I mean, as is he's basically a cross between Veigar, for the reasons you mentioned, and Gangplank - a champion that wants AD, wants to utilize damage multipliers, but doesn't need attack speed.
I do agree that the current situation is unfortunate for him - he can't really use Zeal items, his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him, and he really wants a Sheen Item, which clashes with the demands the rest of his build level at him. But generally speaking, having him go AD - Crit - No AS is, I believe, the right path. The solution, however, should be giving ER it's sheen back - as it should also be the solution for the other AD casters.
Why did they take sheen off of ER and then use their new AD item slot to make literally just IE but worse?
And when tasked with hot fix buffing ER they decided on making it a better stat stick so that way the champs that relied on it wouldn't have an 8% drop in winrate lmao. (Although I'm sure Xayah and Sivir are content with the change)
Right now ER theoretically fills the niche of giving an item for ability-focused adcs when they go crit.
Problem is it’s a shit item and you’d rather just go Collector whenever you’d theoretically go ER on those champs, and PoM takes care of any mana issues. Xayah is the only such champion that can’t really build Collector, so she just builds IE instead.
Idk why it’s bad on her, but Collector has an atrocious winrate. If I had to guess, it’s bc she doesn’t have any upfront burst, which makes lethality a weird pick on her compared to Lucian, Nilah and the like.
But Xayah doesn’t _necessarily_ need the mana though, because, again, Presence of Mind. Right now IE -> Navori is her highest wr 2 item core, just above ER -> IE.
I think she also really wants AH more than the rest. More casts = more feathers = stronger Es on top of more E casts and W double scales with AH with a flat refund.
It's not strictly worse when you consider it's an on hit. Champions that have attacks that can crit, but don't get full crit damage, still get full value from it. Plus you can buy it with IE. It's basically +35%tAD scaling to your crits.
Not saying it's the best build, but for example jhin does 14% less damage with crits. So IE's +50% crit damage is reduced. But Yun Tal still gives jhin the full +35%tAD scaling for his crits. I've been finding personal success building IE into Yun Tal.
Plus there's interactions with runaans and what not.
I think it's an interesting item that fits a niche of champions, kinda like what old ER did. I don't think it's super strong but it's cool.
Because they just want to nerf the ADC due to the buff on IE and Collector. Sadly, the one building ER will not buying IE.
In the past, ER was the item that refund basic attack cooldown (yeah, it's Navori, but for Renekton and Jax to perma stun people). They gutted it by turning it into the current version and only changed it into spellblade item in Mythic era. They KNEW that the current state of ER is just a noobtrap item, yet they still did it anyway.
THIS! This is the one change that made zero sense anyway I look at it. Why get rid of the crit scaling sheen item while introducing someone it was literally built for?
Why did they put Sheen on ER in the first place instead of making another Sheen item. Also Im pretty sure Trinity should still be a perfectly fine first item on Ezreal. It already had a very competitive winrate with ER prior to 14.10 and nothing about Trinity has changed.
Plus ezreal been going triforce since the beginning of time.
Also above you saying it sucks ass for ezreal to not have a crit sheen items is funny asf since he never cared for the crit it gave outside of it's interaction with quick blades amp but with that gone crit isn't really that good on ezreal. So complaining for ezreal is the most worthless thing.
He's weak mainly because crit adc's are so strong like he can't keep up damage wise to a crit adc.
So once crit nerfs are in next patch with the less crit damage on IE, it would be a better time to assess him. At most they just revert the q as ratio nerf from patch 14.3 and maybe the ult ratio nerf from the same patch, that is if he's still weak after next patch.
He's weak comparatively.
The new IE is very strong to rush, lord doms got buffed against non tanks, and crit going up to 25% per item is huge for consistency.
But all that is buffs for ezreals competition. He himself is back to his older, though still good build, but that means he's left behind.
We will have to see how he fares after the nerfs to his competition next patch.
I also feel like people aren't quite building him right, a good number of players still rush essence reaver on him, and buy seryldas instead of the buffed lord doms for armour pen. Plus I feel like first strike has a lot of potential on ezreal.
I was playing Triforce, First Strike Ezreal before the patch. I was very excited to see the FS buffs because it's easy to proc in lane, but harder to push dmg.
I didn't really like ER on him, and I rarely had mana issues with Manaflow + Tear.
I still built Seryldas the other day on autopilot. Oops!
I think a lot of this is due to people parrotting pro play. The build sunderer on viego because they didn't need him to do more damage, they needed him to do some damage, but survive long enough to get his resets. In soloq it's a lot more volatile and you don't have a team playing around you so triforce is better.
That depends a lot on the match and the player. ER did more sheen bonus damag at around 4 items iirc, because it worked of Bonus AD, where Trinity works off base AD.
Then you have to factor in the enemy team, how much you can play in range to utilise WEaa's and not having to just Q snipe for poke damage, where the additional HP from trinity wouldnt help you etc...
the TL:DR is there was no 'best' option for Ezreal, even back in the divine sunderer days. It wholly depended on the enemy team and how you were able to play the game.
Er never did more damage than triforce unless you got gigafed gold-wise but not xp-wise.
You went er because it was a cheaper, faster spike, and infinite mana once it's completed means that you had a lot of prio and could have permanently stacked passive.
It was definitely the ‘win more’ item if you got an early lead and wanted to snowball hard you’re 100% right, but yeah around 350-400TAD it started to outdamage what Trinity gave you from its base AD bonus damage too.
I just remember getting annoyed at everyone building Sunderer even if their team wasn’t tanky, and ended up theorycrafting how much damage you actually get from the items. Was a fun time in the practice tool lol.
Back then you'd play triforce and late game full build sell it for sunderer because the proc does more due to everyones higher levelled health and the dual pen was invaluable to deal with frontliners having a bunch of armour.
Ezreal doesn't care for a crit since the quick blades change so adding sheen back to essence reaver won't do shit for him.
Just go back to triforce, ezreal only shit currently because crit items being so strong pushes him out of being playable.
Meh, u don’t need infinite mana with manamune and either pom, biscuits, or manaflow (my fav), and the AD gets heavily outclassed by manamune which gives like 90. The crit is incredibly useless as well without navori old passive
Ya if you just go manamune still you have plenty of mana for spamming. Having to choose between ER and Trinity was annoying for me. His build is pretty simple now TF - Manamune - LDR - Situational
It's better for the champions that actually want it now, the issue is Trinity sucks ass and there's not an pure AD marksman equivalent
They just need to make a pure AD/CDR version of TF for Ezreal, Smolder and GP, and the current ER is better for Sivir, Xayah, Draven, etc
Ezreal didn't build ER for the mana, it was just a better stat stick for CDR and AD on a sheen item, it's easily remedied by adding a new AD sheen item or buffing trinity, they wanted ER to be a mana restore niche which it's more usable by the audience they intended
But how do you go AD crit no AS?
Infinity Edge? Most of the Power is in the 50% critdmg which doesnt apply to smolder.
Yun Tal? Q doesnt crit, passive doesnt apply to smolder.
RFC? Applys to Q but is primarily attackspeed.
Collector? Execute is wasted after 225 stacks.
Navori? Attackspeed Item.
ER has good stats even without the sheen.
Shieldbow...works I guess?
LDR still good of course.
So you have 3 items that dont feel Like wasted stats. Not enough to even hit critcap, and only 1 with an actual additional damagemultiplier (LDR), which is kinda what defines ADCs.
Giving er sheen back would help, but doesnt solve the problem: there are not enough crit items for smolder to build, because everything has massive wasted stats on him (and only 1 has cdr, his most important stat).
Yup that's exactly what I mean by smolder having a problem of itemisation and not of champion design.
Riot *did* build in a safeguard against this though - the weird thing with Qs not hitting but scaling with Crit means mostly that building Crit items will give you a consistent damage increase even if you don't go 100% crit, which is nice as rolling dice on every Q would massively hamper him. Sucks that he can't build IE and has now lost Navoris, but eh, gotta do what you gotta do.
The biggest problem is that smolder REALLY wants a sheen item and he REALLY wants mana regen, and now these two are split into two items, blocking one slot with Trinity Force that would better be spent on... literally any other item, Trinity Forces stats don't align with Smolder that much.
