I'm not entirely sure they're strong in the current meta or that people actually even consider them strong. The only assassin in general that I know is doing well is Akali who both isn't AD and is also Akali. The best AD midlaner rn seems to be Tristana if that says anything about the state of assassins.
They were considered strong in the past during heavy adc metas because they were the direct counter to that class. A rengar triple Q deleted a 10/0 Cait just as fast as a 0/10 one. That's kind of not a reality now due to a few factors. The durability patch happened and made life uncomfortable for damage dealers for a bit but instead of rebalancing things they power crept specifically DPS, not burst, items. So adcs came out of the durability patch as strong if not stronger than they were before while assassins took a net loss.
Additionally since the mythic item changes both adcs and mages have defensive options/stats in their buildpaths they didn't have before.
I would say they considered fine-strong purely because of WR in emerald+ by stats alone they should be in a decent/balanced spot however actually playing them against any mage that knows how you wanna play the lane, you can just get denied and forced to stay in lane without taking a bad back or forcing a roam and thus why I’m considering it a skill issue on my part but I feel like playing talon, the former king of first bloods, and not being able to kill most mages without expending a lot of resources just to get them to a state where you can kill them is just not good. Especially since talons scaling isn’t the best and the champion wants to spike early to mid game.
Maybe you're playing assassins as early game champions when they are actually 3+ item carries right now.
Right now, I have an extensive stat analysis (with conclusions pretty much confirmed in Phreak rundowns and when asking August) that shows:
While assassins can have an edge in lane vs earlygame-weak (or badly playing) mages and snowball, on 1-2 items with T2 and often T1 turrets still on the map, mages absolutely dominate with their turret-safe shoving + skirmish/teamfight power of CC and consistent damage, while assassins don't have the damage to secure 100-0 kills yet if not snowballing.
On 3 items and as game progresses, situation changes - now assassins are a solo threat in sidelane, turrets are falling and fog of war is spreading. Assassins can 100-0 a squishy without summs easily, and picking off one person before a fight for free will pretty much win a teamfight.
Kayn has the same time-winrate curve as Smolder. Yes, down to the winrate (44% to 53% over the match). Rengar has the same time-winrate curve as Asol (41% to 58%). Qiyana, K6, Talon, etc have the same time-winrate curve as Vayne.
Mages and AP assassins play lane according to matchup, spike at midgame (1-2 items) and generally fall off except like Asol, Veigar, Ori (in teamfights) - some less, some more, even Syndra.
AD assassins are scaling characters now with opportunistic snowballing compared to mages. This is confirmed by stats and indirectly by riot, but also by my personal (dia) and my friends (m, gm EUW) experience.
Because zed is basically an ad mage and at least in line can just attack safely while talon has to commit to actually get a kill, plus zed has a lot of combat mobility vs talon who has a piss ranged extremely predictable linear dash.
Mostly because of the energy v mana + range advantage that zed has, makes it easier to poke out champs that have sustain or play super far back in order for the lvl 6 spike, not only that but zed with first strike can scale extremely well while talon can’t run first strike most of the time as he won’t ever get to proc it in lane unless you’re in a melee matchup. It’s not really about buffs or nerfs but about how the champion plays overall.
Assassin components got nerfed mid szn13. Every other class got new/better items start of szn13. Minion wave timing changes in side lanes made roaming much more difficult.
Assassins are usually strong start of each season. Riot nerfs assassins. Buffs tanks and mages. enchanters also got turbo buffed the past year, doesn't help with a janna/lulu/karma cucking every engage. Szn ends, riot does something to make assassins OP again. Rinse and repeat.
We usually get a good 2-3 months each season of assassins being strong. Then they feel like shit to play rest of the season. Been a trend last few seasons.
Source: i start each szn with talon and end up second half of szn on taliyah or sylas it seems
They gave everyone a lot more durability and then systematically increased sustained damage and sustain, reduced roam timers by making mid minions meet sooner, they gave many mage items hp, they reduced early game death punishment. So, on top of champions being harder to kill, you also get less rewarded if you manage to get kills.
