Hated characters from the League of Legends franchise who've subsequently been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. This includes characters who were hated due to play balance (High-Tier Scrappy or Low-Tier Letdown) as well as those who were unintentionally hated for narrative reasons (The Scrappy and its related tropes).
A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. This is measured from the point when the character was introduced or became hated.
- Examples that were a High-Tier Scrappy or Low-Tier Letdown due to gameplay issues shouldn't be added for 1 month.
- All other examples (e.g. characters who were The Scrappy or related tropes such as Ethnic Scrappy or Damsel Scrappy) shouldn't be added for 9 months.
- Evelynn got this big time. She was *very* hit or miss for much of eight years worth of gameplay, with various tweaks, patches and balance attempts producing mixed results, with unhappy players on both sides for most of the game's lifespan, with Evelynn swinging between hilariously underpowered, disgustingly good at her job, woefully bad at every role, and frustrating on all fronts, for player and target alike. Then after a good long while, Season 7-to-8 finally reworked Evelynn with a full visual-gameplay update, nailing down her role as a stealthy assassin with much more healthy play and win rates.
- Much the same thing happened to Katarina. Her remake fixed all her problems (aside from the ease with which her ultimate is stopped, which is crucial to keeping her from going completely out of control) while leaving all her strengths intact. She's gone from worst champ in the game (picking her in Ranked was a good way to have someone dodge or lock in another troll pick) to one of the most frequent bans across all ELOs, being considered borderline overpowered at best and downright broken at worst.
- Ditto for her most recent rework, where she now has more cooler ways to actually outplay her opponents with the need to setup proper teleport points, while also having massive reward and being able to lane. It's safe to say her current rework had fixed many things about her and made her even better than before, but at the same time is still polarizing as usual.
- Same thing also happened to Twitch. Despised by the community for most of his time in the game (first for being the most overpowered champion in the game by a landslide to the point where if he wasn't banned, the team who didn't get him had absolutely zero hope of winning unless the rest of Twitch's team was utter trash, then for being nerfed to the point of troll-like uselessness, albeit not to the same extent as Eve, Kat, or Heimerdinger), he received a remake that kept what was good about him intact while either removing the things that made him as problematic as he was or altering them to keep the skills mostly intact while eliminating the abusive parts of the skills.
- Vladimir was once hated due to his ridiculous durability, high damage, and obnoxiously effective laning abilities. After steady nerfs that left him nearly useless, he finally received a set of buffs and tweaks that have more or less left him as balanced as he's going to be in his current state, which is to say that he's a highly effective (and annoying) top.
- Xin Zhao was massively overpowered on release, got nerfed immediately, and more or less rode an unsteady wave of nerfs and buffs that gave his usefulness a very push-pull quality. The problem was that he was from an era when the devs were just figuring out how to make melee DPS champs work, and as such had a rather problematic kit. If he was buffed so that he could actually see some use as a viable competitive pick, he was unmanageable for pubs; if he was nerfed so that he could be strong but not overwhelming in pubs, he was damn near troll pick status competitively. Riot more or less gave up and left him at troll pick tier until July 2012, when he received a remake that addressed both of his main issues and left him strong but not overwhelming at all levels of play.
- Yorick and Caitlyn were both severely underpowered on release, and the act of even selecting them was enough to provoke a queue dodge. Then they got buffed (Yorick got an absolutely massive buff, Caitlyn got a series of smaller buffs) and gained renown as some of the best laners in the game. In fact, Yorick's first buff was so massive that it actually made him brokenly good in lane, forcing Riot to nerf him a bit. Even then, he's still known as the best solo top laner in the game. Yorick's recent rework however, not only made him more cool-looking via visual upgrade, but also toned down his dominance as a lane bully (requires more thought and procs to get his usual shtick rolling), but only time will tell to see if he's still broken or not.
- Xerath was widely disliked on release for having an awesome design that was wasted on an incredibly boring and clumsily-designed kit; while potentially very effective with a good team, he suffered from being absolutely no fun to play and feeling like his kit was more or less randomly slapped together with some half-assed attempts at making it coherent. The amount of free stats at his disposal (passage that converted a percentage of AP into Armor, plus an attack that rooted him to the ground in exchange for a huge range increase and a massive Magic Penetration boost) didn't help the slapdash feel and also made him a bitch to balance. After a rework that fixed his kit to make him feel more like the "death from afar" siege mage that he was originally conceived as while giving him more appropriate visual effects (his original effects designer was very inexperienced and could only manage lightning-based effects), the fandom finally embraced him.
