back to its original state and made nerfs from that one point instead. They also changed Stormrazor to have stronger Crit elements. Although it took a while, change did come and Riot was able to listen to the players’ feelings and comments and amend some of the changes they had made.
Although there were changes made to revert some of their ADC changes, the games in this season were still played extremely fast-paced. ADC players still felt that because it takes a long time to scale and that when given the choice, they felt it’s more impactful to play other Mages in the Bot Lane. The state of the game at this point was definitely better than in the last two, but players felt like it was still an underwhelming role. This was also the season that Fasting Senna was born. In Patch 10.3, Senna was hit with some changes to her AD power and her passive which lowered the drop rate of souls when she killed a minion and raised it to a 25% drop rate if someone kills a minion near her. She was able to gain gold from stacks and did not have to rely on farming minions to become strong in the late game. This strategy was so successful that typical champions that were played in the ADC role like Jinx, Caitlyn, and others found laning difficult and less effective. This type of strategy was extremely prominent in professional play especially when I would tune in to watch the LCS Broadcasts in the previous splits. Looking to replicate pro players, this type of meta became frequent in solo queues afterward.
Some of the biggest changes for this season were item, jungle, and ranked changes. Although there weren't any massive changes to the ADC role like back in Season 8, the new items helped change the meta and created new avenues for players: Galeforce, Immortal Shieldbow, and Kraken Slayer. These items helped shape the role for the better and have led to a slow upward climb to being more relevant now in Season 12.
Today, ADCs are a little bit more impactful, and it feels better to play the game in this role than in the last few years. I really enjoy the big three Mythic items that have become commonplace in the ADC role’s repertoire and ever since these were introduced last season, I’ve found them fun to use and enjoy that it feels like you get a real choice in how you play and how you adapt to the enemy team. The slump that the ADC role kind of fell into in the past few seasons, seems to be making a resurgence within the last year.
Most recently, the Teleport Summoner changes have worked out for the ADCs’ advantage. Top Lane up until this point had the ability to teleport to a deep ward in the Bot Lane bush and be able to punish the team that’s pushing. It created a high level of threat for Bot laners and made having Teleport a highly prioritized summoner spell for your team.
In the recent 12.1 Patch Notes, Teleport has been adjusted to having a flat 360-second cooldown at all levels. Teleport can now only be used on allied towers making it more effective for just going back to lane and emphasizing having players duel more and fight 1v1s. Regular Teleport transforms into Unleashed Teleport after 14 minutes which allows you to then be able to teleport to your towers, minions, and wards. The cooldown goes down to 240 seconds once it has transformed. At this point in the game, you’ll be able to move around the map and help your team with your impactful teleport. I think this change has felt better while playing in all the lanes and allows you to duel with your lane opponent more rather than relying on ganking for advantages.
The de-evolution of the ADC role has been one that has extended over the past 4 years and has been tumultuous. It finally feels like the ADC role is potentially on an upswing and I feel I can be useful once again. I actually enjoy playing typical Marksman champions during games like Miss Fortune, Jinx, and Ashe. Only time will tell if there will be even more changes that will occur in the future.
Thanks for joining me on this history lesson today, and hopefully you can have fun playing ADCs in their current state in the meta too.