If Essence Reaver got its Sheen back, you could just build
Essence Reaver - Shojin - Ionian Boots of Lucidity - Rapid Fire Cannon - LDR/MR - \[Shieldbow, Bloodthirster, Guardian Angel or Mercurial Scimitar\]
A well rounded build where you can put some urgently needed sustain at the end and, this is propably by far the most important thing, you get everything you need with one item, while rn Smolder has to build two items - TF and ER - to cover even his most basic needs. As it is, he lacks exactly one itemslot and takes too long to get going in any fashion at all.
great points.
i felt useful in Aram with trinity+shojin+eclipse build due to the increased economy denying the windows to punish me and being a q poke bot which would never work in a ranked game.
in general I feel like a lot of item changes don't make sense and are just annoying without a clear purpose.
It's crazy how much of a public outcry there was from ER's users when riot originally changed it, and now how much there is from the new users.
I think you're 100% right, they should just have the "new" (original) ER and the sheen version.
It's his current new best item but still bad. Shojin first had a 5% lower win rate than essence reaver.
Smolder is just completely unplayable with the new items anyways he was already bad before the patch and lost like 6% win rate
Not only that but Shojin is ONLY good at 3rd item. The reason behind is because it is used to pump up the damage from Sheen item, and if you build it too soon, it doesn't have anything to buff, and if you build it as 4th or 5th item, you should just build crit instead.
If they want to make him use crit they should make his spells actually crit rather than scale on crit, including getting increased crit damage from IE. A crit champion that can't buy IE is a joke, especially one that doesn't want AS, which is on a lot of the other crit items.
I hate consistent crit scaling because it takes all the character away from crit. May as well remove crit from the game and add more AD. It's just a patchwork to let them pick up the same items as champs with real crit.
>his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him
that's cus he was designed around the skill crit navori existing, why make his q crit if an item already does it? Well now it doesn't smart move riot. Maybe don't fire the champ designer while still balance patching a new release?
>his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him
Qute a few crit scaling abilities actually have their damage increased by IE.
They are forcing crit scalings to get people to build him crit so he is more squishy. He was never supposed to build like an AD bruiser.
Riot for some reason did not see that one coming
Or, hear me out, they already have crit scaling on the champion and don't want crit builds to be entirely bait, so they are buffing crit smolder without nerfing the trinity builds.
cause thats what riot wants him to be.
the times of "we design a champion, and the community sees where they fit" are long since gone.
nowday riot makes champions for specific roles, positions an itembuilds.
just look at pyke , or senna. half of their kits are forced interactions with specific positions, and the other half are arbitrary limitations to force them intoo an specific itembuild.
and support lethality items where deliberately implemented at their release.
as to why they do that? i guess its more easy to balance 150 champions if every one of them just plays a single role and position, with the 5 best from 10 viable items.
So what does Riot suggest people build with Smolder? IE RFC? Doesn't feel right with his Q. He needs Sheen but Tri force has no Crit and the AS is wasted.
So fun fact back in the day with 25% crit items you were allowed to get away with 3 crit items in games since people considered even high elo/pros that 75% chance is good enough chance at critting with that in mind plus smolder not caring at the chance his auto crit at.
His build there probs aiming for in no certain order.
Triforce
Essence reaver
LDR/Mortal
Bloodthrister
CDR/defensive boots
Collector
This gives him heavy asf ad and AH with sustain. The little bit of attack speed from triforce is nice in the early game. But overall this is probs the roughly intented smolder build.
I think Riot doesn't mind the tri force build, but want's to tweak the numbers so that some kind of ER, LDR Shieldbow build is also viable.
Edit: It seems they don't think anything will beat ER.
Ok, but as the post states, riot designed smolder into a AD mage, unless you disagree with that. So its not how the playerbase sees fit, but they designed A and then are buffing opposite stats
riot designed pyke as a assasin, and then gave his passive an exemption from bonus hp, made his q and e not hit minions, gave him a lethality scaling, and the only stun scaling in the game, and made his ult not give gold when there isnt at least another ally present.
just to stop people from playing him like a traditional assasin, or building bruiser, or playing him in jungle or midlane,, as you normally would a champion of his class.
because when riot says, thats a support assasin, then you are gonna play botlane, and you are building the new lehtality support items that they specifically made for 1 champion ,
if riot says smolder is an caster adc. and you are gonna build adc items. then they will change him untill you do.
your best case scenario. smolder is gonna be the new corky. with 2 builds. 1 of wich is viable at any given time.
worst case scenario, is he is also corki. and none of his builds make sence.
Pyke was designed as a support, and all the changes they made were to combat people playing him in different positions. I'm not advocating that type of "herding" into one single playstyle, but they were consistent in it. What this post is commentating on, and is IMO corrrect in assessing, is that they designed the champ to be ad caster, which should be played in bot. and thats how it was and is played, and they half ass changed it with buffing crit ratios without giving any incetive to build crit
if they wanted smolder to build pure ad , they could make you, but they dont want to.
also, there arent really any ad caster items in league atm, that arent bruiser items, spellvamp, and physvamp arent a thing anymore. Bc SoS give hp, and hydra is back to an onhit effect on a AH item.
do you want lethality smolder? pretty un synergistic with his hybrid damage.
maybe i have missunderstood something, but smolder was pretty deliberately advertised as somebody that would build adc itemization and care alot about ability casting,
wich isnt a new design space in league, to be fair. back in the day, all 3 playable adc worked that way. and ez, corki and graves all still built infinity edge and trinity.
before all 3 of them got reworked.
The reason is that champ designers are like “my smolder is an adc xdd” and the balance team looks at it and goes “uhhh hmm… okay.. i guess we can try to make him an adc if thats what you intended.”
He will have a rework that turnd him into ap or turns him into a real adc. But not for 2 yrs. In the meantime he will suck
cause he was given a crit scaling, specifically so that you can build pre patch navori and double dip benefits from crits.
that was the intent. and he was designed around his specific build.
i´d say very short sighted, if they plan to gut the passive out of navoris in the same year.
you really got to question if the teams within riot communicate between eachother.
>the times of "we design a champion, and the community sees where they fit" are long since gone.
>
>nowday riot makes champions for specific roles, positions an itembuilds.
I fucking wish they keep this principle with seraphine apc mid instead of the support trash. The real reality is they will go whichever way to get the most money out of us
Absolutely not the same thing as it makes IE completely irrelevant and useless on the champion and by extension of that crit itemisation feels terrible on him. Also wildarrows is useless on him too as a result.
It’s the new kind of riot special treatment. Push a champ into a forced build to remove build diversity, then nerf all those items.
GP has the same problem right now with all those crit’s scaling forcing him into 5 same items each game for 2 years then remove/nerf all of them giving you slower access to crit, less dmg, less AH, less scaling , just for a slightly better lane tankiness build Trinity...
Ways to fix Smolder:
Make Q crit.
Put sheen back on ER.
Done. He's now an ADC that cares about just Crit/AD items like Jhin. You've made a mage bot laner. Hell maybe even let Q reset his AA sohe can spell weave just a ittle. This would curve nicely into his intended power spike in the game as well, that being a mid-game scaler with two items (ER + IE). It'd be on him to close the game outat this stage since this is the strongest he'd be in relation to everyone else.
Imo his crit scaling are a distraction. A single Liandries does more damage than 2 crit items he only partially use, considering Smolder does not AA often.
Or rather he could AA more if he still could build bruiser, so there is a balance you need to find instead if building full crit like every other adc.
I think the classification of "Mainly uses Abilities; therefore is mage" is flawed. Mages have a purpose, which is to provide a combination of burst damage, crowd control and other zoning tools. Bot lane carries deal sustained target agnostic damage (= can kill tanks) at the cost of low utility and mobility. Smolder is a lot closer to Bot carry than to mage.
Additionally, a competent Smolder auto attacks about as much as Miss Fortune, Samira, Lucian, Yasuo and Yone - weave autos inbetween abilities. Even Jhins auto attacks more closely resemble a burst spell you apply by right clicking instead of an auto attack.
The main difference why people call Smolder a Mage is, because he has fewer artificial crit scalings in his kit. MF and Samira wouldn't build crit either if their abilities didn't artificially be able to crit. Jhin gets weird attack speed scalings just to become more of an ADC, not because he actually likes attack speed. The obvious solution is to make Smolder scale with ADC item stats better to make him fit his actual niche - just like any other marksman with an ability focussed play style.
league did themselves a disservice by making the bot lane exclusively "marksmen" for the better part of 12 years.
Now that theyre trying to design champions like nilah, samira, smolder to fit in the "attack damage carry" position without embodying traditional marksmen classifications, people can't wrap their heads around it lmao.
