Why it’s harder to climb as an ADC: The proof in the numbers

The ranked season ended a few weeks ago and it was the same kind of fiesta that happens every year. While most of the player base can barely reach Platinum rank, the same trends are showing everywhere, even in the top 0,001% of players known as the top 50 Challengers.

Some things are just universal it seems, even in Challenger. Better jungler always wins, the top lane is an island and ADC is weak. But apart from the stereotypes surrounding League, now there is legitimate proof that all of these are true.

Role distribution

The table below shows the role distribution for the top 50 Challenger players at the end of season 11 for the North American, European West, and Korean servers.

Some things that immediately stand out are the percentage of players that are junglers in the top 50 on all three servers. Although it’s not surprising considering the role bears the most responsibility and deciding how the early game will play out. And that matters, even more, the higher elo you reach because you’re facing better players, and the games last much shorter. There isn’t a lot of room for error in high elo, good players don’t give you opportunities to make a comeback.

The other worrying trend we see is that ADC players make up the smallest percentage of the top players on these servers. But to get a better understanding of how big the gap of impact is between the ADC and other roles, let’s take a look at another table. This table shows how roles match up accordingly to the rank the players achieved. If the rank one player is a jungler he gets 50 points in the jungle section. Rank two gets 49 to his role section all the way down to the rank 50 player getting one point.

This shows that the gap between the ADC players and the next role is 300 points which is astonishing to think of. These two tables show a lot of things that can be recapped easily. Jungle players make the most of the top 50 players by percentages and they get higher ranks, shown by their point totals. Top lane players are in the middle in terms of quantity in the top 50 but get higher ranks than almost every role except jungle. These statistics are also easy to explain because the top lane is usually the kingdom of the one-tricks.

Players who play only one champion will always climb higher than other players only on the fact that they have mastered their champion. But nowhere is this more apparent than in the top lane, especially if the enemy top laner is auto-filled. In jungle and support, you can pick tanks, do your best not to lose the game, and hope your team carries the game. But top lane is the role that punishes auto-filled players the most.

Bot lane in high elo

And the final point is probably one of the main reasons for the ADC role being so unsuccessful even in the highest ranks. Support players usually get higher ranks than mid laners and ADC players, even though it’s widely agreed the role is much easier to play than the rest. Well, the reason this happens is that after the Ardent Censer meta, supports started playing like a second jungler on the map.

Roaming became such an integral part of the game, that enchanter supports who have trouble roaming are looked down upon. Most of the time in high elo after the ADC gets a few levels, both support players base for items and start roaming. They leave the bot lane to be a solo lane where the ADC players just farm waves, while the outcome of the game is decided by fights happening on the other side of the map. Oftentimes to combat this they have been forced to give up their farm so they can roam with their support and have an impact.

Even though with the item rework, marksmen got better power spikes at one and three items, the meta shifts resulted in them losing their impact on the outcome of the game. This isn’t as apparent in lower elos, where games last longer, everyone makes mistakes and marksmen get items by default. But still every ADC player has felt useless when the enemy assassin or tank is so fed that they’re useless, regardless of whether they played good or bad that game.

Fixing bot lane is hard

The prospect of giving ADCs early impact is dangerous because of solo lanes. A resourceless ranged repeatable attack is super powerful especially when the enemy cannot fight back (or does not know how to fight back in any way but the straight-forward one). That’s why especially in lower skill brackets, solo-lane marksmen are met with disgust. Every top laner hates Vayne, Quinn, Tristana, and Lucian top. Kassadin and other mage players also don’t like Lucian and Tristana mid. You base once without Teleport and half of your tower is gone. Another issue are the tower dives.

A 3v2 or 4v2 bot dive used to be something that required Elise or Alistar or someone who could be the dedicated tower tanker. Now those dives are guaranteed double kills, there is just nothing you can do other than hope your team responds and turns it into a 3v3 or 4v4 with a TP or matched roam. However, with the strength of meta junglers and mid laners, roaming as a mage into the fog of war is a great way to suicide, so matching roams against those champs is basically impossible.

Gaining resistances under the tower, perhaps even scaled to the number of divers, could be a good way to help ADCs and bot lane feel like more than just a double bag of gold for the enemy mid and jungle to collect every few minutes. Balancing around pro play, late game, skill and champion differences, as well as the damage creep in the game are all issues that make bot lane harder to balance.