League of Legends has over a hundred playable champions and thousands of variables affecting them and their viability in an constantly-shifting Metagame, but while there are always a subset of champions that are considered "the strongest" at any given point in time, a good chunk of the roster below it is at least treated as viable in their own way. Unfortunately, there are some champions that go beyond that and are blasted for being far too weak and lack any meta potential, where in worst-case scenarios, picking them will lead your own team to accuse you of trolling.
Important notice: Due to the game receiving constant updates, the metagame is rather sensitive to change and often times flexible, meaning that any worthless champion in one patch can end up game-breakingly good 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.
- As listed in the High-Tier Scrappy page, "Power Farmer" junglers were a big problem for the holistic balance of the game circa 2014-2016 due to spinning the whole metagame on a very unstable and selfish paradigm: junglers farming up as many camps as they could to buff up the items that reward massive farming, which were always objectively more powerful than the alternate options. Due to the problems this playstyle introduced (it incentivized junglers to spend their time not cooperating with their team in order to farm like mad, and also forced several champions to shoehorn in the items regardless of synergy in order to stay relevant), these items were removed, with Riot choosing to balance the game away from this paradigm... which led to some problems when it comes to champions who were specifically designed to be power-farming monsters.
- Pre-VGU Udyr was one of the most notorious power farmers to come out of the Feral Flare period, as not only does he have solid jungle clear speeds, his sheer emphasis on basic attacks made the item exceptionally powerful on him, with a fully-farmed Udyr able to run up to anyone, slap hybrid damage onto them, and tank up their reaction through lifesteal and sheer bulk with impunity. Since the removal of these items, however, this lack of core dimensionality finally caught up with him, and he hardly saw play anymore thanks to Power Creep effectively making him a Master of None, with contemporaries like Master Yi and Tryndamere able to accomplish more with their aggressive farming. While he had some flashes of relevance since then (especially in early season 11 with the introduction of the Turbo Chemtank item giving him his sorely-needed initiation power), players and Rioters alike considered him in dire need of a full relaunch, which finally came to pass mid-2022.
- Shyvana was also heavily affected by this time period, becoming known as one of the strongest power farmers due to her rapid waveclear and strong AoE potential, benefitting especially from the Sated Devourer meta due to her duplicated on-hit effects making her impossible to duel against. Following the removal of the items, however, she's also been subject to Power Creep with Riot being unsure of what exactly to do with her since her lack of gapclosers and CC makes her awkward to use compared to other juggernauts and bruisers. While bandaid patches were implemented since season 8 to instead focus on her fireballs and make her more into an AP-scaling hybrid fighter, Riot also considers her a candidate for a full VGU at some point.
- Ranged Toplaners, i.e. champions that use their ranged properties to put on heavier pressure on the opposing toplaner and harass them out of the laning phase, usually consist of Marksmans, but they can use Mages and Assassins if they have the right tools, either by denying them of pushing and/or freezing, or just harassing them and forcing them to always play under tower until they inevitably push through. Ideally, being able to outpace your opponents from afar is highly favorable compared to going up close, especially since the toplane is very melee heavy and have little to no ways to close the gap between each other, but toplane champions designed to put the map pressure towards the opposing team, by either splitpushing and taking one or two turrets, or peeling resources off the opposing team by tanking their damage for them. Most of these ranged toplaners have no way to put on pressure to other lanes because they didn't have the ability to peel into the opponent without dying in less than five seconds or reliably splitpush to other lanes, and even if they can harass the opposing toplaner off the game, they can't give enough pressure to the opposing team outside of dealing damage, and because of this, they quickly fell off as a result and either became redundant (if wininng) or a full on deadweight (if losing). It doesn't help that this strat requires full cooperation from the jungler to help gank the opponent reliably, which isn't consistent and generally seen as a pitfall that could cost them the game. However, the prospect of taking selfish measure to boot out one of the opponent is considered powerful enough that many players dread them of being annoying and dreadful to fight against, or a redundant deadweight not worth investing if they were on the same team, even if it doesn't guarantee a success. So far, only ranged toplaners with strong utility and teamplay power like Malphite, Gangplank, and Quinn who managed to stayed relevant in the metagame whilst playing this selfish strategy, and even then, they're not relevant because of being ranged toplaners (Malphite is a brick shithouse with one point click knockback ultimate with reasonable length and lenient cooldown, Gangplank's barrels are highly damaging and hard to predict on top of the highly potent global ranged ultimate, while Quinn can put pressure to other lanes because of her strong roaming power).
