League of Legends is a constantly-shifting game with over a hundred playable champions and thousands of variables affecting them and their viability in an constantly-shifting Metagame, so by design, there will always be a share of champions that remain a high priority due to how strong they are. Unsurprisingly, there have also been many cases where a champion is hated for being too powerful, especially if they overstay their welcome in the metagame.
Important notice: Due to the game receiving constant updates, the metagame is rather sensitive to change and often times flexible, meaning that any dominating champion in one patch can end up worthless in the next, so this page will primarily document chronic offenders. For that reason, also remember that Examples Are Not Recent.
Also worth noting that due to the design of the game, how "strong" a champion is can vary heavily with players in normals, ranked games, or the professional scene, and as such, any major discrepancies should be noted when posted.
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Assassins
Assassins tend to be among the most problematic champions for players and the balance teams, since their design conceits hinge around a single question: "Can I go in, kill this target/these targets fast and make it out alive?" If yes, they're incredibly powerful, but if not, then they're near-useless. Due to an incredibly sensitive metagame with a few itemization changes affecting a vast amount of champions, assassins, especially item-dependent "hypercarries," are more susceptible to balance issues more than any other character class, even after several attempts to introduce more counterplay and overall utility beyond their lethality, while still retaining enough to qualify them as "assassins." This doesn't even take different skill levels and champion difficulty into account; often times, difficult-to-play, but punishing-when-played-right champions get ire from both teams as it's very easy to fall into a mindset of "the ally assassin is bronze level, the enemy assassin is horrendously broken," making them some of the most consistently banned champions nobody wants to see in their game.
- LeBlanc has been the source of constant adjustments since her release. When she’s strong, she can take over a game with her strong, hard to avoid and very fast burst damage while being impossible to catch with her spammable teleport. No champion can typically delete a character as safely or quickly as her, and she even is ranged unlike other assassins, with one of the strongest laning phases of any midlaner. However, she also has a very bad late game as she is countered hard by anti-burst mechanics, is incredibly squishy, and overall a difficult champion to pilot. Riot tried to address this with a rework in 2017, but ended up making a champion who had a even better laning phase whilst having access to strong waveclear and area damage so she didn’t fall off as hard, even better damage, synergy with the Hextech Gunblade item giving her broken healing, and the ability to choose which ability her R would Mimic, meaning she always had a teleport up. Not even LB mains liked this version of the champion, and she was reverted fully after a year.
- Fizz is an infamously very slippery assassin, with a reputation of being able to instantly dart around the battlefield and avoid damage, all while laying down scary damage and crowd control with his infamous ult. While several nerfs and reworks helped put him in his definitive place as a squishy AP assassin, many will never forget his heyday where his shark was a far higher-damage death sentence, or the occasions where his innate damage and mobility was so high that he could build for tankier stats while being no less lethal.
- Rengar has consistently been an issue due to his entire gameplay thematic: Stealth, dive onto a squishy enemy, one-shot them from nowhere, then escape just as quickly. While Rengar is usually pretty squishy (depending on the current meta and whether he can reasonably build tank items and maintain his damage), he's been a problem since day one due to this hard-to-play-against concept being so innate to his character, prompting tons of ability tweaks just to make him slightly more palatable when he isn't simply nerfed into the ground. Worse still, several of these attempts to divert his binary concept only served to overload his kit while not directly addressing his stealth or assassination problems (his preseason 7 rework in particular granted a CC-cleanse/heal and a guaranteed 100% crit gap closer ultimate), drawing even more bad faith all around.
- Ekko is actually generally considered a pretty healthy assassin due to the careful nature of his kit and burst damage, but many will never forget his state immediately following his release when it was discovered that due to his immense utility and high base damage, building him as a full tank was far more effective than his expected Glass Cannon build. Tank/bruiser Ekko was considered the default option for the longest time and provided a ton of scary balance issues, especially regarding his late game where he could crowd-control and annihilate enemies without a care in the world for fragility. This path was mercifully nerfed out after countless stat and damage ratio tweaks over the years, where he's finally found his primary recognition as the mostly stable AP assassin he was meant to be.
- Akali's had many problems both before and after her Season 8 VGU, infamous for when she's good for being really good.