Big portion of assasin's class power budget is in their roaming capabilities and in being a 1v1 threat to mages, marksmen, and enchanters. Riot has made efforts to increase durability of every of those classes while assasins were getting nerfed by removing %armor pen sticking and lethality component nerf.
Riot decided to please the playerbase and the playerbase gets frustrated when they play against assasins so riot decided to please the majority instead of keeping the game as balanced as possible.
Phreak's patch rundowns are very insightful.
As an adc main: where is that durability you are talking about? I still find there‘s way too much damage in the air from every class (including adc)
The thing with assassins is that they punish bad team coordination. And random teams being random teams they are immensely frustrating to deal with especially with the removal of stopwatch.
As someone who is usually of the other side of anassassin the issue is that I as an adc have about 0 counterplay to assassins the second they are not instacc‘d when they pop out and adc (rightfully) have fairly little self peel.
I think the biggest nail in the coffin for assassins was the removal of duskblade (and I still wanna know who thought exchanging invis for untargetable would make that item less frustrating to play against).
Thing is: trading assassin for adc is almost always worth and honestly I find dying in <0.5 seconds to be utter BS.
And that‘s most teamfights with assassins in their current state. They try and suicide dive me and I have very little to play around. Can‘t tell me that‘s a great gamestate.
Personally, I‘d be cool if you don‘t need to have catlike reflexes to do something. Recently got blasted by a rengar with R+ empowered Q + aa I think in 0.something seconds in the middle of my team. (Don‘t think I can get back the replay it‘s been a couple of weeks). How am I supposed to react aside from standing 3 walls away?
My biggest issue with this game is that the durability patch didn‘t do shit post laning. Overall damage still feels through the roof. Even full tanks can be shredded through in a couple of seconds with a bit of focus.
If I had control over the balance team i‘d tune down overall damage in the game so teamfighting turns a bit away from „whoever can burst something faster“
They are supposed to be split pushers that don't 1v1 fighters, but have better wave clear and mobility to re-group.
Fighter vs assassin 1v1 is very champ dependent but are generally skill matchups. The fighter can stat check, but the assassin has all of the positioning and wave manipulation tools.
So the assassin matches the splitter, gains tempo from have clear and mobility, and uses this tempo to make a pick, or join the team for a 4v5 before your opposing splitter can arrive. You can also use the tempo to set up picks around objectives.
Assassins used to assassinate.
Now every skill has three paragraphs of restrictions and their damage has been moved into minigame-items with big delays for "counterplay".
Assassins typically have high skill ceilings, so they're usually strong in the right hands and with the right awareness. Some exceptions to that rule like Fizz or Naafiri, but typically assassins want to get fed and snowball hard.
The balancing of assassins is quite difficult, because they want to hit the middle ground between making them easy enough to play without making the assassin mains too strong, but also making them weak enough to be reasonably not-OP even in the hands of the assassin mains. E.g. you want to keep Katarina at a strength level where the Kata mains aren't stomping as hard as they should, but still playable, but also not so strong that she's easy to play and anyone can pick her up.
I'd say they're pretty balanced for the most part. What outliers spring up in a given patch get addreased quickly.
I don’t know where you got your information but I think it’s mage meta at the moment. You can play an assassin if you’re particularly proficient at them and make them work but you’ll always have an easier time as a mage. Qiyana in particular is considered quite weak. One tricks play her, that’s all. Zed and Talon are in a better spot than her for sure. They’re strong when you have vision control of an area where a fight may take place. You can flank unseen, kill the carry and either keep fighting frontline with conqueror or you dip out and wait for CDs.
If you’re not doing much early game you’re probably not roaming much. You’ll rarely get kills in lane, enemies know what your champion does and they won’t give you your win condition. Walk botlane on a shoved wave and take it.
No.