- Teemo, to the point they gave him a Devil Skin. Teemo's strength lies in his absurd movement speed and pacing that not only allows him to poke and sting the opponent from afar, but can also quickly outrun his adversaries either by using Move Quick or slowing his opponent using his ultimate, a renewable mine/stealth ward that explodes in a wide radius that poisons and slows all enemies within proximity, all while he can slowly (or quickly depending on the build) dwindle the enemy's health by his poison. Outside of that, Teemo has nothing else to offer as he's only good at harassing the enemy toplaner out of lane, assuming they aren't just farming elsewhere and scaling to the lategame, where the flaws of his kit become more apparent as the game goes, especially since he's so reliant on Damage Over Time (DoT) and doesn't have any sort of burst or sustain damage to reasonably perform well beyond mid-game onwards. The only reason why he still have a place in the toplane metagame as a rogue pick is because he's the perfect counter against auto-attack reliant bruisers like Irelia and Renekton, who were strong meta picks in the toplane: otherwise picking him in any other situation can be considered trolling that you could get a 14-day suspension for inting. It's telling how fundamentally bad Teemo was that his Wild Rift incarnation reworked him ever so slightly and ironed some of his design crufts (like giving him a dash and swapping his stealth passive with the poison dart and makes it toggleable), making him more comfortable to play with, even if it didn't fully address the issue regarding his kit.
- Vayne. She struggles to find her place in the botlane metagame as every other marksman has other things they could do other than dealing damage, with her heavy-commitment snowballing kit, high focus on fighting single targets, and shorter auto attack range, allows the enemy marksman to stop her before she could do any further damage by outranging her in the laning phase, or by just maiming her up close. Once she exhausts her resources, she has no way to escape because of rather stingy cooldowns on her skills. While her snowballing power is remarkably one of the best, rivalling the likes of Jinx, being able to easily outdamage anything in a vacuum, there's nothing stopping anyone else from just dogpiling her before she could even finish her first item.
- Kalista has been on both sides of high-tier/low-tier coin, mostly due to her basic champion concepts: her passive is considered one of the most innately powerful for marksmen in the game to those who can master it, turning her into a highly mobile kiting monster, with her Rend serving as an effective finishing damage burst/free Smite and an ultimate that could be both a free "get out of death" card for her chosen ally and an effective Human Cannonball attack. This made her horrifying during her heyday around season 5, but things began to fall apart when Riot attempted to bring her more in line; while she could become a hyper-mobile menace, this meant nothing if her damage and range are too low to actually make dents, making her extraordinarily outclassed by other auto-heavy-focused marksmen, who also have the benefit of prioritizing instant critical hit damage instead of simply sustained attack speed damage like Kalista. Because of this harsh dichotomy, Riot has been very cautious and gradual with tweaking her since season 6, with the result that her popularity among most players is consistently low, and her popularity among higher-skilled players much more in flux.
- Around the middle of Season 8, the entirety of the marksmen class was gutted due to some incredibly drastic and not-fully-realized balance changes. To summarize, Riot decided to emphasize the power-spike nature of most marksmen by nerfing all their base damage stats, runes, and crit items (as well as making them more expensive) and reworking their scaling to favor for late-game, including drastically reworking the early powerhouse Infinity Edge into a late-game supplement (this hit popular crit-heavy marksmen Caitlyn and Tristana especially hard). However, due to several concurrent changes intended to make games end faster (from mage waveclear nerfs to prevent stalling to making objectives like towers and Barons easier to take for everyone), it would in practice mean "terrible early game, awful midgame because you've been prevented from getting your items, and no late game because the other team already won while you desperately tried to make your champ not worthless". Marksmen became a redundant liability, to a point where the meta across the entire board (including professional leagues) descended into an anarchy not seen since pre-season 1, where teams would go to some very strange lengths to not include any marksmen in their lineups. Thankfully, Riot would later backpedal on the most egregious changes, and after some much-needed direct buffs, efficient item adjustments, and straight-up ability reverts over the course of several patches, things slowly began restabilizing.
