T1 bot laner Gumayusi has taken aim at the current state of bot lane, saying the growing pile of mages in the carry spot isn’t what ADC players signed up for.
His argument is simple. People pick ADC because they want to play ranged marksmen. Attack damage, crit, attack speed, kiting, and scaling into a late-game monster. If mages become the better or default choice, the role stops delivering the thing players chose it for.
Notably, he isn’t calling for a ban on every weird bot pick. Gumayusi has been fine with Ziggs as a niche or strategic option: a champion who has been treated as a semi-legitimate bot laner for years thanks to his wave clear and siege pressure. His problem is scale. One or two situational mages is variety. A dozen of them being comfortable blind picks is something else.
The list of names being practiced or drafted in the bot carry slot has grown well past Ziggs. Xerath, Syndra, Viktor, Cassiopeia, Taliyah, Seraphine, Swain, Vel’Koz, and Mel have all been mentioned in the conversation, with spicier experiments like Akali, Sylas, and even Yasuo floating around.
Two things make it work. Lost Chapter gets mages online cheaply with AP, mana, and ability haste, which kills the old “mage runs out of mana in a long lane” weakness. And modern supports roam early and often. A mage with ranged wave clear survives alone far better than an immobile marksman who gets zoned off the wave the moment his support walks away.
The result can be a very quiet lane. One side clears from range, the other side can’t punish without eating a combo or a gank, and the actual 2v2 never happens.
That’s where the pro-play concern comes in. Teams recruit players like Gumayusi, Ruler, Viper, and Peyz for spacing, target switching, and surviving late team fights on 200 HP. Handing those players a wave-clear mage hides exactly the skills that got them signed.
There’s a counterpoint, and plenty of players make it: ADC has been the one role that got to play roughly the same 20 champions for over a decade. Mid laners learn mages, assassins, and fighters. Top laners deal with tanks, bruisers, and ranged specialists. Supports swap archetypes every other patch. From that angle, learning a few mages is just the job.
The pushback is that marksmen have nowhere else to go. When they get strong mid or top, Riot usually nerfs them out of it. Champions like Jinx and Aphelios are balanced around having a support babysitting them, so shipping them to a solo lane isn’t a real option.
That’s the open question. Nerfing early mana or wave clear hits mid lane too. Nerfing support roaming reduces map play. Buffing marksmen risks recreating the metas Riot spent years undoing. Nothing official has been announced, which leaves elite bot laners deciding whether to keep expanding their mage pools or wait for a patch to save them.
