![]() I remember the days when you’d send two people would go top instead of putting someone in the jungle, and this was seen a strategic choice to roll with and not a declaration of war from a teammate with evil intentions. The truth is, I miss those experimental days where you could take anyone anywhere and people would nod. Amidst the hullabaloo of it all, I find myself experiencing the strange emotion known as hope. There’s been a knee-jerk response of anger - that’s not where bruisers go! Marksmen go bot! The community is debating whether there’s room for a metagame where the roles fundamentally shift so dramatically, Riot is promising to monitor the situation and other roles are chiding ADC mains for not adapting to the meta. ![]() With marksmen in a very weak spot, high level players are throwing bruisers into the bot lane. There have been brief glimpses of alternatives to this set up, like the Leona and Jarvan IV murder lane, but they never quite escaped the realm of cheese. The details have shifted, but the general shape remains the same: you send an ADC bot, and a support takes care of them. Supports have turned from passive ward droppers to more active and engaged characters, up to and including being active assassins. Twitch and Quinn have left the bot lane for other roles, and Kindred was designed as a marksman who lived in the jungle. Sure, there have been some changes to the way things worked overall: different flavors of ADC have come and gone, with Caitlyn and Tristana ebbing away to be replaced with Graves or Vayne, to eventually be replaced by another strong set of marksmen. The idea of funneling last hits into a marksman only gained popularity after the Eurolane spread like wildfire, and since then, we’ve been locked into that meta. The community had weird, internal rules - if someone was working on chipping a minion down, it was considered foul play to take the last hit from them. ![]() You could throw Singed down there and it worked out just fine. Those were simpler days, a time where League of Legends was all about wild experimentation. “You take her bot! Then, you put a support down with her, and the support just heals her and keeps her alive while she farms and gets huge. “No, no, you don’t take her mid!” I said. ![]() He had been the one to teach us all that if you took Teleport on Ashe instead of Ignite, you could cross map snipe for insanely long stuns, teleport in and get the kill. “Right,” said my friend, who was very proud of his mid lane Ashe. “It’s like this,” I said, carefully balancing a slice of pizza in one hand while I locked in Soraka with the other. In those days, Europe was the best region in the game, and the fact that they had come up with this strategy was enough for us foolish North American Bronze players to sit up and take notice. Years ago, when I was but a teenager playing League of Legends from my makeshift desk of an Ikea cabinet propped on its side, I vividly remember chatting with friends about something the Europeans had come up with.
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