Is there a Rioter I can talk to about Smolder cause I already started to not want to play him any more with the last set of changes he got but this is just the nail in the coffin.
A few patches ago, to deal with pretty much the entire community swapping over to Smolder's optimized Runes and bruiser build, Riot tried pushing him into crit builds by putting more of his scalings into crit, but the issue with this is that the crit item ecosystem is really terrible for him.
He has zero decent crit items to build immediately after you finish ER.
- RFC is terrible, makes your dmg irrelevant
- IE is ok damage but isn't good enough to justify the price and lack of any CDR or combat stats other than damage.
- C44 % dmg bonus only applies to his Q's physical damage so the item just sucks on him
This is why Hubris was one of his best 1st/2nd items because it gives him the stats he needed to help smooth the curve into crit items like IE/RFC/LDR.
But since Smolder's crit scalings are so harsh, it's way harder to play a lethality/burst playstyle early since his damage is so nerfed because of those added crit scalings.
One idea I had was to put crit scaling on his 225 burn not on his base kit so bruiser Smolder isn't as oppressive at 225 and crit Smolder isn't shit if he buys an early lethality item.
Before the Cleaver+DFT incident, Smolder was sitting at around 7% pickrate but now he's all the way down to 2% because of how unsatisfying he's been recently.
I just want to go back play last season's Smolder where he could go either bruiser or crit and they were both fun to play and he even had a bunch of runes to pick from too. But now he pretty only has 1 build/rune option and it's extremely stale and unfun compared to before.
tl;dr Riot fucked crit smolder by buffing it gg