Sandbox / League Of Legends Tier Induced Scrappy

League of Legends is a constantly-shifting game with over a hundred individual champions and thousands of variables affecting them and their viability in an additionally constantly shifting Metagame, so pretty much every champion will have fallen into one of these categories at some point or another.

With that in mind, examples have to be notable in order to be placed here, as due to the at-times extremely flexible metagame, any dominating champion in one patch can end up worthless in the next, or the other way around. For that reason, also remember that Examples Are Not Recent.

Additionally, League's judgement on how much of a High-Tier Scrappy or Low-Tier Letdown 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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Top Tier Scrappy

• 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.
• Plenty of Bruisers (fighters with mobility) 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 solid sustain, spammable 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, which convert her second Q proc into full on true damage at max rank, essentially giving her Cho'gath's ultimate in a normal ability with generous cooldown. 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. The item shop rework also makes her core items easier to access, making her even more powerful early game, where she was supposed to be weak at.
  • In paper, Yone seems to function like his brother Yasuo, having virtually the same passive and AS scaling on his kit, designed around surfing through enemy ranks with three-hit attack that ends with a knockup. The difference starts kicking in once you realize that his overall gameplay is completely different to Yasuo, whereas Yasuo has to carefully waltz into an enemy ranks and had to make sure to score a takedown because his mobility option can only be activated to an enemy unit on top of best being played with other champions with knockup skills, Yone's gameplay consist of relentlessly attacking his opponent with every part of his kit without having to be careful with his positioning because of his Yasuo-like kit allows him to keep spamming his Q after buying Berserker Greaves, and it synergizes well with Lifesteal and Omnivamp, allowing him to heal fully from hitting his Q instead of only 33% of damage dealt from it. The knockup dash on his third Q sounds weak at first in comparison of Yasuo's third Q who is a ranged skillshot or an AoE knockup, but then Riot decided to overcompensating his kit by giving him boatload of other skills that's just too good for his already, which grants him safety and even stronger sustain that he's ever need. Needless to say, Yone quickly dominates the game for a short while before being quickly hotfixed and nerfed to the ground to compensate how many things they added in his kit. Problems arises once more after the preseason 11 item shop rework that left crit-oriented champions weak for a short while, which indirectly affects him and Yasuo. Riot eventually buffed them and their core items to keep them afloat in the next metagame, until players figured that the 'weaker' items were actually a perfect fit for both of them, allowing players to adjust and quickly master them both for the entirety of Season 11 onwards, causing Riot to keep adjusting them every now and then and keep the cycle of nerfing and buffing running for those two and repeating their mistakes over and over again whenever they also nerfed/buffed their items. Many players really disliked his inclusion and the fact that Riot keeps drawing comparisons of the brothers together (which also means if Yasuo's weak, Yone is also weak in their eyes, and they will almost always being buffed together, not helping the case), insisting that they're completely separate and has different gameplan altogether (and by that comparison what makes Yasuo weak doesn't affect Yone as much as he can even be stronger in such regard) and had to be balanced differently, but as for his current position, it's unlikely that Riot will ever address Yone's core problem without having to draw comparison to Yasuo again.
• Amumu is one of the definitive examples of a champion who excels in Solo Queue but poorly in competitive play. He has decent clear speed and ganks, and his ultimate is one of the most powerful in the game, especially in teamfights, and is generally very easy to use. He has a few noticeable weaknesses that higher-tier players can easily exploit, such as his extremely weak early game and need for opponents to be out of position in order to maximize his ultimate's use, but these are usually not likely to be encountered in solo queue as coordination is typically nowhere near as good as it is professionally.
• 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.
• The majority of Marksman champions in general tend to be seen as balanced for the fact that their primary power (high consistent damage that snowballs to lategame) is offset by their lack of other options such as mobility or disengage and the fact that they're had to aim for the lategame to carry their team when average match time is 30 minute at best only makes them hard to stand out among other champions like Bruisers and Control supports. The reason why they're balanced as such because giving dedicated Marksmen other cool toys in their kit can be very devastating, as the champions below can attest.
  • 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 alone^note The closest competition was Gangplank solely due to him having a similar on-hit effect interaction with his Parrrley, and even then, Ezreal was much faster with it, 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.
  • 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. Combined 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), 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.
• Lulu, as she became more popular and got more buffs, began to wander into this territory in higher ELOs. Her entire kit allows her to peel for her team, as she has a ranged slow, an attack speed and movement speed boost that turns into a hard CC when used on an enemy, a shield that is also a point and click damage ability, grants true sight if used on an enemy, lets her fire her slow off whoever Pix is currently attached to and automatically slows them if it's on an enemy, and her ult is a combination knock-up and max health increase that can save herself or a teammate from death and turn both trades and teamfights around. She's also no slouch when it comes to offensive capability, as her kit and stats once made her an effective off-meta mid and top lane pick.
• Zoe has been a major one of these ever since her release, with a lot of emphasis on "scrappy" to a sizeable amount of players. Pretty much every ability in her kit draws some level of ire, and what it altogether amounts to for many is an incredibly annoying kit that has the potential to put your champion to sleep, steal your precious summoners and item actives, then utterly annihilate your health bar with a single, well-placed Paddle Star with relative ease. Riot has been hesitant to nerf her a lot despite constant complaints, and she does have her defenders and fans who cite a bunch of definite weaknesses to go with her strengths (such as her deceptively low mobility and health), but even most critics who concede that she's technically balanced still hate her for her sheer tilt factor, which possibly rivals that of Teemo.
• Galio has been a consistently strong pick since his rework, drifting between merely high tier to an outright Game-Breaker depending on the patch. His somewhat unique niche as a mid lane tank already gives him reason to be picked, but his individual strengths are numerous enough to make him a consistent top contender. Both his wave clear and burst are deceptively good, his global presence is rivalled only by Shen and Twisted Fate, and his durability is only slightly worse against AD assassins, who tend to struggle against tanks like him who can resist their burst to begin with, rendering him a Lightning Bruiser who can show up anywhere, survive anything the enemy team throws at him, all the while squashing anyone unfortunate enough to get within taunt range.
• 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 in the duo botlane. However, Riot has tried repeatedly to push her as a midlaner by buffing her major strengths such as her scaling and survivability, which in turn makes her even more annoying in duo botlane thanks to how her kit synergy gives her plenty of versatility when buddied up.
• 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 inherently strong, amassing a hatedom of detractors who want to see her removed on the basis that she's unfun when weak, frustratingly effective and toxic when not.
• 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.