- The marksman class would eventually face the a similar dilemma during the entirety of preseason 11, in large part due to Riot's overhaul of the item system and the modification of several global stats, most relevant being the lowering of critical strike damage from 200% to 175%. While player unfamiliarity was a factor (the new Galeforce item had an odd experience of being seen as weak, given a buff in 10.25, then had it reverted by 11.2 just to notify players of the power they weren't using), it was agreed that burst damage was way too high while marksmen/crit items were particularly weak, a bleed which also affected crit-reliant non-marksmen like Yasuo, Yone, and Tryndamere. Unlike the season 8 fiasco, however, items were in a more stable place that they could be lightly tweaked rather than outright reverted, and following patches in the proper season 11, almost every crit item was buffed to make the champions purchasing them viable again.
- Artillery mages (encompassing champions like Xerath, Ziggs, and also some hybrids like Lux and Vel'Koz) as a subclass have reached an odd state over the years, generally due to changes in the surrounding game starting to make them obsolete. With an identity built around using spells to chip away at enemies from extraordinary lengths, the ideal fantasy is that they're a perfect lane bully that can snowball into more utilitarian, but still powerful strengths like zone control or sieging come mid/late game. However, their general weakness of fragility, no mobility, and inability to deal with close-range threats has become an increasing liability over the years as burst damage and mobility have become much more common, creating a cascading effect that makes keeping up with enemies way harder, and necessitating reliance on the rest of your team to keep you safe. When combined with their staggered gameplay style ironically making them pretty mediocre at securing kills and general lack of gameplay flexibility, the practicality of artillery mages nowadays has become heavily limited when compared to flashier burst mages, assassins, or even marksmen, and their appearances only get less and less frequent the further in rank you go up. Given the subclass' lack of development over the yearsnote , a big worry has risen that perhaps they're just not meant to be in how League currently exists.
- Yorick was notably weak and underplayed for a very long time, between his release in Season 1 to all the way in Season 6. While he was largely considered impossible to beat solo top when played well due to how toxic and annoying his kit is, as well as his ultimate that can be used to create a second source of DPS if he targets his ranged carry during a teamfight, his personal scaling was very low, and his general kit was extremely binary, usually very boring to both play against and play as.
- He was finally given a full rework/visual update in season 6, giving it some mechanical diversity as well as a clearer focus, more in line with the effective "necromancer" theme Riot was trying to go for. Unfortunately, while this did fix a lot of his issues of Fake Difficulty, placing him in a better position on a technical level, he's still not very popular — in retaining his core concept of summoning "pets" to assist his fighting, he allocates some of his own personal power onto AI-controlled partners, consequently removing much of the potential flashy, tide-turning options that come with being a Juggernaut. He does have a distinct niche on crazy splitpushing, but this is often seen as being far too niche as it comes at the cost teamfight presence, making him way too situational compared to other brawler options.
- Pre-relaunch Mordekaiser was simply pushed off the side for most of the playerbase. While he had admittedly high close-range damage, so did other juggernauts, with Mordekaiser's biggest weaknesses being his complete lack of crowd control or mobility and an awkward, Cast from Hit Points shielding system that served as his only innate defense. This introduced a dichotomy where either he walked up to you and dropped his killing combo, or enemies simply outranged him and killed him from afar, leaving Riot to excise his numbers just so he didn't become totally unstoppable even if he was ahead.
- He was addressed for a rework in the 2015 Juggernaut Update, but it was considered a disaster that skewed in the other direction. It started off as an experiment to make him a melee-range APC duo-bot laner in order to break the standard "ranged carry with a support meta." Unfortunately, Morde's gameplay thematics weren't a proper fit for the role, and his only real compensation was being absurdly overpowered at a 65% win rate, and soon he was eventually nerfed back into obscurity, and then tweaked again to make him a solo laner, bringing him pretty much back to where he started.
- Fortunately, his full 2019 relaunch came and successfully dredged him out from the scrappy heap. The aged design cruft of his kit was vastly compacted and streamlined into a basic AP juggernaut, giving him a much more straightforward, easy-to-combat-and-balance design with his sorely-needed crowd control and strategic niche with his Death Realm ultimate.
- Urgot prior to his 2017 rework was considered near-useless in part due to his overall extremely unfocused design (a mix of a ranged carry, tanky DPS, and a ganker) making him clunky to play and difficult to balance. As a relic of a bygone design era when they were still trying to figure out how to make more complex and unique champs practical, he did not stand the test of time, and was largely relegated to Memetic Loser status. Thankfully, his relaunch fixed a bunch of his issues and hunkered down on a proper theme (making him a juggernaut with potentially explosive close to mid-ranged damage), successfully bringing him in line as a viable top laner across the board.
