Attack Damage assassins haven’t been in a great spot for a while now. Talon and Zed seemed to be everywhere at the beginning of the season, but by the mid point of Spring Split they had all but dropped off the planets thanks to repeated nerfs to the new Lethality items that were introduced at the beginning of Season Seven. Edge of Night and Youmuu’s both ate huge nerfs by the end of the split, but not because of AD Assassins, but because of ADCs like Varus and Jhin that were abusing them. To make matters worse, the fallback item for AD Assassins after the flat lethality items were nerfed, the Black Cleaver, were likewise nerfed later on in the season, this time because of another ADC, Graves.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The tough times may soon be at an end, however. Meddler took to the forums yesterday to announce a set of sweeping changes that Riot is looking to make to the lethal items that are intended to make them all feel more unique. These changes should be hitting in Patch 7.14, so keep on the lookout for them!
The complete proposed change list is as follows:
“- Serrated Dirk/Poacher’s Dirk – Removing the out of combat movement speed and instead giving it a passive where after killing a large minion, monster or champion your next damaging spell against a champion deals 50 bonus damage. Goals of adding a bit of optimization to its use and removing the need to put out of combat MS on everything it builds into.
– Duskblade – No longer has out of combat movement speed, proc damage a flat number (so a more viable first item), has CDR and a very brief slow on application of the Nightstalker proc (think Trundle Q like) plus a cost reduction. Looking to make it a reasonable alternative to Ghostblade as a first major item.
– Ghostblade – More OOC MS, less AD. Cementing this as the strategic mobility choice.
– Black Cleaver – Testing an internal cooldown on how quickly you can add stacks to an opponent (0.5s at present). Aiming to preserve its impact for slow/regular speed stackers, while making it less dominant on those with sufficiently split up physical damage it gets stacked almost instantly.”