- Before her update, her kit's been somewhat all over the place, with a pretty simple yet potently deadly kit allowing her to potentially snowball out of control from a single kill, with her infamous Twilight Shroud being able to help make her even more slippery. However, due to her lack of utility useful for the team and focus on pure all-or-nothing assassinations, she also became extremely easy to overnerf as a failure to kill targets from a lack of damage numbers made her a liability, prompting a full relaunch.
- Issues shifted around with her Season 8 VGU, where her kit was expanded to give her more mobility and combat options that subsequently required delicate play and a relatively longer execution time when compared to other assassins. However, in a way very akin to Yasuo, she became controversial due to many arguing that she's still too loaded and frustratingly effective at her job to play against, not helped by her revamped Twilight Shroud, made to be even more stealthy. Riot had to remove several chunks of her post-relaunch kit (including a heal on her Q, a stun from her ultimate, and the aforementioned "true stealth" which even stealthed her from turrets at one point), even beginning an initiative at the start of 2019 to intentionally gut her to joke status, then buff her back up to normalcy when everyone calmed down, and she's still a pretty contentious champion, after constant adjustments since her rework.
Bruisers and Skirmishers
- Plenty of Divers (fighters with mobility, often known as Bruisers) tends to be hated across the board because of how Riot didn't have any good definition of what Bruisers are and what they should be; are they're tanky assassins or mobile juggernauts? This leaves them in the state where even at their weakest, they can still put up a fight and win you the game as long as you know what to do with them, with little chance to actually fight back and turn the table in your favor. It doesn't help that they're deceptively tanky and/or mobile they are as plenty of rune and/or the summoner spell choices manages to cover up some of their "weakness" if there are any.
- Darius is absolutely loathed by quite a large percentage of the game's community for having a kit utterly overloaded with damage and self-healing, most especially his refreshable, massive-true-damage ult. While it's generally agreed that he's not overpowered per se, it's only because there are a number of champions who exploit his flaws (lack of hard CC or escapes, limited range) to counter him completely and those who don't counter him get destroyed so one-sidedly that they might as well not bother. Additionally, his ultimate means that even a Darius who has a terrible early game can still come back and do immense damage late-game even when purely tank-built, largely by Kill Stealing — with some claiming he's far more annoying and punishing than he probably should be, even for his status.
- Renekton proved that you only need one reliable crowd control move to stay relevant in the metagame for so long, and players dread fighting him head on because of it. His W, Ruthless Predator, is an auto-attack buffer that gives you multiple properties in your next auto attack (applies extra hit up to three times, stun, shield breaker, and each hit applies on-hit effects, among other things), allowing him to just insert it during his auto attack chain without people noticing. The easily accessible crowd control option makes it really useful any time of the game to effectively disable (if not get rid off) a single champion off an enemy team (usually squishies like AD Carry and Enchanter Support) and can singlehandedly flip the gamestate upside down in your favor if you play them right, while the rest of his kit helps him go up close and face punishment just so he can disable someone with relative ease. Because of this, Renekton has a solid presence throughout the time he was active in the toplane metagame even at his weakest, and become a staple pick in professional play because of the skill alone, which culminates in having a full on 100% ban rate during the entirety of LCK 2022.
- Aatrox has historically been in many cases a Low-Tier Letdown (see the respective page for details), even after his 2018 VGU due to initially feeling a bit undercooked and clunky. Post-patch 9.9 Aatrox, however, is now a whole 'nother beast — in addition to ironing out the casting of his abilities (including making his dash more intuitive), his passive and ultimate were greatly reworked, replacing his antiheal and self-revive into huge amounts of lifesteal, turning him into a proper drain tank Lightning Bruiser with extended brawling and late-game snowballing in mind. As is still the case like with pre-VGU Aatrox, Life Drain being such an integral part of his identity means he requires a lot of attention from Riot as it's easy for him to get out of control when played correctly and especially if healing is strong and/or antiheal is weak. In those cases, he can be nigh-unstoppable unless he's up against a counter who can outclass his specific movement or punch through his healing (such as Fiora, Cassiopeia, or Camille), and any form of Grievous Wounds (such as Ignite or Bramble Vest) are considered absolute requirements to even try to deal with him. The good news is that this is still dependent on the challenge of landing his abilities, but nowadays even after extensive nerfs and tweaks, he leans on being a very strong bruiser pick.