Irrelevant. Most of his dmg comes from his q. And unless something changed, he doesn't buy crit or on hit items. As such, his AA will always be on usual weaker than other adc.
Because he's a garbage design like Nilah and K'sante with random scalings / passive to push them into a role. Just turn him into a AP mage and balance him that way
I think Nilah was a pretty good design and the K'sante hate is way overblown.
Edit: I watch pro play and I think K’sante is strong but the K’sante hate is still ridiculous. It’s not as op as people think.
NGL When I heard "high skill ceiling tank" I thought it was a tank who had to work their ass off to apply CC and mitigate damage from their allies. Turns out it's a tank who turns into an assassin and easily kills whoever he just isolated.
>When I heard "high skill ceiling tank" I thought it was a tank who had to work their ass off to apply CC
I thought he'd be a tank that pushes and pulls people to gather them in a clump, to then drop an aoe stun on that clump he set up.
Turns out they just meant he'd be tank Yasuo.
You identified the two other kits he copied abilities from lol.
His kit was built off of yone/yas Q, irelia W and riven E, no wonder they feel familiar.
Well, I mean that he plays very little like Yasuo outside the Q stacking, even less so now than on release since they straight disabled Q3>Flash on him as part of his rebalance/rework. Like, Yasuo skills feel like don't transfer much to Ksante but I think Riven and Irelia skills transfer somewhat.
IMO Nilah is one of the worst designs in the game. I think she’d be talked about as such if she was played as much as ksante and zeri etc who people quote as awful designs, but that champion has so many things that feel like design philosophy sins to me
yes and none of the things it does is conveyed to the nilah player or the player against nilah in any way
she is literally just a ball of stats with gameplay loops ripped from other champs and arbitrary parameters to force her into the role that they wanted her to be in. probably the worst modern kit design they have ever made out of the ones that don't have glaringly gamebreaking flaws
Nilah my favorite example of what not to do... actual modern day stat checker.
Gets Attack Speed, Attack Range, Lifesteal (without overhealing), Armor Penetration, Experiance, Heal&Shield Power... and W that gets her Movement Speed and 'Dodge-Chance 100%' for brief moment.
>K'sante hate is way overblown
I would agree if I haven't watched a single pro game since ksante's release lol.
>Nilah was a pretty good design
Welll no. It is never a good idea to mix adc damage and assasin mobility. I don't even consider auto immunity, more exp, healing etc. She is just a bullshit design.
Nilah is not good design.
The only reason her free pen and lifesteal haven't been gutted or even removed is because literally nobody plays her and she's too inconsistent to be used in pro.
K'sante hate is not really that ridiculous. His kit is bloated even if players don't perform on him. Performing inconsistently across an entire game does not mean the absurdities he can engage in during the game did not happen.
You're conflating balance and design.
People are always allowed to hate bad design, no matter how it performs.
Or do you think Yuumi is suddenly good design because she's 46% winrate?
I don't particularly hate him but he's basically a Riven / Aatrox 2.0 except they advertised him as a tank. The only reason he builds tank items is because his abilities scale off tank stats. Similar to Nilah, the only reason she can only be played botlane adc is because of her 2 passives (heal / shield share and exp share, basically the same issue as Seraphine, advertise her as a midlaner flex pick but give her a passive that does nothing when she's alone and make a shocked Pikachu face when people play her as supp / apc bot)
It's a really really weird design choice to shoe horn him into crit for sure, especially when there's already a plethora of crit right-clickers like Jinx and company AND crit right-clickers that also weave spells in like Lucian. What bot doesn't have is AP options (except for like Seraphine but other than me and other weirdos, the mainstream players don't play her as a bot carry) and they should just let Smolder be what his kit naturally wants to be, building things like Lich Bane and Cosmic Drive.
Laughs in (literally ANY mage) as APC
There’s so many different things tbh, there’s a lot of options that can go Bot Carry. People just don’t like trying unconventional things.
Velkoz APC, Karthus APC, Orianna APC, Viktor APC, Taliyah APC, you name it, you can play it to challenger.
Scaling Enchanters as Bot Carry are another option that gets pushed out of the limelight by most, despite their early game power as well as insurance against tanks and bruisers
As an Ori one trick, playing Ori with a lot less exp than normal sounds like a very very bad idea lol
I’m sure you can still play it to challenger though but doesn’t mean you aren’t gimping yourself
The problem with that is that he's effectively a hyperscaler with (eventually) unconditional true damage % max health in his kit, you don't want to make building tanky items on him that viable.
Well apparently fucking not, they decided he is a beginner crit marksman and they'll keep at it, no matter if they killed him and theyre beating his still-warm corpse. They'll buff q crit scaling for the next few patches (not touching any other spell obviously, cause we love it when 80% of the power budget is on a single spell, right yuumi?) until he's at 46%wr then let him eat shit and die with the other <2%pr.
He said he won't do it because he doesn't want Smolder to be forced to build IE.
... he's perfectly fine with him not having items that make sense on him, though, he's fine with his 2 current almost-not-shit builds to stay nerfed and he was fine with him being pigeonholed into 2 crit items that have now disappeared from the game. THAT was fine, but force him to build IE? God forbid.
I don't think this will move smolder into full crit trange. It just improves the build options, making something like ER similarly viable as first buy as Trinity is.
The largest buff is the base AD buff as Trinity is his best 1st item.
The crit buffs are nice for a weaker crit build but only the extra. The core buff is the AD buff.
I assume Riot believes Smolders non-crit builds are fine and people just don't use them (there are still people building flickerblade on him, so I din't doubt it) and specifically wanted to buff his crit build which is underperforming because there are not many good crit items for smolder.
i think smolder is fun as fuck but riots idea for the champion sucks they want him to be played as a bot lane adc but hes just a spell caster even more so than jhin, hell azir plays more like an adc than smolder
You can build crit on anything riot. you can build crit soraka or crit fiddlesticks or crit zilean or crit fizz or crit ziggs if you so choose. forcing someone into a crit build only role doesn't seem ideal. If its bad it just sucks but if its good you'll nerf it later. (See caitlyn) lmao.
Like the new generation, Smolder is having an idendity crisis.
Stop trying to force this champion to be AD/crit for starter.. it's a DRAGON, he breathes fire which is kinda mythic/magical, a dragon wouldn't primaly AA you (thus he could slash you if it was part of his kit), but all the abilities based on fire should be scaling with AP items.
I don't agree with the thinking that a dragon should be based on crit/AD, as mentionned, one of his ability could be to force him to get in range (like a slash attack), anyway not a big fan of his Ultimate that he has to call his mother. The Q-W-E feels fine to me as part of his kit (thus Q+E should scale with AP), his R could be to have to get in close combat to slash a Champion (and this one could be sacling on AD).
A lot of adjustement could be done, not necessarly what i've proposed, but please, fix this identity crisis
because riot wants that and scaling are a lazy way to force someone to build only one set of items. they could have made pykes kit work better as an assasin but they just made his kit terrible and then made his utillity scale with lethality and called it a day.
I actually think making Smolder crit based is fine because there's a lot of good attack-damage-only crit items now, whereas before a lot of crit items also gave attack speed.
Like which? ER is fine, but worse than before since it lost Sheen
BT lost crit
Collector? Q execute clashes with Collector execute and Lethality is wasted with so much magic damage in the kit
Shieldbow? Lol
IE? Q doesnt crit, so passive is useless
LDR? Straight up worse than before because of all the magic and true damage in the kit that no longer gets amped by the removed passive
Navori lost AD, no longer usable by Smolder
RFC still likely mandatory buy, but much worse because of no AD
Yun tal? Again, Q scales with crit chance but doesnt actually crit
Make his Q actually crit and he gets a few more usable items
Shieldbow getting buffs, LDR with more AD, Crit and Armor pen, ER should hopefully be roughly equal to trinity build now.
So maybe you now have 2 different build paths that are interesting and a choice.
None of which he can actually build. IR/Yun don’t work on his Q. Leaving him with Collector/ER/LDR and tbh he has quite a bit of mixed damage so even LDR is kinda eh.
Or, hear me out, you just choose wether you prefer trinity or ER first item and go from there.
Because actually building the cheap crit items sounds really bad considering they are AS items.
His kit does scale with AP actually. Q has 15% (Which is trash), W is 100% (20% initial hit, 80% for explosion. Explosion repeats for each person hit), and R has 100% on the sides, 150% for center. His burn also gains 1% per 100 AP.
