League of Legends



""After centuries of conflict and hardship across the lands of Valoran, the Rune Wars have finally come to an end. Treaties have been signed, and the superpowers that once ravaged this land have turned to a new role. Realizing that there must be a better way to settle their differences, they created the Institute of War, a multinational governing body that would settle all disputes. Inside the Institute is the League of Legends-where powerful magic users and delegates from each of the realms vie with or against each other to rule the land.""

"Welcome to Troper's Rift! Thirty seconds until tropes spawn!"

League of Legends is a free-to-play Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game, based on Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft 3 fan-mod, published as a standalone game developed by original DotA programmers.

Like DotA, League of Legends uses a Real Time Strategy framework, but has a much narrower focus. You pick one champion, who has unique attacks and abilities, and that's it: no base, no armies, no nothing. With your champion you kill enemy Mooks and champions to earn experience points and gold, and attempt to destroy the enemy's base while preventing them from doing the same to you.

The Excuse Plot is that magical "summoners" do battle with each-other by summoning creatures, heroes, and champions and pitting them against each other in gladiatorial combat. Your Player Character is one of those summoners; it is persistent and gains experience with every battle, as opposed to champions who start every match at Level 1. This opens up various customization options which have a practical effect on gameplay: summoners can bring two Support Powers into battle, and have access to "Runes" and a "Mastery" skill-tree to directly improve a champion's stats during gameplay.

The game has two playable modes:
 * Classic: Players push different lanes of combat, destroying defensive towers that lead up to the enemy nexus. Destroying the nexus wins the game. The two maps available for this mode are Summoner's Rift, a 5v5 map in the same style of DotA's map, and Twisted Treeline, a smaller map for 3v3 matches. A small, third 5v5 Classic map, Proving Grounds, is currently nearing the end of development.
 * Dominion: A capture-and-hold gamemode with five control points. Controlling more points than the enemy team damages their nexus. Champions start off at level 3 and gain gold and experience much faster for quick and fun matches. Crystal Scar is the only map available for this mode.

The Characters page lists every commercially-released champion, and a few others to boot. The numerous memes spawned by the community can be found here. The numerous Shout Outs to other medias can be found here.

""In our eternal forward march, we must stomp out evil all across Valoran wherever it may grow. Leave no stone unturned: the roots of one ignored weed will inevitably corrupt the whole of the garden.""
 * All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The end result of any game. The question is whose base are belong...to...um...who.
 * Exhibited by how every game ends with the camera going to a position centered on the losing team's Nexus blowing up - this happens even if one team surrenders.
 * Alpha Strike: Most mages and some physical damage champions focus on burst damage; that is, blowing up someone before they can retaliate. A fed Veigar can take this Up to Eleven and decimate even the tankiest of champions in a full combo. (The problem is getting there.)
 * This is also the name of one of Master Yi's abilities. Ironically, while Yi is normally a physical DPS champion, there is an Ability Power build for him based mainly around jacking the power of Alpha Strike up to ridiculous levels (due to its 100% AP/damage ratio), allowing him to put out incredible amounts of burst on multiple enemies with a single shot.
 * An Adventurer Is You: Due to Loads and Loads of Characters, everything is implemented.
 * The Tank: Also known as "soaks", bulky champs who can get the enemy team's attention and keep it.
 * The Healer: Pretty much everybody who has a heal that can be used on allies.
 * The Nuker: Mages. To a slight degree, everybody who has a nuke.
 * The DPSer: Fighters and carries.
 * The Debuffer: Trundle, along with certain supports.
 * The Buffer: A large number of supports have at least one such ability. Lulu stands out in this regard, thanks to 3 of her abilities having at least one potential ally buff effect (including her ultimate).
 * The Mezzer: Anybody with a crowd control capability, such as Fiddlesticks, Ashe, etc.
 * The Minion Master: Yorick.
 * The Petmaster: Annie, Malzahar, Heimerdinger, Mordekaiser, Shaco, Orianna, and Yorick.
 * The Trapper: Teemo, Shaco, Nidalee and Caitlyn.
 * Area of Effect: Many champions have this ability, several in the form of their "ultimate" attacks. Some champions like Karthus and Cassopeia specialize in this.
 * The Jack: actually almost everybody has more than one build that emphasizes a specific stat or play-style. And yes, we do mean almost everybody. At one point, the dominant build for Annie (high magic-damage nukes) was physical DPS. Hybrid-built characters, who rely on ability power as well as attack power can also be called Jacks. But remember -- just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea.
 * Announcer Chatter: At the start of the game, when minions are spawned, whenever someone goes down, destruction of important buildings, and killing sprees.
 * Anti-Poopsocking: The first match you win every 22 hours gets a big XP/IP boost. After that, you're just grinding slowly.
