The other day this thread hit front page detailing the Rioter GreaterBelugaWhale's thoughts on ADCs complaints about having no agency. In it he talks about how the ADC role is built around the reliable output of their unmissable auto-attacks, and in order for this to come close to being balanced (though he believes the ADC role is overpowered, intentionally so) they need to have very low agency to compensate.
I fundamentally disagree in two ways. I think the lack of agency in the ADC role has nothing to do with the champions themselves, and I think agency and balance have nothing to do with each other. This post will mainly focus on the former because it's the most common misconception which I believe is vital to clear up if the community (including Riot) are to have productive discussions on this matter.
A champion like Lucian doesn't lack agency, in fact he has agency up the ass. He's a strong duelist, he has outplay potential, he can carry. Put him on a solo lane and his agency is painfully obvious to his opponent, he'll constantly dash forward for force trades which he crushes, he has high kill potential after level 6 since he can use Culling to finish off anyone who gets too low from his engages. Compare him to a champion like Orianna and he should stand out as a relatively high agency champion.
His agency tools allow him both to force fights more easily in favourable situations (Orianna has to wait for them to get into her QR range, she can't reposition herself into that range), and his high in-combat mobility especially at level 13+ allows him in-combat agency too, that is, greater ability to outplay his opponents (such as, dodging a perfectly aimed Orianna QR because he has plenty of time to see it casting and press E to dodge if he's good enough).
Mid-late game he's an ADC like any other, and if he's played well, he's not only going to be the most fed champion in the game but also the highest level champion in the game. Pretty much no champion would expect to be able to walk up to him on a side lane and 1v1 him.
Put him on bot lane though? He can't just dash forward to force a trade against that weak early-game Vayne, Janna would hammer him back with W and together they'd beat him. He can only trade when his Thresh is also in range to hit her so the trade is 2v2 instead of 1v2, but Vayne/Janna will back off any time Thresh approaches since they know they lose all-ins so they don't want to get Flayed.
So while the Lucian player may have all those high-agency tools to succeed, and occasionally he may indeed find a window to make a small trade, for the most part he's just spending laning phase waiting for Thresh to land a hook. Whether Lucian stomps or plays passive doesn't mostly depend on how he wants to play, it depends mostly on whether Thresh can hit a hook or not. Whether Lucian wins lane or not doesn't mostly depend on how well Lucian executes trades, it depends mostly on whether Thresh will walk up and Flay Vayne while she's over-extended, or whether he'll overextend trying too hard to force and die.
And his reward for winning lane, whether he deserved to or not? He's 3 levels behind whichever top laner won their lane. If he's 10 kills up on the enemy top laner, he's probably still scared to quickly shove a side lane without his support coming with him in case the 0/4 enemy top laner (or mid laner, or jungler) happens to be nearby and decides to one-shot him.
Mid lane Lucian has agency in just the simple act of choosing to go push out a side lane, because unless he's behind he's confident that if the enemy mid/top/jungle is nearby and wants to contest him pushing out the wave that they have no fundamental advantage over him and would need to outplay him to kill him. ADC Lucian, or more accurately bot lane Lucian, even as the same champion with the same build, would have to do the same act praying that no one will punish him for it, because unless he's extremely ahead there's no way he's even in levels and even being only 1 level behind would be a blessing.
At high levels, the ADCs give up side lane farm entirely while solo laners go to pick up side waves and potentially shove them out or stay to split because the ADC can't safely do that without their support coming with them to protect them, and sending 2 people to bot/top just for one of them to farm while the team is playing through mid lane is extremely inefficient. But if the ADC goes on his own, he risks death, so with an uncoordinated team, where he can't tell the support to come with him to pick up a bot wave then shove it out, and he can't tell his mid laner to leave mid farm to him and go pick up that bot wave instead, his options are to potentially die trying to farm efficiently, or have to share mid lane farm with his teammates all game.
Fortunately at low Elos, just as their teammates will fail to naturally understand what they must do for the ADC to be able to efficiently farm, the enemies will frequently fail to realize that they have an opportunity to punish a solo farming ADC. But the agency is all on them, it's the ADC that's making a mistake trying to do something any solo laner wouldn't struggle doing, and it's the solo laner that has the ability to punish or not punish it. The ADC, even as a champion like Lucian who fundamentally is both a strong duelist and a safe champion, cannot safely farm a side lane for 20 seconds for fear of being matched by a solo laner 2-3 levels above him.