- Fiddlesticks is one of the game's most unusually unique junglers (his base kit forces him to be a jungling Squishy Wizard that relies heavily on crowd control and self-sustain), but he's generally balanceable enough for him to be decent most of the time. However, due to his uniqueness, he tends to be left behind the hardest by jungle overhauls, and when he falls off, he falls off hard.
- The Season 5 jungle rework was an itemization problem; him being a pure mage made him the exception to every other off-mage or hybrid mage jungler, so the decision to replace the core Magus enchantment for jungling (giving traditional mage stats: flat AP and CDR) to Runeglaive enchantment (essentially an early Lichbane substitute) crippled his pathing. When Runeglaive also introduced problems of its own, it would also be reworked into Runic Echoes (a refined traditional mage item emphasizing waveclear), bringing everyone much closer to an equilibrium again along with some buffs and slight tweaks.
- The Preseason 7 jungle changes gave him issues with fighting the camps, as the changes to the size and distribution of monster camps became extremely risky to fight with his unique abilities (for example, his Dark Wind —his only early AoE— made fighting the now-solo buffs and the Krugs a much harder endurance). Coupled with the changes to vision and the addition of jungle plants making getting an effective Crowstorm gank also more difficult, his winrate took a huge downturn. Some made the most of it by shifting him to being a midlaner or a support, to varying degrees of success.
- Fortunately fixed with his Season 10 rework, keeping the essence of Fiddlesticks alive with his abilities are staying very similar in terms of effects, but modernised to make him work in the jungle again with his W now hitting every enemy in the area, make his ultimate more rewarding and let him better control vision to make Crowstorm ganks more effective.
- While she had her heyday around season 3, Vi fell off significantly in popularity as a diver, mostly as a result of her kit being binary and not withstanding the test of time. Discounting high mana costs and low general numbers, she relies on extreme all-or-nothing aggression to be truly effective, but she doesn't have a ton of active tools and options to sustain herself or really stick to enemies beyond her Vault Breaker and ultimate (the former being her primary source of damage and dive, introducing a bunch of things that can go wrong if you're up against especially mobile targets and miss), which aren't ineffective per se, but are simply overshadowed when compared to more versatile diving picks such as Camille or Nocturne, and making her a lot easier to bully or shut down in the early game. It took until the 2022 season for Vi to start seeing regular competitive play again, which was almost entirely due to the popularity of Zeri, a champion that Vi ended up being a surprisingly strong counter against thanks to her ultimate.
- Nasus gets the flak of what most people dislike about the power-farming junglers despite not actually being a jungler himself (not even a very good niche one). The ability to free farm himself until he reaches at the very least 400-500 stacks (which can be easily done through patience) means that he can simply just buy Divine Sunderer as an offensive item and spend the rest with pure tank or bruiser items alone as he didn't need to worry about his attack power once he got his stacks. The downside of his kit is that being reliant on stacking infinitely means that his early game is piss poor and constantly needs to be wary against champions that can outdo him as early as level 3. It's common to see a Nasus being stuck in his toplane island farming minions by himself until the 25-30 minute mark, where he will appear like Slender Man and one-shot squishies by only popping his ult and E while relentlessly pressing Q and keep stacking indefinitely for every kill, while his team is crippled because he wasn't even with them 100% of the time.
- Azir has run into a similar problem to Kalista, being an extremely high learning curve champion whose jam-packed design makes it extremely hard to balance. His centralization around his Sand Soldiers and interacting with them in theory makes him a highly flexible champion primarily balanced by his difficulty, but was initially found to be too flexible when played well, resulting in several hard nerfs just to make him fair in that skill level, consequently making him the epitome of Awesome, but Impractical to the majority of players below it. After countless kit tweaks and a minor 2017 rework attempting to make him a little more palatable across the board, Riot has since cut their losses by removing much of his utility and making him more of a definitively high-risk, high-reward DPS mage, resigning him to being unpopular among solo queue, but far healthier in the hands of higher-level players (pro midlaners consider Azir a safe bet to play when mid metas are in a lull state, as he can farm well and scale enormously into late game).
- Quinn has received a lot of flack since day one due to the somewhat contradictory nature of her design as a "marksman-assassin", manifesting in different ways before and after her 2015 rework.