 * Arch Enemy: The League is home to several of pairs of champions who would love to see each other dead.
 * Nasus and his brother Renekton were literally at each other's throats before they were summoned to the League. Their relationship hasn't improved much.
 * Jarvan IV and Swain are most likely this considering how often they've clashed. They are both among the highest ranking military leaders of their respective nations.
 * Malzahar and Kassadin both got their powers from the Void, but Malzahar works to bring its horrors to Runeterra while Kassadin works to stop them. They've battled each other outside of the League before and they both are reported to have large groups of followers. Kassadin probably has a lesser form of this going on with Cho'Gath and Kog'Maw for similar reasons.
 * Lets not forget Garen and Katarina. In Garen's lore, it's mentioned that most of the reason Garen even wakes up in the morning is to confront her on the battlefield.
 * Garen's an interesting case as his is more of a Blood Knight obsession with her and that he doesn't actually want to kill Katarina, but just enjoys the challenge of a good battle. Some other Demacian soldiers think there are other reasons why he constantly seeks her out, though.
 * Morgana and Kayle are involved in an eternal war between two factions of immortal angels.
 * Graves' only reason for joining the League is to ruin Twisted Fate as payback for turning him in and getting him locked in prison in exchanged for magical abilities.
 * Sejuani joined the League to oppose Ashe for control of Frelijord.
 * Zilean and Volibear hate each other as a joke because of Riot employees; Zilean was named after Zileas, who was against the idea of armored bears, while Volibear was named after Volibar, who wanted armored bears.
 * Art Evolution:
 * In-game art became much better post-release.
 * Chinese in-game art. Compare this to this.
 * Summoner's Rift recently had a Graphics update, complete with a new Yordle Shopkeeper.
 * Some of the older champion portraits are being redone. Morgana above has a new portrait, as does Sivir, Veigar, Kayle, Tryndamere, and others. You can really see a difference between the old style of art and the new ones.
 * This has extended, with a few characters, into getting new character models as well as new art. One of the most thorough revamps was Ashe, one of the oldest champions in the game, as her character models for all of her skins getting a significant rework along with all of her skin portraits getting redrawn in the more realistic style. In Ashe's case, she had already had her main portrait redone once before to get away from her really awful original art.
 * More recent champions occasionally get Chinese art for their skins. Not nearly as quickly as the champions and skins come out, but they're there.
 * Armor-Piercing Question: The whole point of the League's Champion Judgement process is to ask two: "Why do you want to join the League?" and "How does it feel, exposing your mind?"
 * Artificial Brilliance/Artificial Stupidity: The bots zig-zag between these two. The bots on Beginner are notoriously poor players, running into towers without minions and rarely going back for more health. The Intermediate bots, on the other hand, are a whole order of magnitude more difficult, ganking weak champions and making much better use of their abilities -- and yet they still make stupid decisions like chasing "weakened" champions all across the map while their lane stays wide-open.
 * The bots are actually being updated, too - with Artificial Brilliance intended.
 * Ascended Meme: Many.
 * Gentleman Cho'Gath. French Maid Nidalee may or may not be related.
 * Amumu got an Emo Mummy skin. Emumu!
 * Corporate Mundo deals what he pleases.
 * If you type /joke three times when Swain is in his transformed state, he will say "Think logically for ONE SECON--CAWCAWCAWCAWCAW!!"
 * The 'Battle Training' has a tip to inform of being careful around the brush since an enemy champion maybe be hiding in it to ambush you... using images of Garen appearing out of the brush using his infamous Judgement. You can practically hear the "DEMACIAAAA!".
 * Brolaf, the King of Bromacia. Now at an in-game store near you.
 * When the servers are loaded with login requests you are placed in a queue to log in. If the number is sufficiently high your position in the queue is Over 9000.
 * The upcoming Pulsefire Ezreal skin has his scanner unable to detect anything with a power level BELOW 9000.
 * Nunu's Nunu Bot skin, based on a video series of the same name.
 * The item "The Brutalizer" costs 1337 gold
 * Surprise Party Fiddlesticks, released on the game's second birthday on October 27, 2011.
 * Volibear, in response to fan demand for a giant armored bear.
 * Battle Bunny Riven was released in response to the biggest thread in the history of the LoL forums.
 * Attack! Attack! Attack!: If you do this, your teammates will hate you.
 * Killing enemy minions as hard as possible is a bad idea, at least early on. It brings you closer to the objective, but also closer to the enemy tower, leaving him with a trivial escape route while you have to run all the way back under a barrage of attacks when you inevitably get ganked. And because you only get gold for killing minions as opposed to damaging them, and your own minions are attacking theirs, auto attacking will often leave you with very little gold.
 * The trick is to 'last-hit', waiting until the last possible millisecond to hit them, thus minimizing minion advancement and maximizing revenue in early game.