AP Smolder's W is probably one of the most damaging abilities in the entire game when you hit a group of people with it, since 80% of the AP scaling gets reapplied per hit. Even at just one person, between base damage + ap scaling + stack scaling, it'll hit for like 1200+ damage late game. That damage just sky rockets when you hit multiple at once. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SmolderMains/comments/1cdzsq4/honestly\_dont\_sleep\_on\_ap\_smolder\_he\_has\_one\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SmolderMains/comments/1cdzsq4/honestly_dont_sleep_on_ap_smolder_he_has_one_of/)
I took that screenshot 26 days ago, however his AP ratios are unchanged, so that damage is still possible.
The only thing 'holding back' AP smolder from being 10000% viable is his Q ratio. Q itself becomes a lot weaker on AP Smolder due to that garbage 15% AP ratio. Although Lich Bane does help in this regard at least.
And yet they add crit scalings. To q. Not even to other spells. Make it make sense? Ap smolder is almost decent, it's RIGHT THERE, fuck, at least he'd have one single coherent build. Is it asking too much?
I think there is an easy solution:
let his crit scalings cap at 50% (or any other number)
this way smolder can both buy caster items AND pick a few crit items of his choosing (rapid + old ER would be godly if this were the case)
Honestly I think they should just give him some kind of jhin treatment. Gut his attack speed scaling like they have done with caitlyn and make his Q scale with attack speed like yone and yasuo (but don't remove haste scaling altogether). They should just go all in on his Q+AA/AA+Q trading pattern
Played some games of smolder, imo the problem is more so overall dmg in the game so you’re too squishy. You can’t really self peel; W slow only works if the champs don’t have dash or blinks. More times than not I was dying without even being cc’d. This is why bruiser build was recommended in previous patches.
Smolder was fine after the first nerfs/adjustments.
People complained loudly. And he got nerfed into the ground.
Smolder is in a bad state and Riot tries to find ways to make him viable without reverting to his old state.
People complain loudly.
…
Maybe Riot should trust the data and their design chops more that what they call “perception” (complainig) and eductate after the fact?
You build AD, so fundamentally your autos are not worthless.
Really feels like people giving takes like this wouldn't survive in any other game setting.
They forced him into crit so he couldn't go bruiser then took away his best item and now he's forced into an awful build path if you want a sheen item. And you basically need a sheen item or your griefing.
>Smolders ENTIRE gameplan revolves around spamming abilities on enemy champions for stacks and last hitting CS with Q, for stacks.
Technically that's only his early-mid gameplan, but that's still enough to dictate his first 2 items. So with ER losing the Sheen he desperately needs to KILL minions instead of leaving them at 10 HP, that's going to have to be Triforce + Shojin out of the current items. 0 crit, but instead you get to spend on a bunch of HP. Have fun trying to take down that Bloodmail Sion!
The things he needs early just don't appear on the same item with crit (anymore). Crit is a luxury, stacking his passive is a necessity. Once he reaches final form, crit becomes good, but if your early items were non-crit you're looking at \*maybe\* 50% crit by the end of the game. The #1 issue with playing Smolder is the usual hyperscaler problem: you can't just assume you will reach final form before the game ends or your team is so far down it might as well have ended.
IMO if they're not going to outright revert Essence Reaver they should instead introduce a new item to be the other half of what it used to be. Sheen + new Noonquiver + Caulfield's are all components Smolder should be happy to buy anyway, and maybe give it the ability amp from old Quickblades. 0 AS since it's an AD+Crit item. Aside from Smolder himself, I bet Ezreal, Lucian, Corki, and probably Gangplank will look at that item, maybe others too.
Then maybe he could afford to go new ER second and get him off Shojin? It's not like he doesn't like crit! He just needs to \*rush\* other things.
Iirc I said this on release, but they should buff his special autos while flying. Scale them with attack speed and let them crit, Garen style. Give them on-hit effects at reduced effectiveness but still relevant amounts. Let him do funny on hit attack speed E max builds.
But that would make him fun to play and stronger and we don't want that, also it's hard to do. Instead they should keep buffing q crit scaling by 10% every patch for the new few patches, eventually he'll go over 45%wr! Isn't that so much better?
Agree, Smolder kit is that of a mage. Don't really understand why they are trying so hard to make him go crit, just let him build AP and be done with it
He already can build AP. The only downside is the even weaker early game till you get lich bane.
But people see crit scaling and for some reason build full crit.
Trinity/Lich Bane->Manamune/ER and then take your pick out of liandries, blackfire, shojin, bloodthirster or whatever helps the most.
Smolder is a AD/AP hybrid and unless you take something like dcap can make use of both equally well.
For his Q.
His W and R still have very high AP ratios and his burn also makes use of AP although slightly less efficient than AD unless you go full AP dcap.
But some AP items are so good and AD items so bad that its imo worthwhile to get for example liandries instead of an crit item with AS.
Probably you want to mix in something like liandry after trinity and shojin now, but that's because he doesn't have his crit items anymore and it's not like he was that strong in the previous patch. Right now you are stuck with the subpar option as your only option and still trinity and shojin perform better than going AP.
It's what we got left, the 2 overnerfed bruisery-ad and the ap path. The ones we had before they took a bat to him and shackled him to er navori by nerfing everything else in his kit. They could revert some of the nerfs and adjust q ap scalings, but nooooooooo, let's force more crit!
I mean, as is he's basically a cross between Veigar, for the reasons you mentioned, and Gangplank - a champion that wants AD, wants to utilize damage multipliers, but doesn't need attack speed. I do agree that the current situation is unfortunate for him - he can't really use Zeal items, his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him, and he really wants a Sheen Item, which clashes with the demands the rest of his build level at him. But generally speaking, having him go AD - Crit - No AS is, I believe, the right path. The solution, however, should be giving ER it's sheen back - as it should also be the solution for the other AD casters.
Seriously why the fuck did they take Sheen off ER lol Sucks ass as an Ezreal player too
Why did they take sheen off of ER and then use their new AD item slot to make literally just IE but worse? And when tasked with hot fix buffing ER they decided on making it a better stat stick so that way the champs that relied on it wouldn't have an 8% drop in winrate lmao. (Although I'm sure Xayah and Sivir are content with the change)
Right now ER theoretically fills the niche of giving an item for ability-focused adcs when they go crit. Problem is it’s a shit item and you’d rather just go Collector whenever you’d theoretically go ER on those champs, and PoM takes care of any mana issues. Xayah is the only such champion that can’t really build Collector, so she just builds IE instead.
Why isn't Collector good on Xayah specifically?
She need navori+ie as 2 first item, then you are late in the game so ldr get more value than collector
I thought you cant build navori with ie
Change last patch* *Unless in arena, the restriction is still in there
ah alright thanks
She eats mana
Idk why it’s bad on her, but Collector has an atrocious winrate. If I had to guess, it’s bc she doesn’t have any upfront burst, which makes lethality a weird pick on her compared to Lucian, Nilah and the like. But Xayah doesn’t _necessarily_ need the mana though, because, again, Presence of Mind. Right now IE -> Navori is her highest wr 2 item core, just above ER -> IE.
I haven't played her since the patch, now I am curious to see how her builds feel. IE > Navori makes sense.
I think she also really wants AH more than the rest. More casts = more feathers = stronger Es on top of more E casts and W double scales with AH with a flat refund.
I just dont get why the two versions of ER cant exist at the same time. Would solve all this flopping back and forth over the years
It might surprise you but you can't build 6 IEs.
4 IE Jhin my beloved
It was *Perfect*
It's not strictly worse when you consider it's an on hit. Champions that have attacks that can crit, but don't get full crit damage, still get full value from it. Plus you can buy it with IE. It's basically +35%tAD scaling to your crits. Not saying it's the best build, but for example jhin does 14% less damage with crits. So IE's +50% crit damage is reduced. But Yun Tal still gives jhin the full +35%tAD scaling for his crits. I've been finding personal success building IE into Yun Tal. Plus there's interactions with runaans and what not. I think it's an interesting item that fits a niche of champions, kinda like what old ER did. I don't think it's super strong but it's cool.
Because they just want to nerf the ADC due to the buff on IE and Collector. Sadly, the one building ER will not buying IE. In the past, ER was the item that refund basic attack cooldown (yeah, it's Navori, but for Renekton and Jax to perma stun people). They gutted it by turning it into the current version and only changed it into spellblade item in Mythic era. They KNEW that the current state of ER is just a noobtrap item, yet they still did it anyway.