- Pre-VGU Irelia was hated back in her heyday for embodying the worst of the tanky DPS golden age, when Riot was still trying to figure out how to make melee champs that weren't straight tanks or bulky mages work, and boy, was it obvious. Her biggest problem was that her kit was simply too overloaded: Free scaling tenacity, a dependable nuke/gapcloser with an easy-to-trigger reset that triggered on-hit effects, passive healing and true damage from auto-attacks, an easy targeted stun/slow, and a relatively low-cooldown ultimate that gave her long-range piercing nukes that allowed her to recover chunks of her health. The end result made her incredibly frustrating and annoying to deal with (possessing so much innate damage that she could build tanky and still be horrifying), and so she was hit with near-constant nerfs for a good deal of 2011 (creating the "better nerf Irelia" meme), and reworks to tone down the really problematic parts of her kit without making her useless. She eventually reached a general state of balance and favorability for several years, and was eventually subject for a full relaunch to better capitalize on her gameplay fantasy and remove several egregious design artifacts for good measure.
- Irelia received her full VGU in 2018, though she hasn't emerged completely unscathed. While much of her original design cruft was removed, her active strengths were shifted around to preserve her status as a very high-mobility, high-power duelist in the right hands, resulting in her being a highly dominant toplane and midlane threat throughout the rest of the season. Naturally, widespread vitriol and consistent nerfs to the champion were to follow.
- After her buffs starts rolling in and with the addition of her passive can proc on structures, many mid-to-high diamond top laners will swear on Fiora and for a good reason. She's a versatile fighter with good statline, solid sustain, healthy mobility options, and powerful disengage choices. Doesn't help that her Riposte is deceptively strong since you don't need hit someone who uses a crowd control move with it to be useful, because the double cripple and slow is enough to practically bring any lane trading a piece-of-cake and make her hard to go up against. Combined with the buffs that allowed her Q and E to proc on buildings, she becomes a stupid splitpushing machine that the viable way to go up against her is to haste on Bramble Vest.
- Camille managed to prove herself to be pretty strong regardless of how the current meta goes, but when the meta does favor her, she becomes STUPID. Camille's entire power is essentially defined by two words; Precision Protocol, whose true damage proc essentially gives her Cho'Gath's ultimate in a normal ability with generous cooldown by late game. Her other skills essentially makes her a hypermobile assassin with bruiser properties that further emphasizes her powerplay and giving her easy access to take down an important target or escape ganks with ease. Even in the scene where Camille is overshadowed by the current top picks for toplane, Precision Protocol ensures her a higher spot on the toplane tier list than most, with Riot being hesitant to nerf it lest they end up completely gutting Camille.
- A ton of Skirmishers (sometimes referred to as "melee carries") tend to be considered high-tier scrappies at lower ELOs, stemming from how they — especially earlier ones — tend to be designed. Their general design conceit is that they're able to duel 1v1 or serve as cleanup against weakened enemies, and thus escalate significantly by late game, able to shred entire enemy teams when properly fed. This presents balance issues when ranged carries, including marksmen exist, most of which are able to serve as primary damage dealers from a distance and don't require being in inherently dangerous close-quarters range, demanding skirmishers walk a tightrope balance-wise, needing to survive the enemy onslaught to deal their sustained damage without becoming utterly unstoppable (this aspect varies a lot on skill range, as more coordinated and skilled teams tend to have an easier time stopping them). Riot has become increasingly aware of this issue and (re-)designs modern champions to require more versatility or possess more utility to make things less binary, but a few artifacts exist here and there.
- Master Yi is one of the oldest still-remaining skirmishers who fits this design philosophy to a tee; all of his power comes from blink-and-you'll-miss-it damage and snowballing to shred entire teams, with annoying temporary invincibility with his Alpha Strike, self-healing, and on-kill cooldown resets. Because of how scary he can get from this, a common complaint is that games focus entirely around him simply for him existing, though this is a double-edged sword since due to his all-or-nothing nature and weak early game, he's also fairly easy for coordinated teams to punish before he gets to that point. Because of his "brutal at low levels, ineffective at higher levels" identity being set in stone, however, Riot doesn't consider him a high-priority balance target, so he still gets complaints from low-level players for being "broken" to this day.