 * The situation depends on the player though, because the game, in the end, is all about making it to the other team's nexus and destroying it.
 * Rule of thumb: If an enemy champion appears to be leading you into a trap, it's too late. And don't chase.
 * Of course, some champions play this trope perfectly straight (at least when they get well-farmed) like Olaf and Tryndamere, capable of simply ripping into the enemy team and slaughtering everything within reach of their blades.
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: Barbarians and Noxians.
 * Ax Crazy: Played literally with Dr. Mundo, Sion, and Olaf, all three of which wield axes, have abilities that hurt themselves in the process of hurting the enemy, and are designed to charge straight into a fight.
 * Olaf especially was designed to be an "Ax wielding maniac".
 * Darius decapitates others with his huge axe.
 * Back From the Dead:
 * Everyone respawns after death for sometime. As it likely gave your enemies time and extra gold over you, it will eventually get to a point where a dead team's buildings and base should logically be razed by the other side before they can respawn.
 * The respawn timer increases as the game progresses.
 * The Guardian Angel item does the same thing, but there is a longer cooldown before it can be used again.
 * The Revive summoner spell also allows you to immediately respawn upon casting, but it has a nine-minute cooldown, and is widely considered the worst summoner spell ever: while all the other spells except maybe Rally find their consistent use in standard matches, Revive is useful only with various gimmicky, but occasionally effective, tactics. (This is subverted by the popular "Zombie Karthus" technique in Summoner's Rift, as well as generally in dominion, where one revive can win you the game by back-dooring a point.
 * As a rare plot example, the character Sion is quite literally back from the dead. After having been killed by Demacians, his corpse is rescued by Noxian General Katarina and is then revived with necromancy. Also, Karthus is an undead Lich. Urgot also underwent the same resurrection as Sion, although the mangled state of his body caused complications.
 * Both Yorick and his ultimate are examples of this. The character Yorick is quite literally back from hell to try and earn his family name remembrance, and apart from that, his ultimate allows himself or an allied champion to become a ghost after death.
 * Both Mordekaiser and Zilean have ultimate attacks that do this, in opposite effects. Mordekaiser enslaves an enemy champion's soul, making them serve him, whereas Zilean's ultimate revives a dead allied champion.
 * Badass Adorable: Yordles in general, but Teemo has this in spades. Especially since the dev team gave him an Easter Bunny skin -AND- an astronaut skin -AND- a superhero skin.
 * Badass Crew: The Commando-skin Demacians; Xin Zhao, Garen, Galio, Jarvan, and Lux.
 * Not to be outdone, Noxus has begun to reveal their Crimson Elite. Current known members include Talon and Riven.
 * Badass Boast: Several champions use these as their taunts.
 * Cho'gath: "Death is not the end for you. I have seen to it. For eternity. You. Are. MINE!"
 * Nasus: "Your legacy shall drift away, blown into eternity, like the sands of the desert." and "Life is a cycle; yours is over." Again, when you pick him. "The cycle of life and death continues. We will live. They will die."
 * Mordekaiser: "Death is too good for the likes of you!"
 * Malzahar: "Bow to the Void, or be CONSUMED by it!"
 * Nocturne has one as a joke: "Weather forecast for tonight? Dark with a chance of pain!"
 * Shen: "You're already dead, you just haven't caught up yet."
 * Veigar: "Even Death trembles in my presence!" Said in an off-kilter, high-pitched voice. Also, when you select him: "Know, that if the tables were turned, I would show you no mercy!"
 * Annie: She has two adorable ones. "You smell like burning", a reference to the fact that she lights her opponents on fire, as well as the ever popular "Beaten by a little girl...HA!"
 * Badass Pacifist: Many support champions do very little damage themselves, but make their allies much stronger.
 * Sona has three different auras, one stun and one damage spell. But her passive actually adds additional damage and effects to her next basic attack after a couple spellcasts.
 * Soraka has two heals, a silence and a mana refill and one damage spell.
 * Janna technically has several damage spells but they do little actual damage and are loaded with slows, knockups and knockbacks. Her most effective playstyle involves leaving every single minion kill to her allies, falling hopelessly behind in terms of levels and gold, but using her spells to set up enemies for her team, earning her team potentially a dozen kills while doing insignificant amounts of damage herself.
 * Zilean has only one ability that deals damage. One. The others are to reset his cooldowns, speed up or slow down champions, or revive allies if they die. It's possible for him to spike by putting a time bomb on someone, then rewinding the cooldown and putting another on, forcing the first bomb to explode.
 * Taric can actually do some decent damage himself, but his main job is supporting his team. He can heal his allies, passively boost their armor, stun enemies that would otherwise cause trouble, but his Ultimate is the real kicker. It does a decent amount of AoE burst damage, significantly boosts Taric's offensive stats, and gives nearby allies half that bonus for 10 seconds. It's absolutely fabulous for teamfights or tearing apart a tower.