ADC champions don't lack agency. The ADC role lacks agency. And it's true that that it's for good reason that they lack agency; the average fed ADC is more fed than the average fed top laner, because bot lane is a 2 man role. If you wipe out the enemy laners on bot lane you're getting 2 kills rather than one, and bot laners have to be balanced around this.
But in reality, 2v2 wins aren't always 2 kills, and nor is 2 kills guaranteeing that the ADC is getting fed; you can ace your lane twice in a row only for Nautilus to use those 4 kills to buy Mobis and Chain Vest while Lucian's 4 assists allow him to buy a Long Sword along with the BF Sword he'd already farmed up. But you can't balance the game around the ADC getting unlucky, you have to assume that the guy who's meant to be fed kills is indeed receiving his kills when he wins lane, and balance according to that.
I feel like Rioters and Redditors alike tunnel too hard on the champions' kits/itemization when thinking about what makes the ADC role so frustrating to play for ADC players, when there's really nothing wrong with either of those things. Nobody plays Tristana mid and one-shots every mage that dares to step foot past their tower and complains "but I have 0 agency!". Their problem is that they're playing bot lane so they can't walk up past the halfway line without a mage that's constantly out of vision every 30 seconds walking up and one-shotting them because of the massive level advantage they have throughout the game.
Aside from just having 6 sooner, do you know how squishy you are compared to a champion 2-3 levels higher than you? Practice tool lacks a way of measuring DPS onto your champion so there's only so many ways you can test it in a manner that shows you just how massive the difference is, but I picked Lucian and tested how much tower damage I took from 5 tower shots from a tower with 243 AD (though remember the damage escalates) at level 14 vs level 17. At level 14 I survived with 8 HP, at level 17 I survived with 380 HP.
Because of the scaling armor/HP given by each levelup, taking the same damage from the same source, one is able to withstand nearly 400 more damage from the other? Imagine how one-sided a duel between a level 17 Lucian and a level 14 Lucian would be regardless of how much better the level 14 player might be? Without even getting into the levelups impact over their respective DPS (here is an idea of how one-sided a duel would be with a champion 2 levels above you, when they can do that much damage in just a 0.5 second window of fighting back as a result of their levels). All because the level 17 Lucian was picking up solo XP in laning phase which then allowed him to safely pick up solo farm throughout the rest of the game, while the level 14 Lucian was stuck in his usual self-fulfilling prophecy of being underlevelled because he was on a 2v2 lane, then being too underleveled to contest farm on his own and needing to keep his support around taxing XP in order for him to farm safely.
Regardless of individual champion strengths, bot lane ADCs are held back by their role, not their class, making them massively behind by default. It takes a huge item advantage to make up for the standard 2-3 level deficit that a bot laner averages vs a solo laner that isn't behind.
If the problem is limited to bot lane and not solo lanes, then why doesn't every ADC just play solo lane ADCs? It's for the same reason that the top 3-5 highest winrate bot laners for the past 2 years have all been mages on almost every patch and yet mage players continue to only queue mid lane, and those 5 high winrate bot lane mages continue to average a combined 2% pickrate.
Bot lane is where ADCs are used to playing, it's where all their practice has been put towards, it's where all their game knowledge lies, it's where they've developed an understanding of matchups. Making the transition to suddenly being mid/top lane mains would be wasting so much of their development as players.
But even aside from the practicality of that transition, there's also the matter of incentive. There's an extremely limited pool of ADCs that can be played on solo lanes, so while you may enjoy Lucian who can be played mid lane, what if your champion pool consists of Lucian/Jinx/Miss Fortune/Caitlyn/Jhin/Kai'Sa? You're just going to pack it all up and live your life as a Lucian one-trick, even if he's only your 4th favourite ADC? No, you're going to continue playing bot lane for those champions, and even when you pick Lucian, you're going to be doing it bot lane because you were queued up for bot lane when you found the right comp to play him in.
Speaking of Jinx/Miss Fortune/Caitlyn, they might come to mind as ADCs who do lack agency even if they were on solo lanes. And that's true, they do lack agency, but that's because they actually do fit the description of the Rioter GreaterBelugaWhale; they do very little other than walk up and hit you with unavoidable damage.
But no one makes a distinction between the lack of agency of an ADC like Jinx, and the lack of agency of an ADC like Lucian. Because they're not talking about the agency, or lack thereof, within the champions' kits, but within the role they queue up for. They're both tied to living or dying by their support's actions, and both are rewarded for getting through the support coinflip in laning phase with being behind by default vs any solo laner, even if that solo laner is another ADC.
For proof of this, look no further than Kayle. Kayle is nothing more than a magic damage-dealing ADC, and hypercarry at that, who has 0 agency in laning phase and even after still has her agency limited to walking up to people and hitting them with unavoidable damage.
