I agree. It was harder to play non-adcs back then but it was still doable. Also Riot had said they wanted to make adcs non-mandatory but 8.11 wasn't meant to do that really. They nerfed adcs because of ardent meta (still dumb af) and they overnerfed so mages started being played. Then Riot was like "oh we didn't really expect this, this wasn't our immediate intention".
I maintain the opinion that Riot did too many things at once but the idea was good:
The base stat changes / AP ratios to turrets and so on were fine. I think Riot saw from internal playtests that ADCs just had too many base stats and it made early laning impossible against them. I think it was fine to make this change, and TBH, none of this really got unwound, so clearly it ended up fine
They reworked crit items to give IE sh*t base stats and made crit into a true damage conversion instead of a big number payoff. I think this was the wrong call and it's what got reverted.
That's basically all that changed. We're finally in a good spot for crit itemization after walking back the majority of those item changes and we're in a world where mages are indeed viable bot lane and actually considered with relative frequency.
"Adc's just had too many base stats"
Can you give examples of this being the case for the ADC role as a whole in recent memory? I'm not talking Ardent Meta where they were broken or specific op champions. I just don't feel like adc's have had "too many base stats" in a long time.
Adc is legitimately the only role I've played (and I've hit diamond playing every role at some point except top) that has the potential to consistently lose a 1v1 to essentially every other character class in the game even with a lead without major missplays. You can be 5-0 and if your team doesn't help you manage the 0-5 Irelia who tp's behind you in a teamfight then you just die.
Obviously I'm speaking in generalities as there are situations that this doesn't necessarily apply, but it really does feel as if high base stats have not been an issue for the role in a long while to me and that a lot of adc's that aren't as competitively viable would be significantly helped by just giving them back some base stats.
Appreciate your work Phreak, don't take this as criticism I'm just curious as to why you felt those old nerfs were necessary.
This was where their base hp5 went down to ~5 and base AD went down by about 4, compensated by larger scaling numbers. Basically just nerfed their laning but buffed their late game dps.
It was in specific response to them lane testing mages and found they consistently lost lane against marksmen.
devtrackers.gg