 * Averted by Karma, whose abilities both make her allies stronger and deal significant damage themselves. This leaves her in a bit of a weird spot in the metagame.
 * While the orthodox setup (and the one most commonly seen in high-level/tournament games) for most of the supports above is to have them lane with an AD carry and give up all the minion kills and gold to said carry, effectively turning them into CC/ward/clairvoyance bots for the rest of the game, people sometimes choose to build them as damage dealers. Soraka and Janna both have damaging spells that scale well with AP, and Sona's short cooldowns allow her to throw out Sheen procs regularly, making AD a semi-viable build for her.
 * BFS:
 * A number of champions use this kind of weapon, especially Tryndamere, whose sword is so big he drags it on the ground behind him.
 * Slightly Subverted with Mordekaiser and Jarvan, who have a B.F.Mace and a B.F.Spear respectively.
 * A purchasable item in the game is actually called the B. F. Sword.
 * Bash Brothers: Jax and Gragas. They go drinking and get in Bar Brawls together. In the lore, anyway.
 * Battle Cry: Lux, Jarvan, and Garen all shout DEMACIA!
 * Hilariously parodied with the "Legendary" Brolaf skin for Olaf, who shouts "BROMACIA!" when he uses his ultimate.
 * Beehive Barrier:
 * The summoner spell Fortify places a hexagon-tiled invulnerability sphere around your towers for a few seconds.
 * Morgana's Black Shield and Udyr's Turtle Stance are some as well. Same graphic too.
 * Jarvan has a spell that summons an actual shield (as in the kite-shaped object) in a transparent hexagonal shape.
 * Poppy's ultimate puts a miniature barrier around her.
 * Beware the Nice Ones: All Yordles except Veigar, who is a megalomaniac, and Rumble, the Yordle equivalent of a mad scientist in a mech with tasers and flamethrowers.
 * Especially scary with Teemo. It's heavily implied that the constant use of his abilities for assassinations, as well as the isolation he suffers, is slowly driving him insane, which gives nightmare fuel when you look at the constant smile he always wears. He's starting to crack, and it won't be too long until he uses his poison outside of the League.
 * Also Lux, who is eternally smiling, but won't hesitate to trap you in light and MELT YOUR FACE OFF WITH A LASER!
 * Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Mild case with the Yordles. From the champions we're shown, female Yordles are always blue-skinned with white hair (Tristana, Poppy), while male Yordles vary from having tan skin (Corki), tan skin and blonde hair (Heimerdinger), to looking like anthropomorphic hamsters (Kennen, Teemo, Rumble). Likely caused by the fact that there were originally two different races, Meglings and Yordles, that were merged into one race by the designers.
 * Boring but Practical: Wards. They provide no statistical bonus to your champion what so ever. They are one of the cheapest items in the game in terms of gold cost and also are considered to be some of the most important items by more experienced players since knowing where the enemy team is or isn't is very important.
 * Auto-attackers. That's the only way they deal damage, but if it isn't effective as hell.
 * The summoner spell "Clairvoyance" is another intel-gathering tool similar to wards. It is similarly boring and similarly practical.
 * To a similar extent, stat-increasing elixirs. They only last four minutes long, and don't provide any cool unique effects, but always provide more benefit in plain stats for its gold price while using it than if you had a permanent item instead.
 * The Oracle's Elixir allows a champion's line of sight to see invisible stuff until they die. Proper teamwork allows it to easily pay off against champions who utilize invisibility, as well as spot and kill enemy's wards, thus denying map awareness.
 * The Doran's items don't build into anything, but can be bought right when the game starts and give more sheer statistical benefits than any other item costing roughly equally at the time. Some players find it perfectly good to just buy them until they get enough gold to sell them for more expensive ones.
 * Summoner's Rift default laning/team composition: one carry, one tank, one offtank, one caster and one support; one jungler, solo top, solo mid, duo bot.
 * Many of the original champions count toward this as well. Ashe in particular has only two attack skills, one self buff, and one vision extender. However, her game-changing ultimates are devastating in the right place.
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: Despite there being plenty of things to spend money on, very much averted. While it's certainly faster to gain the unlockable champions by forking over cash, you can also gain them via "Influence Points", which are awarded along with EXP at the end of every match. While there are things you can only buy with money, they are either 1) purely cosmetic skins for your heroes, or 2) "Boosts" which double your EXP or IP gain for a set period of time. Also, the Runes which provide stat boosts to your champions? They can only be purchased with IP; no real money allowed. And they're the things more likely to have an effect on whether you win or not. Ten champions, rotated weekly, are free to play at any time. It's perfectly viable to do some playtesting and then purchase only the ones you like. (Or, for a Self-Imposed Challenge, play only whoever's available right now.) However, it must be pointed out that sets of Tier-3 Runes — which you want, because they'll help you win — cost almost as much IP as champions; maxing out a single Runepage involves playing dozens of games.
