League of Legends (LoL) Question: What happened to ADC?

The turning point was the crit item changes. It gives a weaker three item spike and requires more time to amp up in damage. A few small changes throughout the season impacted this too:

• Summoner Rift games are shorter, marksman have less time to scale to fullest potential.
• Conqueror and AP items make killing tanks easier which originally was a marksman's specialty.
• Marksmen had a stats nerf making the early lane difficult and less tolerable.
• AP champions can take turrets with their auto-attacks and baron is easier to shred.

For those reasons the role of a marksman can be accomplished by other roles to the same, or better, outcome.

Well, if you read through the 8.11 Patch there were huge changes on all ADC's and also on alot of crit items such as Infinity Edge, Runaan's Hurricane, Statikk Shiv, Rapid Firecannon and Phantom Dancer. Also a new item, Stormrazor got released. The changes on the crit items should force ADC's to scale slower into the game. As you can see in the patch notes, Runaan's Hurricane, Statikk Shiv, Rapid Firecannon and Phantom Dancer got more expensive and now you can rush Infinity Edge, because it does not give you any chrit chance any longer by itself.

Also On-Hit ADC's like Kai'Sa and Varus got their core item Guinsoo's Rageblade nerfed twice patches in a row, what decreases their strength.

Since games got shorter recently players realised, that ADC's need to long to scale good into the game, what just makes them pretty useless in those short games. And then some Pro's had the idea to play bruisers and mages on the ADC position. Now, these type of champions just fit better into the meta than normal ADC's.

In the 8.12 or 8.13 Patch, im not sure which one it was, Twitch and Tristana got their scaling buffed. I guess riot tried to bring some ADC's back into the game, but this wasn't enough. We gotta see how this meta will go on, but I personally hope, that they bring ADC's back.

A huge changes to the crit items cussed it.