Caitlyn has had a roller coaster of a year. She went from watching on the sidelines as Jhin and Varus dominated the lethality meta of the early season to completely dumpstering her competition as the most OP markswoman in the game.
Following last week’s patch, she’s back to the bench with the lowest win rate of all ADCs, according to League of Legends stats site OP.gg. Her pick rate has taken a massive hit as well.
In Patch 7.16 last week, her Yordle Snap Trap and Piltover Peacemaker were both significantly nerfed. Stacking on top of her nerfs from Patch 7.11 a couple months ago, that was the final nail in the Caitlyn coffin. She’s definitely felt the pain, too, because her win rate is now a depressing 44 percent. Using her win and pick rates as evidence, it’s tough to find a strength in Caitlyn’s kit enough to make it worthwhile to play her in solo queue. It’s especially bad when you consider playing another ADC that’s much stronger and takes much less effort to succeed on.
It seems like her nerfs were a little too over the top, but they weren’t without merit. Up until this patch she’s had total dominance over the professional meta, being banned in almost every single professional game over the last few splits according to pro League stats site Stage.gg. Nerfs were necessary to allow pro ADCs to breathe a bit more, opening up more bans and pick opportunities. Her solo queue performance, however, was already bad before the nerfs, and now it’s even worse.
If Riot dishes out some emergency buffs or reverts the nerfs from the last patch, it could throw Cait right back into the same issue professionally. But if they don’t, her solo queue performance will continue to plummet. It’s definitely a tricky situation to be in. We’d be surprised, however, if we didn’t see some sort of buff soon, even if it’s a small one.
Since Caitlyn’s only reliable damage now is stacking headshots, perhaps an increase to the headshot’s scaling would help her out. Her headshots are arguably the most broken part of her kit—but right now, it’s all she has.