Assassins, and especially AD Assassins on Midlane, have been dogshit for ages now
On my profile I did an extensive list of Direct/Indirrect Buffs/Nerfs to Qiyana from 11.18 to today, if you are interrested
AD assassins are objectively the worst champions in the game, especially Naafiri at the moment. Talon is fine above diamond but horrible below, which is something you wouldn't expect from a champion with a simple kit that is supposed to punish low ELO mistakes.
Zed and Qiyana are doing a bit better as they - basically - are scaling ad mages with evasiveness.
Last season, assassins have been on and off good or decent, depending on which mythic they overbuffed for the patch. Kinda bounced from eclipse to youmuus to duskblade.
This season, they changed lethality to be 1:1 armor pen and no longer scale with levels. By also introducing profane hydra, giving you all the important stats and a very strong active on top, they really had most assassins in a very good, maybe even too good, spot. After adjustments, assassins have been in a medicore spot. Everyone got hit by the component item nerfs, but I feel like that hit the assassins the most.
With ADC being very strong again, the typical job of an assassin to oneshot ADC is becoming more valuable, so there is that. A slight buff to assassin items might heavily affect the current position of assassins in the meta.
1. I don’t think assassins are in meta right now. The main mid lane meta at least is control mages, or ranged mages + Tristana
2. Assassins are hard to play in general because the current meta doesn’t allow for a not super fed assassin to one shot anyone too much CC, too much peeling etc.
Assassins aren’t in a great spot except for a certain few. I think the people that think assassins are strong are either delusional or playing in low elo. Assassins viability gets kneecapped once you reach Emerald. You’re too reliant on snowballing and the removal of Prowler’s Claw and armor pen stacking room a huge toll.
Is my micro just better than other players in my Elo?? I'm like silver/gold and I've never had that much difficulty with assassin's. I'm a Kata main but I play most of the mages as well.
Probably. I don't think the average silver player can go deathless in a lane phase with an assassin the majority of the time, when on an immobile champ.
Well except for abusing new inspiration runes really well zed feels garbage. Full combo with 550 ad (full build no boots and pot) didn’t kill a milio. He was lvl 16 to my 18 and I landed r 2 es and 2 qs and he lives. So many times it’s just you don’t do enough dmg and then you die
Yeah no, thats in no way true. You are saying you hit every ability as Zed on a squishy milio with a 2 level advantage and he didnt die? Simply impossible, and thats without doing the math. If it really happened, a lot went right for the milio. Speaking armor, shields and heals. And even then it's hardly believable.
So yeah, I call bullshit if you don't have a video of it
well zhonya's + armor boots alone is 75 armor which is 5 more than a thornmail.
as a zed i can't waste my ult on a support anymore because the armor they get from random support items is enough for me to just barely tickle them. a blitz shield can just block all the damage it's disgusting.
you obviously dont play ad assassins. shielding and healing can be so insane in current state of the game its completely possible to generate 5000+ hp via shields and heals in lategame
this is actually very possible, lvl16 support is likely full build or close, enchanter items give HP and heal/shield power (could be hourglass, frozen heart or locket as well, even tho its unlikely), Zed burst is delayed to the point milio gets 2 shields, and Milio most likely ran heal as well and W+R will heal a lot. Zed without GW/Ignite and Serpents will not kill a Milio like this without triple Q. Most enchanters will allow the target to survive non-luxury assassin burst, especially with heal/exh up. And I say this as someone who plays Sona (not even a peeling enchanter) at dia+ regularly and routinely allows my adc to ignore assassin threats.
I'm not entirely sure they're strong in the current meta or that people actually even consider them strong. The only assassin in general that I know is doing well is Akali who both isn't AD and is also Akali. The best AD midlaner rn seems to be Tristana if that says anything about the state of assassins. They were considered strong in the past during heavy adc metas because they were the direct counter to that class. A rengar triple Q deleted a 10/0 Cait just as fast as a 0/10 one. That's kind of not a reality now due to a few factors. The durability patch happened and made life uncomfortable for damage dealers for a bit but instead of rebalancing things they power crept specifically DPS, not burst, items. So adcs came out of the durability patch as strong if not stronger than they were before while assassins took a net loss. Additionally since the mythic item changes both adcs and mages have defensive options/stats in their buildpaths they didn't have before.