 * In a meta example, Riot Games themselves: "Hi, guys, there's a popularity contest for online games over there, the winner is decided by number of votes. Oh, and if we win, everybody will get a free rune page. Here's a vote link. No, we're not implying anything."
 * However you need the IP boosts if you want to quickly get IP at an early level. Once you get past level 10 you no longer have IP bonuses.
 * Buxom Is Better: More or less explains most of the female characters. Mentioning it is virtually Memetic Mutation. It has been explained that being subtler doesn't quite work for the game engine.
 * Cast From Hit Points: Currently three champions use health as their main resource: Vladamir, Mordekaiser, and Dr. Mundo. Tryndamere used to use health, but he was changed to use the Fury system, making all of his abilities free to cast.
 * Cast of Snowflakes: In addition to each champion having a very different physical appearance, they each perform a very unique role in team compositions.
 * Catch Phrase: In nearly every champion spotlight since Yorick (as well as many times he shoutcasts games or in other League-related videos), Phreak makes it a point to use the phrase "tons of damage."
 * Chekhov's Gun: Many game elements were hinted at in the Journal far prior to their release, such as Lux appearance in the League and Wriggle's Lantern.
 * Chekhov's Gunman:
 * Renekton was added as a playable champion about a year and a half after being mentioned in Nasus' backstory.
 * Kog'Maw, as seen in the background of an early Malzahar screenshot.
 * Really, you could add a whole lot more examples if you take into account how the Journal of Justice and backstories mention certain characters that could easily become champions later.
 * Child Soldiers: The League has no age requirements for its champions.
 * Garen's younger sister, Luxanna "Lux" Crownguard, joined the Demacian military at the age of thirteen. It is unknown how common such a thing is within Demacia, or whether she even saw combat while around that age.
 * Annie is a little girl. And a magical prodigy. With fireballs. And her teddy bear is a demon from hell that she ensorcelled.
 * Nunu looks like he can't be much older than Annie. Both Annie's profile page and Nunu's refer to how terrifying they'll be when they grow up, considering how nasty they are now.
 * Clothes Make the Superman: Champions can be a One-Man Army later in the game, but you need items to do that. You will lose the game if you can't get them. See Level Grinding.
 * Depends on the champion in question. Carries need expensive and specific items, casters and tanks are less reliant on them, supports are the least reliant. Janna, Alistar and Blitzcrank can be fine with just boots and lots of wards, as they mostly provide crowd control, which doesn't scale. This is in fact the reasoning behind a strategy for grouping a support in a laine with a carry. The carry gets as much gold as possible from the enemy minions in the lane to make use of their high potential, while the support remains a useful member of the team without that gold.
 * Combat by Champion: The purpose of the League -- because actual wars and the dangerous potential of magic is unpreferably terrible.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: CPU Champions receive items on a timer, so if the match goes on long enough, they already have their completed build when the players are still farming gold to finish their builds. Sometimes if a game goes on long enough, bots may have less minion kills and team kills than you yet still somehow wind up at level 18 before the players do.
 * Conscription: Demacia requires at least three years of military service for all citizens, and Noxus has a mandatory service of six years, requiring being in active military reserves until too old, and a compulsory draft that may affect any citizen, regardless of age and sex, when the Noxian High Command sees it necessary.
 * Conservation of Ninjutsu: An actual in-game mechanic for Shen, Kennen and Akali: they each get -1 health for each other ninja on the team. It used to be -1 damage, but this actually made a huge difference over an entire game, so it was changed.
 * Conspicuously Selective Perception: A game mechanic -- the minions in the lanes will attack enemy champions if said enemy champion(s) attacks one of their allied champions. But only if they attack, as in by the method of "autoattacking". So, using only the abilities of the champion that one is playing as that does not utilize their autoattack allows a player to damage the enemy champions while their allied minions won't care at all. Avoid autoattacking the enemy champion if there are many minions nearby, and make sure the times you do autoattack an enemy champion have a superior payoff from the damage you'll take from those minions.
 * Cool Sword: There is a mundane 'Longsword' item to buy, but the rest of the sword items in the game definitely qualify.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: An example in the 30th issue of the first volume in the Journal of Justice in CEO Dr. Priggs of Priggs Industries, reporting a Zaunian warehouse of theirs was found to be a makeshift prison for the purposes of blackmail against the company's competitors. One of the prisoners was there for at least three years. Priggs met his end at the hands of Graves, who had been locked up for conning him years before.