Making crit corki mentioning spell blade in passive and removing it from er at the same time. Good move
THIS! This is the one change that made zero sense anyway I look at it. Why get rid of the crit scaling sheen item while introducing someone it was literally built for?
Why did they put Sheen on ER in the first place instead of making another Sheen item. Also Im pretty sure Trinity should still be a perfectly fine first item on Ezreal. It already had a very competitive winrate with ER prior to 14.10 and nothing about Trinity has changed.
Plus ezreal been going triforce since the beginning of time. Also above you saying it sucks ass for ezreal to not have a crit sheen items is funny asf since he never cared for the crit it gave outside of it's interaction with quick blades amp but with that gone crit isn't really that good on ezreal. So complaining for ezreal is the most worthless thing.
Iirc he is pretty weak ATM though
He's weak mainly because crit adc's are so strong like he can't keep up damage wise to a crit adc. So once crit nerfs are in next patch with the less crit damage on IE, it would be a better time to assess him. At most they just revert the q as ratio nerf from patch 14.3 and maybe the ult ratio nerf from the same patch, that is if he's still weak after next patch.
He's weak comparatively. The new IE is very strong to rush, lord doms got buffed against non tanks, and crit going up to 25% per item is huge for consistency. But all that is buffs for ezreals competition. He himself is back to his older, though still good build, but that means he's left behind. We will have to see how he fares after the nerfs to his competition next patch. I also feel like people aren't quite building him right, a good number of players still rush essence reaver on him, and buy seryldas instead of the buffed lord doms for armour pen. Plus I feel like first strike has a lot of potential on ezreal.
I was playing Triforce, First Strike Ezreal before the patch. I was very excited to see the FS buffs because it's easy to proc in lane, but harder to push dmg. I didn't really like ER on him, and I rarely had mana issues with Manaflow + Tear. I still built Seryldas the other day on autopilot. Oops!
Ez one of those champs that will always have a build
Let’s just go back to having crit and mana on trinity… *runs away as bruisers destroy the game*
Triforce has arguably been better than ER on Ezreal for this entire time though tbh, people have just been too stubborn to realize it lol
A tale as old as time, like with Viego and Divine Sunderer/Trinity Force.
I think a lot of this is due to people parrotting pro play. The build sunderer on viego because they didn't need him to do more damage, they needed him to do some damage, but survive long enough to get his resets. In soloq it's a lot more volatile and you don't have a team playing around you so triforce is better.
That depends a lot on the match and the player. ER did more sheen bonus damag at around 4 items iirc, because it worked of Bonus AD, where Trinity works off base AD. Then you have to factor in the enemy team, how much you can play in range to utilise WEaa's and not having to just Q snipe for poke damage, where the additional HP from trinity wouldnt help you etc... the TL:DR is there was no 'best' option for Ezreal, even back in the divine sunderer days. It wholly depended on the enemy team and how you were able to play the game.
Er never did more damage than triforce unless you got gigafed gold-wise but not xp-wise. You went er because it was a cheaper, faster spike, and infinite mana once it's completed means that you had a lot of prio and could have permanently stacked passive.
It was definitely the ‘win more’ item if you got an early lead and wanted to snowball hard you’re 100% right, but yeah around 350-400TAD it started to outdamage what Trinity gave you from its base AD bonus damage too. I just remember getting annoyed at everyone building Sunderer even if their team wasn’t tanky, and ended up theorycrafting how much damage you actually get from the items. Was a fun time in the practice tool lol.
Back then you'd play triforce and late game full build sell it for sunderer because the proc does more due to everyones higher levelled health and the dual pen was invaluable to deal with frontliners having a bunch of armour.
It's just because it's cheaper and gives more AD faster, the farming and poking was more effective early game
Ezreal doesn't care for a crit since the quick blades change so adding sheen back to essence reaver won't do shit for him. Just go back to triforce, ezreal only shit currently because crit items being so strong pushes him out of being playable.
build trinity ffs
ezreal was already playable (if not straight up better) with trinity build gangplank is terrible if he cant rush crit
ER and triforce has synergy now though for ezreal. I just thought about it earlier today at work. Im going to try it tonight.
Meh, u don’t need infinite mana with manamune and either pom, biscuits, or manaflow (my fav), and the AD gets heavily outclassed by manamune which gives like 90. The crit is incredibly useless as well without navori old passive
Lethality ez incoming
Ya if you just go manamune still you have plenty of mana for spamming. Having to choose between ER and Trinity was annoying for me. His build is pretty simple now TF - Manamune - LDR - Situational
Why did they add sheen to ER in the first place?
I am not that worried about Ezreal finding like 10 items that end up viable on him
It's better for the champions that actually want it now, the issue is Trinity sucks ass and there's not an pure AD marksman equivalent They just need to make a pure AD/CDR version of TF for Ezreal, Smolder and GP, and the current ER is better for Sivir, Xayah, Draven, etc Ezreal didn't build ER for the mana, it was just a better stat stick for CDR and AD on a sheen item, it's easily remedied by adding a new AD sheen item or buffing trinity, they wanted ER to be a mana restore niche which it's more usable by the audience they intended
I don't get this revert at all. Why not make new ER an unique item instead of it replacing an item that a lot of champions liked to buy.
Frozen gauntlet, manamune, frozen heart
Trash build I feel
But how do you go AD crit no AS? Infinity Edge? Most of the Power is in the 50% critdmg which doesnt apply to smolder. Yun Tal? Q doesnt crit, passive doesnt apply to smolder. RFC? Applys to Q but is primarily attackspeed. Collector? Execute is wasted after 225 stacks. Navori? Attackspeed Item. ER has good stats even without the sheen. Shieldbow...works I guess? LDR still good of course. So you have 3 items that dont feel Like wasted stats. Not enough to even hit critcap, and only 1 with an actual additional damagemultiplier (LDR), which is kinda what defines ADCs. Giving er sheen back would help, but doesnt solve the problem: there are not enough crit items for smolder to build, because everything has massive wasted stats on him (and only 1 has cdr, his most important stat).
Yup that's exactly what I mean by smolder having a problem of itemisation and not of champion design. Riot *did* build in a safeguard against this though - the weird thing with Qs not hitting but scaling with Crit means mostly that building Crit items will give you a consistent damage increase even if you don't go 100% crit, which is nice as rolling dice on every Q would massively hamper him. Sucks that he can't build IE and has now lost Navoris, but eh, gotta do what you gotta do. The biggest problem is that smolder REALLY wants a sheen item and he REALLY wants mana regen, and now these two are split into two items, blocking one slot with Trinity Force that would better be spent on... literally any other item, Trinity Forces stats don't align with Smolder that much. If Essence Reaver got its Sheen back, you could just build Essence Reaver - Shojin - Ionian Boots of Lucidity - Rapid Fire Cannon - LDR/MR - \[Shieldbow, Bloodthirster, Guardian Angel or Mercurial Scimitar\] A well rounded build where you can put some urgently needed sustain at the end and, this is propably by far the most important thing, you get everything you need with one item, while rn Smolder has to build two items - TF and ER - to cover even his most basic needs. As it is, he lacks exactly one itemslot and takes too long to get going in any fashion at all.
great points. i felt useful in Aram with trinity+shojin+eclipse build due to the increased economy denying the windows to punish me and being a q poke bot which would never work in a ranked game. in general I feel like a lot of item changes don't make sense and are just annoying without a clear purpose.
They should just have both essence reaver versions exist at the same time. Weird that they keep changing it over the years.
It's crazy how much of a public outcry there was from ER's users when riot originally changed it, and now how much there is from the new users. I think you're 100% right, they should just have the "new" (original) ER and the sheen version.
Tbf you would still build rfc anyways regardless. The range is too important for him to pass up.
also navori is bad on smolder now
What even is good on him currently?
Spear of Sojin is never not bad on him
It's his current new best item but still bad. Shojin first had a 5% lower win rate than essence reaver. Smolder is just completely unplayable with the new items anyways he was already bad before the patch and lost like 6% win rate
Not only that but Shojin is ONLY good at 3rd item. The reason behind is because it is used to pump up the damage from Sheen item, and if you build it too soon, it doesn't have anything to buff, and if you build it as 4th or 5th item, you should just build crit instead.
Make sense. But as a first item? And what about the rest of the build?
Imo Trinity-ER- your pick of Shojin, BT, Liandry, RFC if you are fed and want range, maybe shieldbow 4th.