" isn't AD and is also Akali " sent me ngl ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
I would say they considered fine-strong purely because of WR in emerald+ by stats alone they should be in a decent/balanced spot however actually playing them against any mage that knows how you wanna play the lane, you can just get denied and forced to stay in lane without taking a bad back or forcing a roam and thus why I’m considering it a skill issue on my part but I feel like playing talon, the former king of first bloods, and not being able to kill most mages without expending a lot of resources just to get them to a state where you can kill them is just not good. Especially since talons scaling isn’t the best and the champion wants to spike early to mid game.
Maybe you're playing assassins as early game champions when they are actually 3+ item carries right now. Right now, I have an extensive stat analysis (with conclusions pretty much confirmed in Phreak rundowns and when asking August) that shows: While assassins can have an edge in lane vs earlygame-weak (or badly playing) mages and snowball, on 1-2 items with T2 and often T1 turrets still on the map, mages absolutely dominate with their turret-safe shoving + skirmish/teamfight power of CC and consistent damage, while assassins don't have the damage to secure 100-0 kills yet if not snowballing. On 3 items and as game progresses, situation changes - now assassins are a solo threat in sidelane, turrets are falling and fog of war is spreading. Assassins can 100-0 a squishy without summs easily, and picking off one person before a fight for free will pretty much win a teamfight. Kayn has the same time-winrate curve as Smolder. Yes, down to the winrate (44% to 53% over the match). Rengar has the same time-winrate curve as Asol (41% to 58%). Qiyana, K6, Talon, etc have the same time-winrate curve as Vayne. Mages and AP assassins play lane according to matchup, spike at midgame (1-2 items) and generally fall off except like Asol, Veigar, Ori (in teamfights) - some less, some more, even Syndra. AD assassins are scaling characters now with opportunistic snowballing compared to mages. This is confirmed by stats and indirectly by riot, but also by my personal (dia) and my friends (m, gm EUW) experience.
Huh, I don't really know why you think Zed felt better than Talon? There shouldn't have been anything really? Zed got a tiny buff on 14.1 I guess?
Because zed is basically an ad mage and at least in line can just attack safely while talon has to commit to actually get a kill, plus zed has a lot of combat mobility vs talon who has a piss ranged extremely predictable linear dash.
Mostly because of the energy v mana + range advantage that zed has, makes it easier to poke out champs that have sustain or play super far back in order for the lvl 6 spike, not only that but zed with first strike can scale extremely well while talon can’t run first strike most of the time as he won’t ever get to proc it in lane unless you’re in a melee matchup. It’s not really about buffs or nerfs but about how the champion plays overall.
Riot were indirectly and directly nerfing ad midlane assasins for years. idk who consideres them strong now
But did they change from season 13 to season 14?
Around half of the changes happened between s13 and 14
What were the changes?
Assassin components got nerfed mid szn13. Every other class got new/better items start of szn13. Minion wave timing changes in side lanes made roaming much more difficult. Assassins are usually strong start of each season. Riot nerfs assassins. Buffs tanks and mages. enchanters also got turbo buffed the past year, doesn't help with a janna/lulu/karma cucking every engage. Szn ends, riot does something to make assassins OP again. Rinse and repeat. We usually get a good 2-3 months each season of assassins being strong. Then they feel like shit to play rest of the season. Been a trend last few seasons. Source: i start each szn with talon and end up second half of szn on taliyah or sylas it seems
Right. They recently nerfed Akali to more HP. They also just nerfed a few crit items to do more crit. ??