 * Crack Defeat: There have been matches where one team is dominating then after a few minutes starts getting sloppy and the other team wins.
 * Backdooring can be defined as that: a champion with high attack and movement speed will target unguarded towers, take them out, and then retreat.
 * Often happens with Dominion wherein a team can capture three or even every single node at the beginning of the game only to have the other team emerge from the shadows and take all of them.
 * Crippling Overspecialization: Stacking one stat in this game will generally just make you extremely vulnerable or easily countered. Only a very few amount of champions have a gameplay style that encourages getting only one stat until you might as well upgrade to other items that give more in addition to them.
 * It is possible to force the enemy team to overspecialize. Pick an assassin or nuker and have a good early game to the point where the enemy is forced to buy resistance items specifically to counter you. While this leaves you fairly useless, the entire enemy team is now hundreds of gold behind or you could single out the one person that didn't buy resistances yet.
 * Some champions have passive abilities that boost a stat according to how high another stat is. This both nudges the player in a certain direction for building items and makes stacking one stat a bit more viable. Examples include Singed (+1 HP per 4 mana), Galio (ability power bonus equal to half his magic resist score) and Rammus (attack damage bonus equal to one quarter his armor). However, none of them are strong enough to encourage overspecialization to benefit more from the passive (The examples respectively would be have too much mana and nothing else, be vulnerable to physical damage, and be vulnerable to magic damage).
 * To a point also Malphite, whose most practical general-use attack scales its damage to his defense.
 * Critical Existence Failure: The ex-lead writer even says they do feel pain during the matches, so just assume the champions are just that Badass.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome: As an in-game/in-universe meta-example, it should be noted that the game is designed to give the players this feeling. There's lot of ways to win a situation in ways that make you feel like an epic fantasy hero. Having the narrator announce to the world that you are "unstoppable" and "godlike" and all that kind of stuff doesn't hurt either. Never mind if your enemies get these moments ten times as often as you do.
 * Crutch Character: Any character that is said to not scale into "late game" is this. The trope isn't nearly as bad as it may seem, as each game has all champions start over from scratch at level 1. Using a early-game monster to kill and stop the enemy carry from becoming the late-game powerhouse that he will become is as valid a strategy as any other. Of course, if the enemy can hold out they will have a major killing machine in the game's crucial last moments while you are left with a below-average champions under your control. Part of the fun and strategy of the game is figuring out when such a strategy is viable and when it isn't.
 * Cute and Psycho: The database asserts that Teemo is slowly cracking under his prolonged isolation from others of his kind. He's doing a bit better now, though, now that he has Tristana as a friend.
 * This is also what drove Veigar insane.
 * Cutscene Power to the Max: Used to an extent in the Season One CG trailer, but just as often averted -- Ryze gets to do a lot of cool stuff that isn't possible in the game, but most of the characters use their actual ingame abilities (and in Ryze's case, his summoner uses the Ghost spell to let him run through the wreckage of the collapsing tower).
 * Lampshaded in the League of Legends Season 1 Commentary, with Phreak treating the trailer like a real "600 ELO" match (which is very, very low on the ranked ladder).
 * Death Is Cheap: When you die, you can't participate in the game for up to a minute and a half. You miss out on some gold and experience, you give your buffs if you have any to your enemy (not counting Baron buff which you just lose), you waste some valuable time of battle Elixirs and instantly lose Oracle's Elixir. You will still inevitably die in pretty much every game, and your number of deaths is only very weakly correlated to whether you win or not.
 * LoL is actually quite notable for death being cheaper than in other games in the genre, such as the original Defense of the Ancients and Heroes of Newerth as champions do not lose gold when they die. Some consider this a flaw as they feel it makes the game less "hardcore" than these other games, but most generally agree that it's an improvement as it helps reduce the effect of Unstable Equilibrium.
 * Deflector Shields: Numerous champions have those. Apart from that, there used to be an item called Rose's Pride, but it was never implemented and is instead replaced by Zhonya's Hourglass, which puts you in stasis for several seconds.
 * Determinator: Some players are determined to finish a match even when they've lost most of their base... and sometimes they win.
 * Some ingame examples would be Tryndamere, Olaf and Dr. Mundo, who get stronger as they near zero health, and especially Karma who gains ability power at low health and has an assortment of heals and shields. Being a support (though also a fairly strong attacker for a support), Karma most likely won't win a 1v1 battle but she can draw it out for an impossibly long time while her team closes in on the attacker.
 * Difficult but Awesome: Several characters, especially those reliant on skillshots, qualify for this. Special note goes to Lee Sin, who can save enemy characters with a poorly placed kick, and otherwise be useless in the hands of an inexperienced player. Those who know how to play him well and use his combos and tricks, however, are an absolute menace.