- Tryndamere has been known for having very extreme strengths, but at very hefty costs where he's treated as highly unstable for any given meta. His strengths include brutal crit-based auto-attacks, a pretty solid low-cooldown dash, and his infamous ultimate that prevents him from dying, along with a niche as one of the best splitpushers in the game. His downsides are that he's also an enormous stat-checker lacking in pretty much everything else, including a consistent early game, flexibility against counters, and even the actual ability to carry in teamfights. How this ends up in practice is that he's generally seen as such a gamble that he's very rarely tolerated unless he reaches 6 items, but he's incredibly obnoxious once there since there's very little that can be done against his raw DPS and Undying Rage if the enemy team just doesn't have the right champions to delay him. Prior to late 2021, he was almost completely forgotten beyond his kingdom of low ELO and a cult of dedicated mains, but as preseason 2022 began rolling around and the meta began shifting (including a widespread shift in favor towards burst damage and increasingly relevant items like Galeforce), he was discovered to be astonishingly powerful for being really annoying.
- K'Sante had one hell of a debut year for being another technical, high-skill-ceiling brawler who remained consistently relevant in higher divisions and pro play, with the biggest complaint being that he has fundamentally too much — the sturdiness of a Warden, abilities to shield himself and make himself immune to crowd control, multiple forms of his own control, multiple dashes, and an ultimate ability that not only ratchets up his damage even further, it also essentially removes one opponent away in a team fight. While this is placed within a delicate kit and requires skill to use optimally, this sheer versatility and the fact that he's essentially pigeonholed to purchase tank items has kept him an enormously relevant top-laner, with many coming to loathe him for being yet another inherently overloaded champion that introduces far more problems than he's worth.
- Special mention goes to the Windbros, the duo Skirmisher brothers of Yasuo and Yone that shares the same crit-damage passive modifier that practically gain increased crit chance at a cost of lowered critical damage dealt, which allows them to only need to buy two crit items and left you with three spaces that you can mix and match yourself to cover up their innate squishiness. Both brothers has some situational defensive mechanic that allows them to basically deny your opponent's offense (anti-projectile for Yasuo, large shielding for Yone). Both brothers also scale on attack speed for their ability cooldown reduction, which makes them really spam heavy and downright unstoppable if you let them escape the early game hell they normally face. Their overall strength is offset by the technical difficulty that the players must master whilst controlling them, but in general they're really strong and potent regardless of roles.
- Yasuo is a high-risk, high-reward skirmisher who has just enough utility to survive prolonged combat if his player knows what to do. A good Yasuo will blitz through an entire team while remaining almost untouchable thanks to his dash mechanic, passive shield, and Wind Wall; a bad Yasuo trying the same thing will get murdered. This makes him loved and loathed at all tiers, and banned by both sides, because "their Yasuo" will become a team-slaying monster, while "your Yasuo" has a sign around his neck saying "Free Gold Here".
- Similar to his younger brother, Yone is also a high-risk high-reward skirmisher with similar damage-crit modifier and having the cooldown tied to the user's attack speed, with the only major difference is that Yone doesn't have his own equivalent of Wind Wall and a greater emphasis on close range combat. However players soon realize that the intended high-risk factor in his kit is more downplayed compared to his brother thanks to three different dashes that offers him versatile mobility, as well as having safer gameplan that rewards aggressive actions with good sustain, which in turn allows player to be much more reckless and daredevil when playing with him.
Unique Marksmen
The majority of Marksman champions tend to be seen as balanced due to their primary power (high consistent damage that snowballs to lategame) being offset by their lack of other options such as mobility or disengage, and the fact that they have to aim for the lategame to carry their team when average match time is 30 minute makes them hard to stand out among other champions like Bruisers and Control supports. However, some have fancier toys to play with that challenge the idea in a potentially devastating way:
- Ezreal is one of the most consistently popular champions in the game in large part due to his versatility and fast-paced gameplay, and he's usually considered healthy and liked enough that he rarely strays hard into being a "scrappy." However, he's created some rippling balance issues due to the design of his Mystic Shot, a skillshot that applies on-hit effects normally applied by basic attacks, which has resulted in surprisingly intense and unexpected consequences that the rest of the game (particularly its items) have had to accommodate for, one of the most infamous being with the Kleptomancy mastery introduced in preseason 8. With its ability to allow champions to gain gold and other goodies from weaving basic attacks in with abilities, it was practically built for Ezreal and him alonenote , and the rune ended up having to be balanced solely around him (as well as vice-versa, itself causing problems for those who didn't want to take Kleptomancy due to its RNG-heavy nature). After hogging the rune for the better part of two years, it was decided that Kleptomancy was a lost cause and was removed entirely in preseason 10, mercifully returning Ezreal to a paradigm where he could be simply "good".