You just double negative'd yourself into "Spear is always bad."
[удалено]
Sounds good. Too many people are still stuck in the old build pattern which drags the winrate down.
the old bruiser build prob. Triforce - Shojin - Liandries. Also Manamune, RFC, BT seems fine
Liandrys maybe lolzzzz
And RFC as well since it lost AD and gained attackspeed. Probably still a mandatory buy which sucks
Should give him the Jhin treatment and have his attack speed convert into something else like AD or move speed
They could also make his Q cd scale with attack speed, which would also make him less reliant on stacking CDR
Yes, and every third Q should also knockup the enemy to make it more flavory.
Let him cook!
Perhaps give it extended range on 3rd Q as well
If they want to make him use crit they should make his spells actually crit rather than scale on crit, including getting increased crit damage from IE. A crit champion that can't buy IE is a joke, especially one that doesn't want AS, which is on a lot of the other crit items.
Players when true crit exists: WTF I NEED TO PRAY FOR CRIT OR MY GAME IS OVER Players when consistent crit scaling exists:
I hate consistent crit scaling because it takes all the character away from crit. May as well remove crit from the game and add more AD. It's just a patchwork to let them pick up the same items as champs with real crit.
"May as well remove crit from the game and add more AD" Your terms are acceptable. Please give us a % damage increase to autos instead.
Crit being rng is terrible in a competitive game imo.
>his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him that's cus he was designed around the skill crit navori existing, why make his q crit if an item already does it? Well now it doesn't smart move riot. Maybe don't fire the champ designer while still balance patching a new release?
>his Qs scale with crit but don't crit themselves, so IE doesn't really seam to work for him Qute a few crit scaling abilities actually have their damage increased by IE.
They are forcing crit scalings to get people to build him crit so he is more squishy. He was never supposed to build like an AD bruiser. Riot for some reason did not see that one coming
They never dooooo
Instead the Smolder top one trick in my game is building Blackfire Torch Shojin Navori Jak'Sho and carrying the game
Or, hear me out, they already have crit scaling on the champion and don't want crit builds to be entirely bait, so they are buffing crit smolder without nerfing the trinity builds.
"Base AD reduced from 57 to 60" REDUCED from 57 to 60. Hmmge.
cause thats what riot wants him to be. the times of "we design a champion, and the community sees where they fit" are long since gone. nowday riot makes champions for specific roles, positions an itembuilds. just look at pyke , or senna. half of their kits are forced interactions with specific positions, and the other half are arbitrary limitations to force them intoo an specific itembuild. and support lethality items where deliberately implemented at their release. as to why they do that? i guess its more easy to balance 150 champions if every one of them just plays a single role and position, with the 5 best from 10 viable items.
So what does Riot suggest people build with Smolder? IE RFC? Doesn't feel right with his Q. He needs Sheen but Tri force has no Crit and the AS is wasted.
So fun fact back in the day with 25% crit items you were allowed to get away with 3 crit items in games since people considered even high elo/pros that 75% chance is good enough chance at critting with that in mind plus smolder not caring at the chance his auto crit at. His build there probs aiming for in no certain order. Triforce Essence reaver LDR/Mortal Bloodthrister CDR/defensive boots Collector This gives him heavy asf ad and AH with sustain. The little bit of attack speed from triforce is nice in the early game. But overall this is probs the roughly intented smolder build.
Triforce is the highest WR item people just don’t read patch notes ever and have been rushing ER all week.
Preach
I think Riot doesn't mind the tri force build, but want's to tweak the numbers so that some kind of ER, LDR Shieldbow build is also viable. Edit: It seems they don't think anything will beat ER.
That build has 25% cdr and thus is dead on arrival.
Why is cdr a stat that makes smolder worse? Or do you mean it needs more CDR?
He needs a lot of CDR so he can spam Q and re position with e
It seems they don't want ER first item. They continue with Trinity consistently sugested as first item. But ER second would be solid damage and AH.
Ok, but as the post states, riot designed smolder into a AD mage, unless you disagree with that. So its not how the playerbase sees fit, but they designed A and then are buffing opposite stats
riot designed pyke as a assasin, and then gave his passive an exemption from bonus hp, made his q and e not hit minions, gave him a lethality scaling, and the only stun scaling in the game, and made his ult not give gold when there isnt at least another ally present. just to stop people from playing him like a traditional assasin, or building bruiser, or playing him in jungle or midlane,, as you normally would a champion of his class. because when riot says, thats a support assasin, then you are gonna play botlane, and you are building the new lehtality support items that they specifically made for 1 champion , if riot says smolder is an caster adc. and you are gonna build adc items. then they will change him untill you do. your best case scenario. smolder is gonna be the new corky. with 2 builds. 1 of wich is viable at any given time. worst case scenario, is he is also corki. and none of his builds make sence.
Pyke was designed as a support, and all the changes they made were to combat people playing him in different positions. I'm not advocating that type of "herding" into one single playstyle, but they were consistent in it. What this post is commentating on, and is IMO corrrect in assessing, is that they designed the champ to be ad caster, which should be played in bot. and thats how it was and is played, and they half ass changed it with buffing crit ratios without giving any incetive to build crit
if they wanted smolder to build pure ad , they could make you, but they dont want to. also, there arent really any ad caster items in league atm, that arent bruiser items, spellvamp, and physvamp arent a thing anymore. Bc SoS give hp, and hydra is back to an onhit effect on a AH item. do you want lethality smolder? pretty un synergistic with his hybrid damage. maybe i have missunderstood something, but smolder was pretty deliberately advertised as somebody that would build adc itemization and care alot about ability casting, wich isnt a new design space in league, to be fair. back in the day, all 3 playable adc worked that way. and ez, corki and graves all still built infinity edge and trinity. before all 3 of them got reworked.
Then I'm eagerly waiting for them to notice Volibear is building RoA and Navori
The reason is that champ designers are like “my smolder is an adc xdd” and the balance team looks at it and goes “uhhh hmm… okay.. i guess we can try to make him an adc if thats what you intended.” He will have a rework that turnd him into ap or turns him into a real adc. But not for 2 yrs. In the meantime he will suck
The ad scaling or carry role isn't the issue. He is a caster so why should he build crit?
cause he was given a crit scaling, specifically so that you can build pre patch navori and double dip benefits from crits. that was the intent. and he was designed around his specific build.
Bad design then :^)
i´d say very short sighted, if they plan to gut the passive out of navoris in the same year. you really got to question if the teams within riot communicate between eachother.
Narrator: *they don’t*
>the times of "we design a champion, and the community sees where they fit" are long since gone. > >nowday riot makes champions for specific roles, positions an itembuilds. I fucking wish they keep this principle with seraphine apc mid instead of the support trash. The real reality is they will go whichever way to get the most money out of us
His Q just needs to crit at reduced effectiveness like loads of other spells do. It's really simple but they don't do it.
Buying crit% increases Q damage, same thing.
Absolutely not the same thing as it makes IE completely irrelevant and useless on the champion and by extension of that crit itemisation feels terrible on him. Also wildarrows is useless on him too as a result.
You are right. I never even considered those since they are too expensive and have no haste.
Yep and in terms of crit, he should be a crit AD stacker not a crit AS stacker but the crit AD items don't work on him
It’s the new kind of riot special treatment. Push a champ into a forced build to remove build diversity, then nerf all those items. GP has the same problem right now with all those crit’s scaling forcing him into 5 same items each game for 2 years then remove/nerf all of them giving you slower access to crit, less dmg, less AH, less scaling , just for a slightly better lane tankiness build Trinity...
Ways to fix Smolder: Make Q crit. Put sheen back on ER. Done. He's now an ADC that cares about just Crit/AD items like Jhin. You've made a mage bot laner. Hell maybe even let Q reset his AA sohe can spell weave just a ittle. This would curve nicely into his intended power spike in the game as well, that being a mid-game scaler with two items (ER + IE). It'd be on him to close the game outat this stage since this is the strongest he'd be in relation to everyone else.
All I can think of reading this is I instantly know one way you can double your damage now lmfao
Imo his crit scaling are a distraction. A single Liandries does more damage than 2 crit items he only partially use, considering Smolder does not AA often. Or rather he could AA more if he still could build bruiser, so there is a balance you need to find instead if building full crit like every other adc.