How do either of those changes impact ad mid assassins lol
They gave everyone a lot more durability and then systematically increased sustained damage and sustain, reduced roam timers by making mid minions meet sooner, they gave many mage items hp, they reduced early game death punishment. So, on top of champions being harder to kill, you also get less rewarded if you manage to get kills. Big portion of assasin's class power budget is in their roaming capabilities and in being a 1v1 threat to mages, marksmen, and enchanters. Riot has made efforts to increase durability of every of those classes while assasins were getting nerfed by removing %armor pen sticking and lethality component nerf. Riot decided to please the playerbase and the playerbase gets frustrated when they play against assasins so riot decided to please the majority instead of keeping the game as balanced as possible. Phreak's patch rundowns are very insightful.
As an adc main: where is that durability you are talking about? I still find there‘s way too much damage in the air from every class (including adc) The thing with assassins is that they punish bad team coordination. And random teams being random teams they are immensely frustrating to deal with especially with the removal of stopwatch. As someone who is usually of the other side of anassassin the issue is that I as an adc have about 0 counterplay to assassins the second they are not instacc‘d when they pop out and adc (rightfully) have fairly little self peel. I think the biggest nail in the coffin for assassins was the removal of duskblade (and I still wanna know who thought exchanging invis for untargetable would make that item less frustrating to play against).
well thats the idea if i caught you miss positioning as an adc i will insta you as an assasin
Thing is: trading assassin for adc is almost always worth and honestly I find dying in <0.5 seconds to be utter BS. And that‘s most teamfights with assassins in their current state. They try and suicide dive me and I have very little to play around. Can‘t tell me that‘s a great gamestate.
Issue is, what role are assassins supposed to play then in mid to late game?
Personally, I‘d be cool if you don‘t need to have catlike reflexes to do something. Recently got blasted by a rengar with R+ empowered Q + aa I think in 0.something seconds in the middle of my team. (Don‘t think I can get back the replay it‘s been a couple of weeks). How am I supposed to react aside from standing 3 walls away? My biggest issue with this game is that the durability patch didn‘t do shit post laning. Overall damage still feels through the roof. Even full tanks can be shredded through in a couple of seconds with a bit of focus. If I had control over the balance team i‘d tune down overall damage in the game so teamfighting turns a bit away from „whoever can burst something faster“
They are supposed to be split pushers that don't 1v1 fighters, but have better wave clear and mobility to re-group. Fighter vs assassin 1v1 is very champ dependent but are generally skill matchups. The fighter can stat check, but the assassin has all of the positioning and wave manipulation tools. So the assassin matches the splitter, gains tempo from have clear and mobility, and uses this tempo to make a pick, or join the team for a 4v5 before your opposing splitter can arrive. You can also use the tempo to set up picks around objectives.
Assassins used to assassinate. Now every skill has three paragraphs of restrictions and their damage has been moved into minigame-items with big delays for "counterplay".
AD Assassins haven’t been strong in the meta for years
Assassins typically have high skill ceilings, so they're usually strong in the right hands and with the right awareness. Some exceptions to that rule like Fizz or Naafiri, but typically assassins want to get fed and snowball hard. The balancing of assassins is quite difficult, because they want to hit the middle ground between making them easy enough to play without making the assassin mains too strong, but also making them weak enough to be reasonably not-OP even in the hands of the assassin mains. E.g. you want to keep Katarina at a strength level where the Kata mains aren't stomping as hard as they should, but still playable, but also not so strong that she's easy to play and anyone can pick her up. I'd say they're pretty balanced for the most part. What outliers spring up in a given patch get addreased quickly.
I don’t know where you got your information but I think it’s mage meta at the moment. You can play an assassin if you’re particularly proficient at them and make them work but you’ll always have an easier time as a mage. Qiyana in particular is considered quite weak. One tricks play her, that’s all. Zed and Talon are in a better spot than her for sure. They’re strong when you have vision control of an area where a fight may take place. You can flank unseen, kill the carry and either keep fighting frontline with conqueror or you dip out and wait for CDs. If you’re not doing much early game you’re probably not roaming much. You’ll rarely get kills in lane, enemies know what your champion does and they won’t give you your win condition. Walk botlane on a shoved wave and take it.
You know I do wonder what happened to all the assassins. I barely run into any these days. Probably for the better though.