- Kai'Sa is infamous among the playerbase as an example of how overloaded newer champions and reworks has become, containing a stacking Percent Damage Attack passive, reliable waveclear that also functions as a quick single target burst, a long-ranged poke, a mobility option that increase her attack speed and can grant her stealth, and an ultimate that allows her to chase marked enemies from far away and give her a good chunk of shield on top of it. Even with her weaknesses (no form of crowd control whatsoever, thus relying hard on control support to help her out of the laning phase), Kai'Sa's sheer versatility has made her one of the most inherently powerful marksman to date, being able to remain relevant even after other marksmen with just as (if not even more) overloaded kits like Aphelios and Samira entered the scene.
- Aphelios got hit with this reputation pretty bad on release — while he was hyped up as another high-skill floor, high-power potential champion, players quickly found that he was both nowhere near as intensive as expected and his kit was too rewarding, with a ton of backlash against his gun-changing mechanic as being too versatile and overall lacking punishable weaknesses, with virtually every combo being viably lethal. He was also hit with clarity issues — for as much as Riot did their best to emphasize and make clear which gun he's using in his main hand, enemies often had a hard time telling what was in his off-hand and what his ultimate did at any given time, though the former at least got addressed with a new indicator later on. Many nerfs and quality-of-life tweaks to his kit have put him in a more manageable place where his combos are less all-encompassing, making gun cycling an important skill for players to properly manage to be effective as Aphelios, but with his track record, it's no wonder he's built up a reputation for being the purest form of "unfair" design in a while.
- Samira was really annoying on launch, with Riot effectively designing an AD marksman version of Katarina but greatly underestimating how much her strengths would outweigh her weaknesses. The playstyle of racking up fast combos to unleash a crazy ultimate balanced with fragility and high mobility isn't anything new, but Samira's biggest asset was the fact her abilities applied 1:1 on-hit lifesteal, making it so long as she built up a full combo, it was completely in her ability to facetank a 5-man enemy team and still win. Combined with other nuisances like her ability to dash to knock up any stunned enemy using basic attacks (a trait considered too rewarding given it didn't even require her to be in harm's way to use) and her Blade Whirl being compared to a 360-degree Yasuo Wind Wall, it's not surprising that she had a ban rate circling around 80-85%. Eventually, Riot had enough of her and directly nerfed her major strengths (Wild Rush has slower cast speed and no longer allows you to dash on an allied unit, lowered lifesteal per ultimate hit, a Blade Whirl that lasts half as long, and overall lowered AD scaling) that she finally relegated into a niche snowball pick on botlane rather than being a meta-defining pick she is before.
- Zeri is a marksmen that, due to her unusual, high skill-based form of running 'n' gunning, started off in a wonky state of inconsistent balance, but ended up crossing into high-tier scrappydom during the middle of her debut 2022 season. In addition to her kit conceptually having a lot (her wallbang is a gnarly long-range poke, her dash gives her massive map-crossing mobility, and her ultimate gives her intense scaling and chasedown potential), her synergy with enchanters is through the roof, most especially with Yuumi, whose untargetability and potent Zoomies are no-brainer options to pair up with Zeri in making her even harder to catch. In pro play, the botlane meta was absolutely magnetized to Zeri (usually with Sivir as a counterpick due to being seen as on par with Zeri's ridiculous DPS and mobility), requiring several direct nerfs just to make her less overbearing as both players and Riot struggle to determine counters to her sheer speed.
Supports
- Engage supports, archetype consist of champions (usually tanks, but they can also be assassins and/or bruisers with lockdown capabilities) that specializes in some form of lockdows (usually pulls) that forgoes the usual sustainability of enchanters or the resilience of wardens in trade of taking down single (or multiple) target in a well-coordinated crowd control to effectively shut them down and/or even stop their gameplan altogether. Usually they're balanced around the fact that their overall damage is rather low and had to rely on peeling off enemy's resource so that the allied champions could finish them off. Regardless, the fact that they can singlehandedly flip the gamestate by either disabling or outright removing a core member from their team (usually their main damage dealer or the crucial enchanter support) with relative ease means that they're even more dangerous than the ADC marksman because they're effective regardless of the gamestate.