 * Similar to this is Alistar, who doesn't do that much damage, whose ultimate technique is used primarily for escaping, and whose Headbutt has saved many an enemy champ by knocking them away from a team fight. However, used correctly, he can sustain even the squishiest of carries by constantly healing, and a headbutt used to knock an enemy champion into friendly carry or turret range is a powerful strategy.
 * Double Entendre: Start at 1:30 for this "commentary" on the Season 1 CG trailer. The actual Double Entendre is at 1:38.
 * Miss Fortune has abilities named "Make It Rain" (a shower of bullets from the sky) and "Double Up" (a bullet that bounces and hits two enemies).
 * Drop in Drop Out Multiplayer: NO. If you leave during a game, even for a few minutes to take a bathroom break, you will cripple your team by being underleveled at best and singlehandedly turn the tide of battle in favour of your enemies at worst. If you're gone long enough, you could end up reported for being a "leaver", which results in the banhammer if it happens enough.
 * Dynamic Entry: Any champion with a dash or a blink really.
 * Turned up to eleven with Pantheon's Grand Skyfall.
 * Jarvan can jump on a target and trap them within a ring created by the force of his impact.
 * Amumu does this the best. Not only does he fling himself into the entire enemy team, they'll most likely shit their pants, because despite being small, Amumu's "dynamic entry" usually is followed by his legendary ultimate, which is one of the best in the game, disabling their entire team.
 * Blitzcrank has the opposite of this. He has a pull, which can force an enemy champion to dynamic entry to YOUR team, giving your team a chance to eliminate them.
 * Shen's Stand United. Not only does your ally get a shield, it's one of the few global ults remaining in game. And for that matter, Shadow Dash is also a dynamic entry. AND HE IS A FLIPPIN NINJA TO BOOT!
 * Twisted fate's Ultimate reaches almost anywhere the whole map good for picking off anyone who runs.
 * Shyvana can leap towards the enemy and turn herself into a dragon mid-jump, pulling all enemies in her path with her on her wings.
 * Poppy does this as part of her standard strategy. She charges an enemy carries them a set distance... or into the wall, stunning them in the process.
 * Drop the Hammer: The item Phage, which can be later upgraded to the bigger hammers Frozen Mallet or Entropy.
 * Taric and Poppy both use hammers, as does Sion while using his Hextech Sion skin.
 * Dueling Games: With Demigod, Heroes of Newerth, and, of course, Defense of the Ancients. Heroes of Newerth unquestionably the most.
 * Eldritch Abomination: There are a few here and there. Cho'Gath and Kog'Maw are monsters from the Void (which is apparently filled with such creatures), Fiddlesticks is an extraplanar horror who killed the guy who was stupid enough to summon him, and Nocturne is a dream-born monster who hunted and killed Summoners in their sleep until he was dragged into this world. Xerath also borders on this, considering that he's become entirely inhuman in almost every way, including personality, and is absurdly powerful even by the standards of the League.
 * Jax may be an example of this. While he appears to be human, it is not known where he came from. What is known, however, is that when he joined the League, he got so many consecutive wins that they forced him to use a LAMPPOST instead of a real weapon. The worst part is that it apparently didn't affect his chances at all, so the requirement was rescinded while he kept using the lamppost.
 * Eldritch Location: The Void.
 * Elemental Crafting: Referred to in the basic armor items: Cloth Armor grants some armor, while Chain Vest grants a lot of it.
 * Elemental Powers: Brand and Annie use fire spells, Ryze and Kennen cast electricity, Anivia uses ice, Malphite uses rocks, Janna is a spirit of wind, Fizz and Nautilus use water, Lux's spells involve bursts of light, Nocturne uses DAAARRKNEESSSSSS... yeah, the whole spectrum gets represented in this game.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Cloak and Dagger item... is made from the Cloak of Agility and Dagger items.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: You can be promised from the start of the game that only your team will have disconnects, only your team will have a support that doesn't know how important wards are, and only your team will have the Jax that does bad. It's positive that THEIR team will have the Akali that gets 12 kills by 10 minutes, their team will know how to communicate, and their team will always have the better jungler.
 * Evil Twin: A confusing instance on Riot's forums. There is an Associate Game Designer, Shurelia. There is also an apparently official Riot account posting on the forums called DarkShurelia. Who is comparatively ruder and snarkier while posting. One other Riot poster seemed to indicate this was because people made fun of her voice.
 * Everything's Better with Spinning: Spinning attacks are so common in this game that there's a term for it: "spin to win."
 * Garen is the king of this Trope. If you walk into a brush and there is a Garen on the enemy team, expect it.
