It has been a rather eventful start to the League of Legends competitive season. Not only have fans witnessed underdog teams like SK Gaming or Invictus Gaming thriving in their own regions, but there have also been many new innovative picks across the world, especially in the support role.
This trend started off at the 2022 League World Championship, when the current world champion player BeryL picked the first-ever Heimerdinger support. After teams and players slowly started realizing the ins and outs behind this unconventional pick, they started experimenting with new answers and counter-picks. As a result, traditional ADCs began to be picked as supports, first with Ashe and then others following suit, including Caitlyn and Kalista in the LCK.
In a meta full of ADC supports, however, there is one champion that was specifically designed and released with the goal of becoming a marksman support: Senna. With zero picks across major regions (according to the stats site Games of Legends), why is she not played?
Senna has a weak laning phase
The current professional pro play bot lane meta has two main directions: You either pick scaling ADC with an enchanter, or you pick strong early-game marksmen to bully the enemies. The rise of the ADC supports is mainly caused by the latter, as having an additional ranged support champion makes the laning phase almost unplayable for the opposite side. For example, a Varus with Ashe guarantees long-range poke and permanent priority over the lane.
Even if Senna is a ranged champion, she is too weak in the first few minutes, and she doesn’t offer good AoE damage with her Q. Playing her as a support doesn’t allow you to assert the lane dominance needed to bully a scaling bot lane.
She doesn’t benefit as much from attack speed
This second point is partially related to the first one, since Senna doesn’t have great trading tools without enough attack damage or critical strike. She is designed to scale into the late game thanks to her passive granting souls that are converted into increased crit chance and attack range.
If you pay attention to the ADCs picked in pro play so far this season, all of them can abuse Hail of Blades. The keystone rune grants a big boost to attack speed once activated, allowing these ADC champions to get a couple of auto attacks faster than enemies. By doing so over the course of a laning phase, it can amount to a lot of additional damage, leading to potential kills or dive setups.
Unfortunately, due to her passive, Senna has an attack ratio of 0.3 which modifies the effectiveness of attack speed on the champion. This means that Senna cannot exploit the power of Hail of Blades, making the rune ineffective on her and making her trading much worse.
Another marksman that has a modified attack ratio is Jhin. That said, he offers value thanks to his kit and abilities, which are related to the next reason why Senna is not a suitable pick now.
Senna doesn’t offer as much wave clearing as other ADCs
As mentioned before, double ADC lanes give you strong lane priority and control over the minion waves. The enemies cannot keep up with the wave clearing and counter the push. ADCs like Ashe or Caitlyn have AoE spells that can quickly kill a minion wave with one cast. Senna, on the other hand, doesn’t have this power since her only AoE spell is her Q, and it doesn’t deal enough damage to kill the minions. The spell hitbox is also a thin line, making it even more difficult to hit all possible minions in a wave. In comparison, Caitlyn’s Q can halve an entire minion wave if they are close enough.
All of the aforementioned reasons are why Senna is unpicked so far in pro play, despite being the design that Riot intended when they wanted to create an ADC support. Given the rise of more marksmen champions in the support role, the balance team has a big issue to solve in front of them. With some of the tentative changes in the upcoming Patch 13.3, we might see another shift in the presence of ADC supports.