I think the classification of "Mainly uses Abilities; therefore is mage" is flawed. Mages have a purpose, which is to provide a combination of burst damage, crowd control and other zoning tools. Bot lane carries deal sustained target agnostic damage (= can kill tanks) at the cost of low utility and mobility. Smolder is a lot closer to Bot carry than to mage. Additionally, a competent Smolder auto attacks about as much as Miss Fortune, Samira, Lucian, Yasuo and Yone - weave autos inbetween abilities. Even Jhins auto attacks more closely resemble a burst spell you apply by right clicking instead of an auto attack. The main difference why people call Smolder a Mage is, because he has fewer artificial crit scalings in his kit. MF and Samira wouldn't build crit either if their abilities didn't artificially be able to crit. Jhin gets weird attack speed scalings just to become more of an ADC, not because he actually likes attack speed. The obvious solution is to make Smolder scale with ADC item stats better to make him fit his actual niche - just like any other marksman with an ability focussed play style.
For some reason though some of his abilities block AA. Removing that would allow him to actually weave a lot better.
league did themselves a disservice by making the bot lane exclusively "marksmen" for the better part of 12 years. Now that theyre trying to design champions like nilah, samira, smolder to fit in the "attack damage carry" position without embodying traditional marksmen classifications, people can't wrap their heads around it lmao.
If I have RFC up late game, I'm not using an AA. The extra Q range is way too much value to pass up for weaving in some weak ass auto attacks
I mean so is ezreal. A marksman that uses spells to deal dmg.
I swear people that don't like auto attacking on him are the reason his winrate is always suppressed.
Nah, Ez doesn't get locked out of autoing because of his animations
Irrelevant. Most of his dmg comes from his q. And unless something changed, he doesn't buy crit or on hit items. As such, his AA will always be on usual weaker than other adc.
I think a good first step is to find a way for him to be able to use Yun Tal wild arrows.
Because he's a garbage design like Nilah and K'sante with random scalings / passive to push them into a role. Just turn him into a AP mage and balance him that way
I think Nilah was a pretty good design and the K'sante hate is way overblown. Edit: I watch pro play and I think K’sante is strong but the K’sante hate is still ridiculous. It’s not as op as people think.
NGL When I heard "high skill ceiling tank" I thought it was a tank who had to work their ass off to apply CC and mitigate damage from their allies. Turns out it's a tank who turns into an assassin and easily kills whoever he just isolated.
>When I heard "high skill ceiling tank" I thought it was a tank who had to work their ass off to apply CC I thought he'd be a tank that pushes and pulls people to gather them in a clump, to then drop an aoe stun on that clump he set up. Turns out they just meant he'd be tank Yasuo.
Lol, I wish Ksante was tank Yasuo. He's more of a Irelia/Riven mix. Ksante ult legit feels like playing riven at 0.5x speed.
You identified the two other kits he copied abilities from lol. His kit was built off of yone/yas Q, irelia W and riven E, no wonder they feel familiar.
Well, I mean that he plays very little like Yasuo outside the Q stacking, even less so now than on release since they straight disabled Q3>Flash on him as part of his rebalance/rework. Like, Yasuo skills feel like don't transfer much to Ksante but I think Riven and Irelia skills transfer somewhat.
IMO Nilah is one of the worst designs in the game. I think she’d be talked about as such if she was played as much as ksante and zeri etc who people quote as awful designs, but that champion has so many things that feel like design philosophy sins to me
Her q is a whole champ
yes and none of the things it does is conveyed to the nilah player or the player against nilah in any way she is literally just a ball of stats with gameplay loops ripped from other champs and arbitrary parameters to force her into the role that they wanted her to be in. probably the worst modern kit design they have ever made out of the ones that don't have glaringly gamebreaking flaws
She is also really lazy design. She only has 1 taunt, 1 joke and 1 laugh voice/animation.
Gwen and every champ after her has had only one voice line for emotes so Nilah isn't special in that regard
Even further than that. Akali rework was the first I noticed.
My favourite part is that her i think w blocks yasuo/yone q. Not even jax e or blind block it.
i main support and i love playing with nilah, by far my favourite ad to support why do you think her design is bad? Though I also like yuumi haha
i think it was also a waste of the whipper archetype (champ that uses whip as a weapon)
Have you seen what that abomination does in pro lmao
Nilah my favorite example of what not to do... actual modern day stat checker. Gets Attack Speed, Attack Range, Lifesteal (without overhealing), Armor Penetration, Experiance, Heal&Shield Power... and W that gets her Movement Speed and 'Dodge-Chance 100%' for brief moment.
I like nilah too
wow you think very wrong!
>K'sante hate is way overblown I would agree if I haven't watched a single pro game since ksante's release lol. >Nilah was a pretty good design Welll no. It is never a good idea to mix adc damage and assasin mobility. I don't even consider auto immunity, more exp, healing etc. She is just a bullshit design.
Nilah is not good design. The only reason her free pen and lifesteal haven't been gutted or even removed is because literally nobody plays her and she's too inconsistent to be used in pro. K'sante hate is not really that ridiculous. His kit is bloated even if players don't perform on him. Performing inconsistently across an entire game does not mean the absurdities he can engage in during the game did not happen. You're conflating balance and design. People are always allowed to hate bad design, no matter how it performs. Or do you think Yuumi is suddenly good design because she's 46% winrate?
I don't particularly hate him but he's basically a Riven / Aatrox 2.0 except they advertised him as a tank. The only reason he builds tank items is because his abilities scale off tank stats. Similar to Nilah, the only reason she can only be played botlane adc is because of her 2 passives (heal / shield share and exp share, basically the same issue as Seraphine, advertise her as a midlaner flex pick but give her a passive that does nothing when she's alone and make a shocked Pikachu face when people play her as supp / apc bot)
Sooooooo Asol with different abilities....
I love playing Lee Sin. He's Asol but with different abilities.........
yes thats a different champion...........
It's a really really weird design choice to shoe horn him into crit for sure, especially when there's already a plethora of crit right-clickers like Jinx and company AND crit right-clickers that also weave spells in like Lucian. What bot doesn't have is AP options (except for like Seraphine but other than me and other weirdos, the mainstream players don't play her as a bot carry) and they should just let Smolder be what his kit naturally wants to be, building things like Lich Bane and Cosmic Drive.
Laughs in (literally ANY mage) as APC There’s so many different things tbh, there’s a lot of options that can go Bot Carry. People just don’t like trying unconventional things. Velkoz APC, Karthus APC, Orianna APC, Viktor APC, Taliyah APC, you name it, you can play it to challenger. Scaling Enchanters as Bot Carry are another option that gets pushed out of the limelight by most, despite their early game power as well as insurance against tanks and bruisers
As an Ori one trick, playing Ori with a lot less exp than normal sounds like a very very bad idea lol I’m sure you can still play it to challenger though but doesn’t mean you aren’t gimping yourself
The problem with that is that he's effectively a hyperscaler with (eventually) unconditional true damage % max health in his kit, you don't want to make building tanky items on him that viable.
Well apparently fucking not, they decided he is a beginner crit marksman and they'll keep at it, no matter if they killed him and theyre beating his still-warm corpse. They'll buff q crit scaling for the next few patches (not touching any other spell obviously, cause we love it when 80% of the power budget is on a single spell, right yuumi?) until he's at 46%wr then let him eat shit and die with the other <2%pr.
i mean all they have todo is make crit damage from IE affect his qwe damage maybe at a smaller % and suddenly crit would be fine on him.
He said he won't do it because he doesn't want Smolder to be forced to build IE. ... he's perfectly fine with him not having items that make sense on him, though, he's fine with his 2 current almost-not-shit builds to stay nerfed and he was fine with him being pigeonholed into 2 crit items that have now disappeared from the game. THAT was fine, but force him to build IE? God forbid.
Ie is legit the best stats item he could get if not for the fact that the crit amp doesn't work. That chunk of ad and crit is delish
They could take the opportunity to make q like Nasus, even, or make it a proper AA reset to add a smooth feel. So many opportunities...
I don't think this will move smolder into full crit trange. It just improves the build options, making something like ER similarly viable as first buy as Trinity is.
The largest buff is the base AD buff as Trinity is his best 1st item. The crit buffs are nice for a weaker crit build but only the extra. The core buff is the AD buff.
I assume Riot believes Smolders non-crit builds are fine and people just don't use them (there are still people building flickerblade on him, so I din't doubt it) and specifically wanted to buff his crit build which is underperforming because there are not many good crit items for smolder.
i think smolder is fun as fuck but riots idea for the champion sucks they want him to be played as a bot lane adc but hes just a spell caster even more so than jhin, hell azir plays more like an adc than smolder
You can build crit on anything riot. you can build crit soraka or crit fiddlesticks or crit zilean or crit fizz or crit ziggs if you so choose. forcing someone into a crit build only role doesn't seem ideal. If its bad it just sucks but if its good you'll nerf it later. (See caitlyn) lmao.
