Spice Up Your LoL Life: Fun With AD Casters

Although most players choose to follow the current meta, the popularized game structure could never evolve without those willing to challenge it. Sometimes you may find an effective new addition to your repertoire, and sometimes you may fall flat and feed. Either way, changing up your builds and styles instead of plugging away at the same ones is a great way to keep yourself interested, and keep the game fun.

Certain casters, largely designed to be built with magic damage, also have innate qualities that lend themselves well to building attack damage as well. In most cases these champions will not scale as well off of AD items as they would with AP, but half the battle is how the enemy reacts to the build. If your opponent is taken off guard by or does not know how to counter your strategy, it will decrease the effectiveness of his or her own. Disclaimer: the following suggestions are meant to be taken lightly and in fun, not taken straight to ranked.

 

Annie:

Pros:
At 625, Annie has one of the longest auto attack ranges in the entire game, making her poke one of her most valuable assets. The harass she can bring into a bot lane is enough to make any support feel strained, and a lot of carries feel pressured. Her innate stun can make ganks run more smoothly, as well as allow for even more harass in lane. Her shield is, of course, a good defense against pushy lanes, allowing her to take more risks pushing lanes.

Cons:
Although her auto attack range is extremely long, her attack speed is equally slow. As is typical of many casters, her low attack speed can make full engages and farming difficult. Her Q, Disintegrate, counteracts the farming issue by allowing for a free last hit every time it comes off cooldown, but nothing in her kit helps her in engages for attack speed.

 

 

Kennen:

Pros:
Kennen is a great example of a fairly unconventional build that has recently seen a bit of competitive play. With 550 range, Kennen also brings great auto attack range to the table. Kennen's high amounts of crowd control and spell harass allow for poking and chunking without mana costs. This gives Kennen a fairly safe lane with distance between the player and the minion wave, and no possibility of running out of mana. Another fantastic feature of Kennen is the ability to gap close for potential kills and escape from bad situations. This makes for a great lane with healers or supports without a lot of utility or crowd control, such as Sona.

 

Cons:
Like Annie, Kennen suffers from the low attack speed of mage champions. Additionally, Kennen has less reliable crowd control than a lot of other lane options unless Slicing Maelstrom (Ultimate) is off cooldown. Hitting the other marks of the storm, however, can be great for setting up ganks and for chunking.

 

Janna:

Pros:
Although Janna is typically a support champion, I believe she is still worth a mention in this article. The main advantage to playing Janna as an AD carry is the bonus damage she can gain from her shield. With an effective free BF Sword at level 4, it can help to close the gap between Janna's damage output and that of other AD carries. She also has fantastic built in crowd control from Howling Gale, Zephyr, and Monsoon, which can help her and her laning partner to deal a great amount of damage without forcing a full engage.

On a similar note, these three skills give her one of the best disengages of any potential AD carry, producing a very high escape rate along with her passive movement speed. Additionally, Janna still maintains a lot of her utility even when building AD, so she is still a major support asset to the team as a whole with her crowd control and shield.

Cons:
At 475 range, Janna doesn't bring stellar numbers in that category, though she has sufficient defenses to allow her closer to the creep wave safely. Once again, her attack speed sits at a painfully slow .625, though this is better than some other mages. Nearly all of the advantages that make her somewhat viable as an AD carry are what make her an even better support. Because she can apply nearly all of these benefits to a champion with better scalings, this may be more advantageous. That being said, playing Janna as AD allows you to essentially support yourself, be less team-dependent, and therefore save yourself more often. 

Finally:
Experiment with your own unconventional builds, and describe them in the comments. This particular guide isn't necessarily about what is the most effective, but what allows you to change things up and have a bit of fun. Everyone takes the game too seriously once in a while (or more often), and it's important to remember why most of us started playing League in the first place: because we enjoy it.