- Sejuani was thoroughly disliked upon release due to the general sloppiness of her kit: she had to jungle because she was too weak to lane but she was literally the worst tank/jungle in the game, only her ultimate was her saving grace. One kit rework later and Sejuani left the heap as an extremely deadly ambusher with a LOT of crowd control and mobility, on top of being a proper Stone Wall level tank.
- Syndra was deep in the heap for a long time. Her combination of extremely complex play, really poor numbers (she had terrible mana issues and really bad AP ratios) and buggy skills resulted in her immediately shooting right to the top (or bottom) of the "Lowest Win Rate" champion list, dragging down her teams in a DISTURBING number of games (at one point she had a win ratio of a mere 21%, the lowest of any champ in the entire history of the game). She'd widely been considered to be by FAR the worst champion Riot has ever released. However, a series of buffs and bug fixes, as well as the meta shifting away from the assassins (which have allowed other mids like Morgana and Anivia to come back into play as well), have allowed her to leave the heap. Her absolutely asinine burst damage coupled with the potential for a multi-man stun with Scatter the Weak and her ability to manipulate some teamfights have turned her into a powerful niche AP mid pick in competitive play. Bjergsen, formerly of Ninjas in Pajamas and now Reginald's heir apparent on TSM, is perhaps one of the most famous Syndra players in the world, as the first time he busted the Dark Sovereign out in a game, he scored a Pentakill and led his team to victory. It was at that point that people realized "Huh, maybe Syndra's pretty good after all." She's seen sporadic play at the highest level since then, mainly due to her very high execution requirements, but people are now wary enough to take Syndra seriously when they face her.
- Sion Post-Relaunch. Good God, Sion Post-relaunch. He's a huge hulking zombie with an axe, but originally he wasn't very encouraged to fight at melee and doesn't make any use of the axe in any of his abilities, and has some abilities that don't make sense flavor-wise (why is a warrior zombie able to emit stunning, glittering eyebeams and generate exploding energy shields?) Now? He's an Nigh-Invulnerable monstrosity if built correctly, and can very easily tank an entire team's worth of Damage and Crowd Control and still walk away from the fight.
- Gangplank has, for most of his history, been viewed as a gimmicky pubstomper with a kit that was doomed to keep him from ever being balanced; the few times that Riot actually tried to make him good, he wound up being overpowered and was swiftly nerfed and brought back to pubstomper status. One massive overhaul later via his new barrel mechanic, and he's turned into a brutal pusher and carry with horrifically powerful early pokes that scale very well with the Critplank build and an upgrade mechanic for his ult that makes a prolonged match against a team with a very good Gangplank an uphill battle, and he still has his famous ranged crits and the infamous "I ate some oranges and it was k" built-in Cleanse (which now scale with his missing HP better). Six years after his introduction and he's finally something to truly fear, even after nerfs to his barrels rolled along each time (they had a notable amount of built-in armor penetration).
- The Juggernaut update for several champions. Garen, Darius, Skarner and Mordekaiser.
- Garen was never considered overpowered or underpowered for that matter, he just had a very boring kit that had very little depth and was loaded with power early on, but fell off later thanks to a lack of crowd control. His numbers were normalized to give him a smoother power curve and he had the Villainy mechanic added to make him a legitmate late game threat to the carries that cannot be ignored, even to the point where trying to have your team pour all they can on him still won't be enough to kill him.
- Darius, Kill Steal the Champion himself, in order to stop him from just mowing down teams with his ultimate, Riot had shifted its damage to relying on his passive stacks, but it left him rather weak come team fights and easily kited. The update gave him the Bloodrage/Noxian Might mechanic. Now? If he kills anybody with his ultimate or gets to 5 stacks of his passive on a champion his basic attacks and the outer half of decimate instantly apply full stacks. He is now the king of cleaning up fights thanks to his massive damage and tankiness.
- Mordekaiser was put in a strange position, he was deliberately redesigned to shake up the meta-game and for a while was a bit underwhelming because people didn't know how to play him in his new role. Now? He is one of the highest priority pick/ban champs in the game, deals a truly disgusting amount of damage with one of his reworked abilities and can bring a DRAGON to siege your towers. At least up until he received his VGU, where he was updated to make him more competitive; he's no longer able to bring a dragon to siege a tower, but he can still be a threat nonetheless.
- The update also added 2 new items which gave the other Juggernaut style champions a rather large boost in playability.