- Enchanters were seen as an underrated gamechanger in recent years, in the metagame where Engage Support reign superior, many had figured out that they were less restrictive than Engage Supports because they can roam elsewhere and assist other laners earlier on and give them extra edge instead of just staying with the AD Carry botlaner all the times. Champions like Janna and Soraka were often derided because of what they can do they did it a little too well and can quickly outheal all the damage dealt with no sweat, while champions like Bard and Rakan find healthy engagement with their absurdly powerful roaming power that they possess. Of course that they're offset by subpar durability and even weaker damage curve, which make them easy target for the enemy team, but you already knew that, and crafty players have already knew how to circumvent their weakness.
- Yuumi isn't consistently a high-tier pick, but in metas where she is, she's a symbol for everything busted about Enchanters when left unchecked, and then some. Her entire game plan of attaching onto allies — becoming Nigh-Invulnerable in the process — has received a lot of flack for her lack of flexibility, where if she's doing her job right and keeping her host alive and well, her single-button-press heal/speed boost, homing poke, and excellent AoE ultimate provides little to no weaknesses or counterplay opportunities as soon as she gets an early lead, and thus ends up with a near-universal presence and crushing winrates when Enchanters are high in demand, simultaneously making it easy to overnerf and make useless. Even after a pretty substantial mid-scope rework in early 2023 (shifting around her heals, toning down her potential damage scaling and crowd control, and tweaking her attaching ability to be more biased and situational in nature), she's still been greatly criticized for being too polarizing and skewed for high-tier play, amassing a hatedom of detractors who want to see her removed on the basis that she's The Load when weak and frustratingly effective and toxic when not.
- Seraphine is essentially Sona with her design cruft ironed out and replaced with the traditional mage skillshots, which makes the playerbase think of using her as a support or an AP Carry counterpick in the botlane. Riot has tried repeatedly to push her as a midlaner by buffing her major strengths such as her scaling and survivability, but it ended up makes her even more annoying in duo botlane thanks to how her kit synergy gives her plenty of versatility when buddied up, even if she wasn't playing as the support. In recent years, Seraphine finds a comfortable spot as a duo lane AP Carry with either a Marksman-hybrid support like Ashe or Senna, since her kit is pretty good going up against a lot of Marksman in the game, and her kit just being well-synergized with most champions that include some sort of slow in their kit, allowing her to simply root the target without having to charge her passive, reserving it for more powerful heal or poke burst.
Other Specific Examples
- "Power farmer" junglers — junglers specializing in amassing gold through fast jungle clears and objective control over duelling and ganking — is an archetype that became infamous during their heyday between 2014-2016, as their very existence created balancing chaos across the Rift. During this period, Riot designed jungle items specifically meant to cater to this fantasy, namely Wriggle's Lantern (and its upgraded form, Feral Flare) and the Devourer enchantment, both starting off with average stats that exploded in power once a jungler secured enough enemy/monster kills, but both left massive unintended implications: for starters, many saw their upgraded forms as objectively superior to other options (Feral Flare infinitely stacked damage/healing and provided increased utility with free, long-range wards, while Sated Devourer outright doubled any inflicted on-hit effects), leading the items and the champions that could use them to be played over everything else, also resulting in several champions being forced to shoehorn them into their builds to stay relevant. Second, this also forced an unstable paradigm for the power farmers themselves to be balanced around, initially making several of them really busted, and forcing them to be nerfed based on the potential of how strong the items would make them (Sated Devourer in particular skyrocketed the relevance of champions with regular on-hit abilities, from Master Yi, Shyvana, Udyr, and even Fizz and Kayle). This made farming and completing the item upgrade before the enemy jungler imperative above all else, unintentionally encouraging a form of lone wolf "AFK farming" where junglers would spend up to a half hour farming and never interacting with their teammates, only showing up once they felt capable of destroying the enemy team themselves. By mid-2016, Riot finally gave up on designing items this way and removed both, rebalancing those affected by their loss to more standard paradigms, aged cruft and fallout be damned.
