Season 14 has been very burst heavy, which has lead to frustration within the community. Especially ADC players have been annoyed, but does their role truly suck? The devs don't think so, but what do players think?
Lethality items on bot laners has become the new norm in League of Legends. What even is crit, eh? In Season 12 Riot tried to stop some of the power creep that had made its way into the game by adding a huge durability update halfway through the season, but with the new items, these changes have laregly been undone.
Burst is higher than ever and one class that has suffered tremendously are the bot laners who love to build crit, because lethality is just more efficient. In a recent video, David "Phreak" Turley the Live Pod Design Lead on League of Legends, made his stance on the ADC issue known.
LoL: "I Do Not Agree That ADC's Sucks"
In the upcoming League of Legends Patch 14.3, Riot is going to be nerfing some of the OP lethality items like the Collector and Youmuu's Ghostblade, but a large part of the community does not think this is enough to dissuade players from building lethality instead of crit on their bot lane champions.
The reason for this is the state of the game right now. League of Legends has become a much more fast-paced game throughout the last few seasons, and ADC's tend to be the champion class that wants to scale and play for the long haul. Especially crit bot laners like to wait until the late game, because once they have enough crit and crit chance to be impactful.
Phreak: "I don't believe ADC suck" by u/Barb0ssaEUW in leagueoflegends
These days, games tend to be much shorter than before, with everything feeling rushed, while still having a 14-minute laning phase. It makes every single second within the game count for more, which has an adverse effect on late game champions and roles, which is why ADC's feel awful to play right now, according to the community.
A huge problem with the role currently is not their strength, but the fact that they are not enjoyable to play. So while some ADC mains do agree that the role isn't fundamentally weak right now, they do hope that Riot will listen to them to try and find a way to make the role more fun to play for future patches without the champions becoming oppressive in other roles – looking at you Varus top lane.
Overall, it feels more like there is an issue with the game itself than the ADC role and we might be seeing another durability update in our future instead of changes to the role itself to have games go longer once more... but that's just a guess for now.