- On launch, Quinn already received complaints due an identity crisis. Originally advertised as a botlane marksman, the ideal was that she could play the typical game of farming up and trading with other marksmen, with a dedicated ultimate to swap with Valor to go in for close-range assassinations. In practice, however, her kit ended up being somewhat oxymoronic — her Vault and Valor form forced her to get in unnecessarily risky close range, and while Blinding Assault was annoying, it could be shrugged off by melee targets who could circumvent it, leaving her with no real niche to capitalize on. While she was somewhat more successful played as a toplaner, the general consensus was that she had little to no purpose among other marksmen or assassins.
- She was reworked in the 2015 marksmen updates, which addressed some issues, but highlighted new ones. On the plus side, her assassination-based "transforming" ultimate was changed into a purely utility-based one, but one that makes her the best roaming marksman in the game, giving her a much stronger niche. However, the uneven dichotomy of her regular abilities (which were left unchanged aside from some quality-of-life changes and bugfixes) remained, and the simplification of her kit has resulted in her becoming more binary. Her roaming is largely seen as a royal pain near impossible to stop, but her actual combat is still very much reliant on what champions she plans on diving, making her much more sensitive to matchups. When strong, she's a total nuisance, but while weak, most players take their business elsewhere, not helped by how Riot has effectively abandoned balancing her for botlane and instead allows her to be played everywhere else, presenting a much wider breadth of champions for her to be compared unfavorably to.
- Aatrox has had a lot of ups and downs throughout his time in the game, both before and after his VGU:
- Before his full Season 8 VGU, Aatrox was a primary example of Overshadowed by Awesome within the League of Legends meta as his fighter-tank kit was built almost exclusively around sustaining through constant auto-attacks. This turned out to be a very unstable mechanic difficult to make neither overpowered nor worthless given its incredibly definitive weaknesses (crowd control and Grievous Wounds would ruin him as it denied him of his only survival mechanic), and he otherwise lacked real strengths for him to stand among other AD bruisers, with more popular picks like Xin Zhao or Irelia able to accomplish a similar level of violent disruption with far greater consistency. After being untouched for the entirety of Season 6, he was given a minor rework in Season 7 that brought him to a better state, then would later be given a complete VGU in Season 8 to give him more options and less dependence on constant on-hit self-healing...
- ...which had a rough start as Riot's initial idea was to turn Aatrox from an auto-attack oriented drain-tank into a lane bully AD caster that relies on sustained combat hitting his enemies and healing from it. The issues boiled down to the clunky distribution of a lot of his abilities, emphasizing him persistently landing his Darkin Blade ability but then not giving him great tools to do so, having a less-than-intuitive dash, an antiheal/anti-shield passive considered too limited to properly synergize with him, and a Super Mode ultimate that mostly existed for a mild damage buff and the ability for him to revive himself — the revive mechanic in particular was highly controversial, unpopular against opponents since he had to be killed twice for low risk, and even Aatrox players disliked it as it was seen as a crutch that only suggested his ability to survive long fights, with many just preferring he have actual sustain to fight with. For a while, he was written off as an inferior version of Riven (a champion already infamous for being clunky and all over the place, yet still managing to be superior to Aatrox in many ways), eventually leading to another rework in patch 9.9. As for the results of that iteration of Aatrox... see the High-Tier Scrappy page.
- Between his launch and 2023, Aurelion Sol was almost always been seen as too weak as a playable champion, even if that wasn't necessarily the case, which is especially notable considering how popular he is as a character. This almost entirely hinged around the fact that for a squishy damage-dealing mage, his means of dealing damage was the really unconventional method of stars that infinitely orbit around his body, coming with an incredibly steep learning curve that was difficult to quantify the value of and thus properly balance — Aurelion Sol mains who dedicated enough hours into mastering his high positioning demands found a champion who had bar none the highest potential zoning of any mage, but to non-mains, the journey to such a ceiling was simply too insane to be worth considering. Riot attempted a rework in 2019 to compress the distance between accessibility and his maximum potential (namely by changing the expansion of his stars from an indefinite toggle to a short burst spell), but not only did this fail to entice newcomers, the reduced skill ceiling alienated many of his longtime fans, leaving him in a very niche limbo. In 2023, Riot treated him to their first ever "Comprehensive Gameplay Update", recognizing his kit as having too many critical issues that couldn't be adequately addressed by simply reworking one or two abilities, giving him an entirely new moveset from scratch, with the most notable change being the complete removal of the orbiting stars. While his post-CGU kit has since been contested as perhaps going the opposite end (being a battle mage with insanely high-to-infinite scaling potential), he's at the very least as more exciting and has overall gained more positive attention from a growing audience.