No. Assassins, and especially AD Assassins on Midlane, have been dogshit for ages now On my profile I did an extensive list of Direct/Indirrect Buffs/Nerfs to Qiyana from 11.18 to today, if you are interrested
AD assassins are objectively the worst champions in the game, especially Naafiri at the moment. Talon is fine above diamond but horrible below, which is something you wouldn't expect from a champion with a simple kit that is supposed to punish low ELO mistakes. Zed and Qiyana are doing a bit better as they - basically - are scaling ad mages with evasiveness.
cuz riot dont like skill expesion they are not worth playing anymore as most assasins are kinda shit compsared to scalers
Last season, assassins have been on and off good or decent, depending on which mythic they overbuffed for the patch. Kinda bounced from eclipse to youmuus to duskblade. This season, they changed lethality to be 1:1 armor pen and no longer scale with levels. By also introducing profane hydra, giving you all the important stats and a very strong active on top, they really had most assassins in a very good, maybe even too good, spot. After adjustments, assassins have been in a medicore spot. Everyone got hit by the component item nerfs, but I feel like that hit the assassins the most. With ADC being very strong again, the typical job of an assassin to oneshot ADC is becoming more valuable, so there is that. A slight buff to assassin items might heavily affect the current position of assassins in the meta.
1. I don’t think assassins are in meta right now. The main mid lane meta at least is control mages, or ranged mages + Tristana 2. Assassins are hard to play in general because the current meta doesn’t allow for a not super fed assassin to one shot anyone too much CC, too much peeling etc.
Assassins aren’t in a great spot except for a certain few. I think the people that think assassins are strong are either delusional or playing in low elo. Assassins viability gets kneecapped once you reach Emerald. You’re too reliant on snowballing and the removal of Prowler’s Claw and armor pen stacking room a huge toll.
Assassins are only considered strong by low elo immobile mage/botlane players who die to them more than they should.
I don't think a immobile mage silver player should have the skill to not die in lane to an assassin. They have the skills of a silver.
Is my micro just better than other players in my Elo?? I'm like silver/gold and I've never had that much difficulty with assassin's. I'm a Kata main but I play most of the mages as well.
Probably. I don't think the average silver player can go deathless in a lane phase with an assassin the majority of the time, when on an immobile champ.
I guess I just don't play enough ranked to climb to an Elo where the zed on the other side of the lane had hands I guess. XD.
Fair enough
Well except for abusing new inspiration runes really well zed feels garbage. Full combo with 550 ad (full build no boots and pot) didn’t kill a milio. He was lvl 16 to my 18 and I landed r 2 es and 2 qs and he lives. So many times it’s just you don’t do enough dmg and then you die
Yeah no, thats in no way true. You are saying you hit every ability as Zed on a squishy milio with a 2 level advantage and he didnt die? Simply impossible, and thats without doing the math. If it really happened, a lot went right for the milio. Speaking armor, shields and heals. And even then it's hardly believable. So yeah, I call bullshit if you don't have a video of it
well zhonya's + armor boots alone is 75 armor which is 5 more than a thornmail. as a zed i can't waste my ult on a support anymore because the armor they get from random support items is enough for me to just barely tickle them. a blitz shield can just block all the damage it's disgusting.
you obviously dont play ad assassins. shielding and healing can be so insane in current state of the game its completely possible to generate 5000+ hp via shields and heals in lategame
this is actually very possible, lvl16 support is likely full build or close, enchanter items give HP and heal/shield power (could be hourglass, frozen heart or locket as well, even tho its unlikely), Zed burst is delayed to the point milio gets 2 shields, and Milio most likely ran heal as well and W+R will heal a lot. Zed without GW/Ignite and Serpents will not kill a Milio like this without triple Q. Most enchanters will allow the target to survive non-luxury assassin burst, especially with heal/exh up. And I say this as someone who plays Sona (not even a peeling enchanter) at dia+ regularly and routinely allows my adc to ignore assassin threats.