Low Tier Letdown

• 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, which seemed to fix a lot of his kit's issues, 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. He's still not an astoundingly popular champion —his grand focus on crazy splitpushing is at the cost of a lack of teamfight presence— but overall, he's in a much better position than previously.
• 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.
• 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.
• Aurelion Sol has been revered as being one of the most loved characters in the game, but between his launch and 2023, he was almost always been seen as too weak as a playable champion, even if that wasn't necessarily the case. 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.
• 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 years^note It's telling that Vex — released in 2021 — was supposed to be the first artillery mage since Vel'Koz — released in 2014 — but was changed away since her defining gameplay hook that made her actually fun wasn't compatible with the archetype, a big worry has risen that perhaps they're just not meant to be in how League currently exists.

Both Tiers

• 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.
  • 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".
  • Viego didn't really leave a strong first impression on the community, being deceptively difficult and clustered with so many bugs he might as well have been the second coming of pre-VGU Mordekaiser, put in a spot of being utterly useless and provoking demands for him to be buffed. They certainly got them, and in concert with most of his worst bugs getting ironed out and more players finally learning how to play him optimally, they found a really solid combatant with strong ganking tools (skillshot, dash stun, a stealth gank option, and an execute), and that his possession mechanic was so devastatingly useful that teamfights were effectively won once he got a single valuable pick. After tuning him back down, his power exists in a spot that's greatly dependent on his possession passive and the player's knowledge on using possessed champions, making him either ungodly strong or utterly useless.
• "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 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. long-ranged champions that played in a lane where normally everyone fight and clear up close, has become a point of contention and a source of argument whether they're actually viable played off lane where they shouldn't be, as most of the ranged toplane mains were cheesing their way through the lower ranks with ease thanks to the fact that the majority of lower-ranking players can't always circumvent their power play, but struggle, if not plummet hard, on higher ranks because of other champions being able to expose their shortcomings of not being able to truly impact the game other than denying the toplaner of their trade and forcing them to take a risk farming within their range. Champions like Vayne, Quinn, Lucian, Heimerdinger, Teemo, and Kennen were hated by the playerbase because they can cheese their way off the laning phase and/or become absolutely useless if the enemy toplaner can outdo them with ease, because they can't impact the game in any other meaningful way. It really tells a lot when a lot of low Diamond players were only able to climb that high because of playing cheese picks in top lane against players that weren't as skilled or experienced to combat it in lower ranks, but struggle hard and even plummet back to Platinum when they start fighting champions with even strong diving power like Aatrox below.
  • The most infamous of this case is probably Teemo, to the point that Riot gave him a Devil skin. He's infamous for simply how oppressive and annoying his kit is despite not being very good. His unique auto-attack blind, poison and stealthing explosive mushrooms are notoriously infuriating to deal with on an individual level during the early game, and a good player might take advantage of his stealth and speed for a few sneaky plays. However, as the game goes on, while his mushrooms can still provide solid map control, Teemo is often very difficult to use well in a teamfight as players can easily pick him apart should he step out of position, and as such drastically falls off in power. He can be a complete terror against low-skill enemies who don't know how to exploit his many weaknesses, but he's still not very good to use in a more higher-level scene except in a few highly-specific Lethal Joke Character scenarios.
  • Ever since her inclusion, Vayne has always been seen in a rough spot over the years, where people can't decide whether she was supposed to be a duo lane traditional Marksman in the bot lane or a solo laner in the top lane. As a bot laner, her kit is surprisingly lackluster and counterintuitive to the role as her dismal attack range requires the player to go balls deep into the enemy territory and risk themselves getting killed and/or ganked under the enemy turret, and so many other traditional or unconventional Marksman were able to easily outrange her (especially Caitlyn); even short-ranged ones like Kai'Sa and Lucian perform much better than her in duo lane. As a solo laner in top lane, most of the risk she had to take whenever she's playing duo lane is practically nonexistent aside from getting ganked out by the enemy jungler or roaming support, her kit allows her to easily harass any melee matchups and even chase them down under their turret for a free kill, as she doesn't need to worry about being outranged or eating a hard CC from the engage support while she can also easily escape away from the turret range after a successful dive, but she still had to play with the fact that her kit requires her to go all in all the time or she will lose momentum. Her kit is so simplistic and one-dimensional that Riot had a hard time trying to balance her, as buffing her duo lane will also make her broken in top lane, while nerfing her top lane will make her unviable in duo lane, much like Quinn.