- Pre-VGU Poppy, along with the old Sion, is considered by Riot to be one of the worst champions they have ever designed. She was the most extreme example of imbalanced risk-reward in the entire game; her passive was a massive damage reduction that gave her ridiculous faux-tankiness and an utterly broken ultimate that gave her complete invulnerability to damage and crowd control with absolutely zero downsides. To elaborate on her old ultimate, it was perhaps the biggest case of Not the Intended Use in the game. "Diplomatic Immunity" was meant to initiate a 1v1 duel with an enemy champion just like Camille's ultimate. During teamfights, you could choose a low-damage champion such as the support and deal massive damage to the rest of the team while No-Selling their efforts to stop you. The saving grace was that her kit was so boring and her early game took so dismally long that if she got to late game she would be terrifying, but even by carry standards it took her so long to get good that she was totally impractical. Thankfully, Riot nerfed her into complete unplayability, and eventually she was given a complete rework/visual update during Season 5.
- Ryze is infamously the most significantly reworked and retooled champion in the game, stemming from his original design concept as a tanky burst mage, and has gone up and down the tier lists as a result.
- In his initial iteration, his big issue was the lack of dimensionality of his kit: if you got too close to him, he could immediately snare you an unload his entire combo with virtually no counterplay, and the only thing that determined whether he was broken or useless was whether that could immediately kill you. It also doesn't help that unlike every other champion in the game, his damage scaled from mana, introducing a side effect of annoying durability since most mana items provide tanky stats, making him very awkward to play against by late game if he got ahead.
- His Season 5 rework was an attempt to rectify his issues, but inadvertently made things even worse. The big issue was that his inherently binary gameplay style of "I snare you in close range, unload my combo and hope that kills you" wasn't directly addressed, instead opting for an overly complicated new passive and ultimate system that granted massive cooldown reduction, essentially dialing up his DPS while retaining most of his burst damage and infamous snare, resulting in notorious rapid-fire and unstoppable combos
. He would then be nerfed back into a kit slightly less reliant on his snare, but he still had major balance issues in that warranted yet another rework. - Season 6 Ryze is hopefully going to be his final one, but he's still divisive. Ryze's new abilities (aside from his brand new utility ultimate) became designed to directly combo off each other, requiring on-the-fly strategizing and understanding of various elements to his kit to lay waste rather than simply giving him more DPS in cooldown reduction. A midgame/lategame Ryze has bar none some of the best waveclears in the entire game, but along with his majorly reduced mana scaling, it seems Riot finally abandoned the idea of "tanky burstmage", and simply settled for a slightly tougher-than-normal sustained-battle mage.
- Tahm Kench has been a balancing rollercoaster due to an enormous amount of his power coming from his Devour mechanic, an integral part of his identity, but is considered in practice by most to be too good at its job in instantly saving allies from death or suppressing enemies in skirmishes (to say nothing about his additional crowd control, tankiness, and utility ultimate). In addition, his kit occasionally pulls him into being a decent toplane pick, often seen as mutually exclusive with his intended support route, and Riot's attempts to pull him from one to the other has often left him a technically competent Stone Wall, but in the sloggiest, most non-interactive way possible. Riot substantially reworked him in 2021 to make him less centralized on Devour by making it his ultimate, swapping around a tweaked Abyssal Dive ability to make him more of an engage tank, which fortunately stabilized him in making him more interactive as a Stone Wall while not able to just completely smother enemies by existing.
- In ARAM, the most historically-disliked champions are those with long-range poke damage and those with healing abilities. The game mode lacks the ability to recall to base to heal up, so any damage received is usually permanent and is only mitigated by health pickups that spawn every few minutes or from player-based sustain. This may work for or against you given how champions are largely random, but nobody likes being on the receiving end of poke-heavy teams that can damage you from afar with impunity (infamous offenders being Xerath, Ashe, Lux, etc.), especially if they have a healer like Sona or Seraphine that can help them outlast your response. Riot eventually deemed it enough of a problem that in 2019, they made it so that poke damage was greatly reduced (damage falls off the further in range the ability travels) and began issuing slight ARAM-specific balance changes to make things more stable, so while they can still be a pain in the tail, they're not overwhelmingly so. They also added "Snowball" as a summoner spell, giving melee champs a means to engage ranged champs without getting whittled to half health on the way in.