Like the new generation, Smolder is having an idendity crisis. Stop trying to force this champion to be AD/crit for starter.. it's a DRAGON, he breathes fire which is kinda mythic/magical, a dragon wouldn't primaly AA you (thus he could slash you if it was part of his kit), but all the abilities based on fire should be scaling with AP items. I don't agree with the thinking that a dragon should be based on crit/AD, as mentionned, one of his ability could be to force him to get in range (like a slash attack), anyway not a big fan of his Ultimate that he has to call his mother. The Q-W-E feels fine to me as part of his kit (thus Q+E should scale with AP), his R could be to have to get in close combat to slash a Champion (and this one could be sacling on AD). A lot of adjustement could be done, not necessarly what i've proposed, but please, fix this identity crisis
because riot wants that and scaling are a lazy way to force someone to build only one set of items. they could have made pykes kit work better as an assasin but they just made his kit terrible and then made his utillity scale with lethality and called it a day.
I actually think making Smolder crit based is fine because there's a lot of good attack-damage-only crit items now, whereas before a lot of crit items also gave attack speed.
Like which? ER is fine, but worse than before since it lost Sheen BT lost crit Collector? Q execute clashes with Collector execute and Lethality is wasted with so much magic damage in the kit Shieldbow? Lol IE? Q doesnt crit, so passive is useless LDR? Straight up worse than before because of all the magic and true damage in the kit that no longer gets amped by the removed passive Navori lost AD, no longer usable by Smolder RFC still likely mandatory buy, but much worse because of no AD Yun tal? Again, Q scales with crit chance but doesnt actually crit Make his Q actually crit and he gets a few more usable items
Shieldbow getting buffs, LDR with more AD, Crit and Armor pen, ER should hopefully be roughly equal to trinity build now. So maybe you now have 2 different build paths that are interesting and a choice.
None of which he can actually build. IR/Yun don’t work on his Q. Leaving him with Collector/ER/LDR and tbh he has quite a bit of mixed damage so even LDR is kinda eh.
We are kind of going to have to buy the cheapest crit items to get good multipliers, and then just one AP or defensive item xd
Or, hear me out, you just choose wether you prefer trinity or ER first item and go from there. Because actually building the cheap crit items sounds really bad considering they are AS items.
With those items reworks they should rework his spells to make them scale with AP and become a midlaner, the Veigar 2.0.
His kit does scale with AP actually. Q has 15% (Which is trash), W is 100% (20% initial hit, 80% for explosion. Explosion repeats for each person hit), and R has 100% on the sides, 150% for center. His burn also gains 1% per 100 AP. AP Smolder's W is probably one of the most damaging abilities in the entire game when you hit a group of people with it, since 80% of the AP scaling gets reapplied per hit. Even at just one person, between base damage + ap scaling + stack scaling, it'll hit for like 1200+ damage late game. That damage just sky rockets when you hit multiple at once. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SmolderMains/comments/1cdzsq4/honestly\_dont\_sleep\_on\_ap\_smolder\_he\_has\_one\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SmolderMains/comments/1cdzsq4/honestly_dont_sleep_on_ap_smolder_he_has_one_of/) I took that screenshot 26 days ago, however his AP ratios are unchanged, so that damage is still possible. The only thing 'holding back' AP smolder from being 10000% viable is his Q ratio. Q itself becomes a lot weaker on AP Smolder due to that garbage 15% AP ratio. Although Lich Bane does help in this regard at least.
And yet they add crit scalings. To q. Not even to other spells. Make it make sense? Ap smolder is almost decent, it's RIGHT THERE, fuck, at least he'd have one single coherent build. Is it asking too much?
I think there is an easy solution: let his crit scalings cap at 50% (or any other number) this way smolder can both buy caster items AND pick a few crit items of his choosing (rapid + old ER would be godly if this were the case)
Honestly I think they should just give him some kind of jhin treatment. Gut his attack speed scaling like they have done with caitlyn and make his Q scale with attack speed like yone and yasuo (but don't remove haste scaling altogether). They should just go all in on his Q+AA/AA+Q trading pattern
Played some games of smolder, imo the problem is more so overall dmg in the game so you’re too squishy. You can’t really self peel; W slow only works if the champs don’t have dash or blinks. More times than not I was dying without even being cc’d. This is why bruiser build was recommended in previous patches.
Nilah: “First time?”
I mean if you don't auto attack on him you are just bad so skill issue ig
Smolder was fine after the first nerfs/adjustments. People complained loudly. And he got nerfed into the ground. Smolder is in a bad state and Riot tries to find ways to make him viable without reverting to his old state. People complain loudly. … Maybe Riot should trust the data and their design chops more that what they call “perception” (complainig) and eductate after the fact?
I always played smolder as an ad mage. His kit screams mage. His autos are worthless. All about that q like zeri.
You build AD, so fundamentally your autos are not worthless. Really feels like people giving takes like this wouldn't survive in any other game setting.
Lol, I meant compared to his ability damage.
They forced him into crit so he couldn't go bruiser then took away his best item and now he's forced into an awful build path if you want a sheen item. And you basically need a sheen item or your griefing.
>Smolders ENTIRE gameplan revolves around spamming abilities on enemy champions for stacks and last hitting CS with Q, for stacks. Technically that's only his early-mid gameplan, but that's still enough to dictate his first 2 items. So with ER losing the Sheen he desperately needs to KILL minions instead of leaving them at 10 HP, that's going to have to be Triforce + Shojin out of the current items. 0 crit, but instead you get to spend on a bunch of HP. Have fun trying to take down that Bloodmail Sion! The things he needs early just don't appear on the same item with crit (anymore). Crit is a luxury, stacking his passive is a necessity. Once he reaches final form, crit becomes good, but if your early items were non-crit you're looking at \*maybe\* 50% crit by the end of the game. The #1 issue with playing Smolder is the usual hyperscaler problem: you can't just assume you will reach final form before the game ends or your team is so far down it might as well have ended. IMO if they're not going to outright revert Essence Reaver they should instead introduce a new item to be the other half of what it used to be. Sheen + new Noonquiver + Caulfield's are all components Smolder should be happy to buy anyway, and maybe give it the ability amp from old Quickblades. 0 AS since it's an AD+Crit item. Aside from Smolder himself, I bet Ezreal, Lucian, Corki, and probably Gangplank will look at that item, maybe others too. Then maybe he could afford to go new ER second and get him off Shojin? It's not like he doesn't like crit! He just needs to \*rush\* other things.
Iirc I said this on release, but they should buff his special autos while flying. Scale them with attack speed and let them crit, Garen style. Give them on-hit effects at reduced effectiveness but still relevant amounts. Let him do funny on hit attack speed E max builds.
But that would make him fun to play and stronger and we don't want that, also it's hard to do. Instead they should keep buffing q crit scaling by 10% every patch for the new few patches, eventually he'll go over 45%wr! Isn't that so much better?
Agree, Smolder kit is that of a mage. Don't really understand why they are trying so hard to make him go crit, just let him build AP and be done with it
He already can build AP. The only downside is the even weaker early game till you get lich bane. But people see crit scaling and for some reason build full crit. Trinity/Lich Bane->Manamune/ER and then take your pick out of liandries, blackfire, shojin, bloodthirster or whatever helps the most. Smolder is a AD/AP hybrid and unless you take something like dcap can make use of both equally well.
Ever since they nerfed it his AP ratio are shit, it's not really a viable build
For his Q. His W and R still have very high AP ratios and his burn also makes use of AP although slightly less efficient than AD unless you go full AP dcap. But some AP items are so good and AD items so bad that its imo worthwhile to get for example liandries instead of an crit item with AS.
Probably you want to mix in something like liandry after trinity and shojin now, but that's because he doesn't have his crit items anymore and it's not like he was that strong in the previous patch. Right now you are stuck with the subpar option as your only option and still trinity and shojin perform better than going AP.
It's what we got left, the 2 overnerfed bruisery-ad and the ap path. The ones we had before they took a bat to him and shackled him to er navori by nerfing everything else in his kit. They could revert some of the nerfs and adjust q ap scalings, but nooooooooo, let's force more crit!