But while people may complain about finding her boring and not liking her pre-6 weakness, not even the most delusional Kayle player in the world is whining about being a walking sack of gold to junglers/mid laners/bot laners. Yeah she has the invulnerability from her ultimate, but these days she can't even auto-attack for half of it, and level 11 onwards (if not sooner) she can 1v1 most champions on the map without needing her ultimate unless they're fed or particularly bursty.
People might not enjoy the steepness of her power curve, but no one complains that she's a minion pre-6 only to stay irrelevant even at 30 minutes. Do hypercarries on bot lane have to suffer through his laning phase with the reward of being the strongest champion on the map at 30+ minutes onwards? No, Kog'Maw players can go 10/0 and still be legally classified as inters if they try to side lane against a mage, or a bruiser or... literally anyone. Jinx players have their traps to potentially outplay any bruiser trying to make a solo play on them, and that outplay will buy them 1 second of time to chunk out 30% of that bruiser's HP before they get unrooted, Flash on Jinx and one-shot her.
That's the difference between a hypercarry balanced around being a solo laner and a hypercarry balanced around being an ADC. When Kayle is even, her ~1 second of invulnerability where she also gets to freely auto-attack will win her a duel against almost anyone. When Jinx is 5 kills up, her ~1 second of getting to freely hit her attacker buys enough time for a teammate to avenge her afterwards, because she needed to be 10 kills up to have any sort of chance at surviving if she tried to do anything other than run. Both champions fit the description of having "reliable output (repeatable ranged unmissable dps)", but their agency in the mid-late game is worlds apart.
If Jinx were balanced around being a solo laner, I would happily play her in a solo lane and I would shut up about ADC issues. I happily play Kayle mid and I enjoy her whole hyperscaling aspect. Much of what I love about ADCs, I also find in Kayle, and much of what I hate about ADCs (which really just mostly comes down to bot lane issues, not issues of the champions themselves), I don't find in Kayle. But Kayle is just one champion, and I'm not about to main mid/top just because this one champion is on my list of top 20 favourite champions to play.
And while I've played a lot of mid lane ADCs over the years where I found the ADCs strong enough on a solo lane to actually not be an awful pick, including mid Lucian, mid Tristana, mid Ezreal and even mid Graves before his rework, that just isn't a wide enough variety of picks to keep me satisfied, the only place I can play whatever ADC I feel like, as an ADC player, is bot lane.
And even if I want to play one of those champions anyway, there's still the issue that balance-wise every single one of them is stronger on bot lane than on mid lane, which is where most of my practice and experience is concentrated in anyway. I would make the switch to mid lane in an instant anyway if ADCs were equally strong in both lanes, but losing 70% of the champions I enjoy playing just to switch to get to play on a more enjoyable lane doesn't feel worth the trade-off.
Champions like Kayle are proof that ADCs can most definitely have agency/options without the entire game being about them, and champions like Corki/Kindred are proof that you don't have to fit into the extreme of either early-game curbstomper or lategame hyperscaler in order to have agency/options and not also feel overbearing towards opponents, regardless of the reliability of their output.
ADC has become almost synonymous with bot lane for better or worse, and as a result of that, bot lane issues have been misinterpreted as "ADC issues". Go match a bot lane Syndra vs a mid lane Cassiopeia who's 3 levels above her and ask her how much agency she feels she has when her full one-shot combo with no spells missed only does 70% of Cassiopeia's HP. Do you think she's going to feel impactful compared to the Cassiopeia while Cassiopeia proceeds to 100-0 her in the time it takes for her Q to come back up, which still wouldn't even kill Cassiopeia if she did get a chance to cast it? Do you think Cassiopeia would feel any better if she were the bot laner and the Syndra 3 levels up on her one-shot her even without bothering to use W?
There is no design/balance dilemna created by the ADC class. They are not overpowered for being the only class played on bot lane any more than they are underpowered for being the only class not strong enough to survive through solo lanes even though a minion like Kayle doesn't even struggle with that. ADC champions are in a perfectly fine balance state, and in a perfectly fine design state.
What is in an awful state is the "ADC role", or the bot lane carry role, or whatever you want to call it. That role lacks agency, that role gets 1v1'd by any 0/5 solo laner or jungler, and that role is the one that doesn't have any obvious solutions for their XP starvation issues since if they did get equal XP despite having twice as many potential kills to obtain per fight, they would entirely control the outcome of the game.
There is no ADC issue, there is only a bot lane issue.