- After the 6th preseason ADC patch, Miss Fortune seems to enjoy a much better position when compared to her being the Master of None in the past and usually being seen as an ineffective ADC overall, in a sense that she now deals extra damage when she switches target (and combined with killing someone with her Q, anyone hit with the bounce will take BIG damage, maybe even half their HP pool), that the lack of Grievous Wounds makes her status as lane bully unaffected. Furthermore, her ult received such a big boost (shoots more and faster as she levels and it can inflict Critical Hit) that it's quite easy to wipe out an enemy party with her alone when uncontested. She's currently sitting at the 2nd most powerful ADC, right behind Graves. Looks like MF is back as one of the more powerful ADC's as she was in the past. However, she's recently been considered for nerfs due to how overpowered she seems now to other people's eyes.
- Before the 6.9 Mid-Season Mage Update, Veigar was in a very bad spot, due to his kit being built around an anti-immobile-mage playstyle who farmed constantly for AP and would obliterate enemies using his ultimate which would scale off the target's AP, but unfortunately was massively restrictive and underplayed due to Power Creep; with the advent of mid-lane AD mobile assassins, as well as just a larger mobility creep in general, and necessary but also very damaging nerf to his stun during season 5, and a rather useless passive that just gave Riot an excuse to give him bigger mana costs, Veigar became rather useless. However, after the 6.9 Mid-Season Mage Update, which tweaked immobile mages with healthier design in general, Veigar's kit was retooled to make him a simply more powerful champion stacking tons of AP and becoming a monster late-game, shedding the exclusive Mage Killer style, with his passive granting bonus AP from damaging enemies with his skills and a tweaked ultimate that instead functions as an missing-HP-scaling nuke. With that, Veigar has also found some bonus popularity in a support role to decent success.
- Also as a product from the Mid-Season 6 Mage Update,Malzahar was not only improved from being a fairly bog-standard caster mage into a much more versatile Minion Master, but he has actually been salvaged by professional players. While he was functional before his rework, he was considered pretty boring and uninteresting to play, especially to professionals who preferred more specialized picks for their compositions, with his main uniqueness factor being his infamous ultimate, which while it has a powerful suppression, had a few weaknesses that didn't warrant that much interest. Post-rework, he was revamped to be a more consistently harassing Minion Master mage, and even after being repeatedly nerfed after his infamous launch where he was so powerful he required a hotfix, he still became a pick/ban subject throughout the entire season even up to Worlds, and may continue to be a viable professional pick in the future. Hell, since he finally had better reason to be played, his ultimate was bumped up from being Awesome, but Impractical to a power-move that could decide games.
- Aatrox had a rough run since he was fully reworked into a completely different champion compared to its previous iteration, which turns him into an AD Caster specializing in airborne knockups and drain tanking. This would have turned him into a proper lane bully, but the general consensus sees his kit as rather unfocused and has no late game impact whatsoever, kicking him far back into the low tier for some time. Then patch 9.9 happened, ironing out most of his previous design cruft by simplifying his drain-tanking capabilities and removing some unnecessary parts like the mutilator debuff or the bonus AD from dashes, all while amplifying his previously lower numbers. The result? Aatrox quickly dominates the battlefield and set himself as the safest first pick in any team composition. While he's still held back by the presence of grievous wounds that effectively crippled his drain tanking capabilities, it wasn't enough to shut him down as he still remain highly positioned in the general top lane tier list. It takes multiple direct nerfs, the durability update in mid season 12, and indirect nerfs from his primary item that he finally got dethroned way back to mid-to-low tier, but even longtime players still churning a good chunk of his potential to this day.
- Aurelion Sol has been revered as being one of the most loved characters in the game, but as a playable champion, he's almost always been seen as too weak, even if that isn't necessarily the case. The fact that his kit relies on the mechanically intensive star system while being a squishy mage, means that Asol players will have to be careful at distancing themselves, as going too far means that he won't be able to deal damage, and going too close and he died instantly. Riot attempted a rework in 2019 to compress the distance between accessibility and his maximum potential, but it only further exacerbates the issues of his kit and alienating both Asol veterans and newcomers alike. Season 13 decides that it's time for Asol to shine and the long promised comprehensive gameplay update is finally released, and the reception is generally more favorable by newcomers and veterans alike. It completely removes all the trace of rotating stars in favor of making his kit more dragon-like without sacrificing his roaming potential he had before, with the only thing that halters it from being completely broken is that you're required into building up power over time before he can obliterate someone with a single combo string, if not straight up One-Hit Kill. Needless to say, more players are playing him right now, and he's in much more favorable position than what he was previously.