  • Heimerdinger is another "annoyingly high-tier at low levels" champion, with his turrets being exceptionally powerful at zone control, pushing, and overall denying space to an annoyingly oppressive extent. This doesn't apply as much when you go up the ranks, as he has increasingly exploitable weaknesses — in general, he's very squishy and vulnerable to calculated collapses that respect his turrets, especially if he overextends.
• 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.
• When Xin Zhao was released, he was horrifically broken; he was one of Riot's first attempts to make a pure melee champ work, and because they didn't have much to go by (as most of their other non-tank or bulky mage melees were assassins, and most of those assassins were a pain in the ass to balance), they went for broke. The result was a champ that could single-handedly murder an entire team with minimal farm and get away mostly unharmed. Needless to say, he was nerfed immediately, and it was then that they discovered that his kit was also impossible to balance, as he became aggressively mediocre after that nerf. After this, he started riding a buff/nerf wave that made his viability vary from week to week; it took a rework to finally get him in a state where he could be properly balanced. Even then, Zhao with a few of the more notorious attack speed items (Rageblade and Devourer) made him still pretty difficult to deal with mid-to-late game before they were removed and/or reworked.
• Lucian has had issues with this since his introduction that largely stem from his sensitivity to meta shifts. Released substantially underpowered, he received some buffs that quickly turned him into a terror and one of the best carries in the game in that he was a heavy Jack of All Stats of ADCs with no real weaknesses aside from obvious lack of sustain. He's a very mobile and especially "safely farm first, kill later" marksman, so the general trend is that once the meta favors slippery, mobile carries, he's an obnoxiously effective menace who will farm and poke with impunity and then run around mowing everything down in a hail of gunfire, but the instant that the meta starts favoring damage-centric carries, he's practically useless.
• Kalista has been on both sides of the 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• Wukong has spent a while meandering around as a Skill Gate Character punishing on lower-ranked solo queue, but struggling to finding a strategic niche due to his somewhat awkward design. As an AD caster whose strength came from abilities alone, his lack of in-combat flexibility made him subpar as a bruiser for extended fights, subpar as an assassin for shorter all-ins, inefficient as a tank due to his ratios highly skewing towards him building AD, and even dangerous as a jungler due to lacking his passive defense due to it requiring being near champions. After years of being outclassed in most regards by other, better specialists in their fields, Wukong received a rework in 2020 to give him more extended brawling power much closer to a bruiser (as well as emphasizing his previously-underutilized trickster playstyle), which fortunately seemed to fix a good deal of his issues and has generally made him an average, but manageable and decently viable pick.
• 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.
• Because of Kayn's dual form mechanic, he's on both sides; his Shadow Assassin form boasts high damage and mobility, but his status as a melee-based Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon means that he's likely to get burst down before he can kill his target and that he's less useful for teamfighting. Meanwhile, Rhaast is considered superior because his lack of mobility is made up for by being able to build tanky while also being a tank killer whose increased CC and percent health damage allow him to kill squishy champions just as easily as Shadow Assassin can, without the weakness of being easier to kill.
• 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 — time will tell if it'll manage to dredge him from the deep.
• Sejuani has had a turbulent history as jumping between high and low tiers, mostly coming down to her reputation as being one of the beefiest battering rams in not just the jungle, but likely the entire game. She was widely considered one of the best tank junglers starting around season 5 thanks to having solid survivability, crowd control, and even damage, pretty infamously summarized by how her Glacial Prison ultimate was an area-of-effect stun that could near-instantly freeze entire teams. This prompted her rework in midseason 7 which greatly toned down her AoE and damage in favor of extended survivability and single-target brawling, which unfortunately proved to be an issue over the years as metas began skewing away from tanks as the focus and more towards immediate damage, ironically making Sejuani more dated by being a notable exception in adopting offensive power again. An odd consequence of this is that despite not having a particularly high skill floor or ceiling, thanks to the actual alchemy of her kit (mainly with how her Permafrost passive makes her one of the most ally-dependent tanks in the game), she's regularly seen as a powerful, practical tank choice at coordinated professional levels, but also boring and lacking agency or any appealingly unique strengths everywhere else.
• 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.
  • Post-patch 9.9 Aatrox 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. This transition hasn't emerged flawlessly — 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.