 * Hilariously parodied with Wukong's ultimate. He spins and knocks up enemies, but the kicker is that in the code for the game, the trigger for Wukong's ultimate is actually called "spintowin"
 * Fake Difficulty: All tank characters face the problem that their toughness is not very useful if the enemy simply ignores them and kills them last. Some tanks have taunt abilities to force enemies to attack them. Others do high amounts of damage or have powerful disabling spells. Cho'Gath eats minions to grow incredibly large and simply walks in front of the enemy's mouse cursor so they physically cannot click on the vulnerable damage dealers.
 * Fake Longevity: The average IP cost for new champions has gotten rather high. Where some champions may cost 450 or 1350 IP, the rest that have been released now cost around 6300, with occasional 3150's. Riot's official explanation is that they feel the newer champions have been designed with different mechanics and playstyle reflected by their higher prices, though a number of players think they're just trying to encourage buying the champions with real money or are attempting to make use of this trope.
 * A few classic champions got their prices lowered, perhaps helping even out the average somewhat. Even if it's not that big a difference.
 * Fan Service: See Stripperific.
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Rakkor are definitely meant to invoke the idea of the Spartans, right down to their armor and weapons. The tribe's name was originally Stanpar, an anagram of the word Spartan, but this was Retconned when Leona was added to the game.
 * Featureless Protagonist: Summoners are not "characters" in any traditional sense; you get to pick a screen name and a buddy icon, and that's all.
 * Fighter, Mage, Thief: Shen, Kennen and Akali, the three ninjas, are a tank, a fast medium-range nuker, and fragile speedster, respectively.
 * The three champions available in the Battle Training tutorial -- Garen (front-line fighter), Ryze (mage), and Ashe (ranged damage dealer).
 * Filk Song: The Songs of the Summoned competition inevitably brings a lot of them to the field.
 * Five-Bad Band: The Noxus affiliated champions.
 * The Big Bad: Swain
 * The Dragon: Darius and Urgot
 * The Evil Genius: Swain/Singed (Not a Noxus native, but a hired mercenary)
 * The Brute: Sion
 * The Dark Chick: LeBlanc
 * Katarina and Talon isn't considered here since they are both against Swain. Cassiopeia and Riven also, for obvious reasons.
 * The evil team in the season 1 trailer:
 * Big Bad: Morgana
 * The Dragon: Nasus
 * Evil Genius: Warwick
 * The Brute: Cho'gath
 * Dark Chick: Katarina
 * Five-Man Band: The Demacian crew, if you're willing to portray them as heroes.
 * The Hero: Jarvan
 * The Lancer: Garen
 * The Big Guy: Galio
 * The Smart Guy: Lux/Xin Zhao
 * The Chick: Lux
 * The Sixth Ranger: Xin Zhao/Shyvana
 * And the good team in season trailer:
 * The Hero: Kayle
 * The Lancer: Master Yi
 * The Smart Guy: Ryze
 * The Big Guy: Alistar
 * The Chick: Ashe
 * Fog of War: You can only see areas within the immediate vision of your team's units. There are special Sight Wards that allow you to lift the fog over a certain area for a few minutes, as well as a Summoner Spell that allows you to take a peak at any section of the map you want for a few seconds.
 * Fun with Acronyms: Do you honestly think it was an accident that a name was chosen that could be shortened to "LOL"?
 * Game Breaking Bug: Whatever you do, do not disconnect from the internet mid-match. Lagging out is fine, but actually losing modem connectivity will screw you up. For instance, if an enemy champion was respawning at the time, your client will insist that champion is still dead and cannot be interacted with. His client is under no such compunctions. Congratulations: you've just made an enemy invincible.
 * Though rare, there is a bug where Nocturne can slow your FPS to a crawl. Understandable, since he is somewhat resource intensive.
 * Yorick's Ultimate ability (a "ghost-form"/temporary resurrection on himself or another champion) has caused several such bugs, to the point where the damage was so bad that he was temporarily removed from the game so they could fix it.
 * At first, if the Ability was up at the time of the player's death, but the player also has Ignite on them, the Ignite ticked away the sliver of health that remains prior to the ability's triggering, thus negating the temporary resurrection effect.
 * Under some rare situations, a resurrected player would continue to die even after they've respawned, giving the enemy who originally killed them even more kills.
 * Finally, there was a bug that caused champions to get a kill point for killing the resurrected ghost, meaning that a single kill could be turned into a double kill. This was the bug that required Yorick to be briefly removed from play.
 * Gameplay and Story Integration: The melee champions armed with spears or staffs have 25-50 more attack range over other melee champions.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation: Flying champions are equal to walking champions, champions benefit from weapons despite having a Weapon of Choice, et cetera, for versatility.
 * Gargle Blaster: There is a contest in Bilgewater called the GrugMug Grog Slog where half of the contest is creating an actually caustic drink. As in, the winner's has burned through the mug, the table and the floor. The other half is drinking the most of that winner before requiring medical attention.
 * Singed's ultimate ability has him drink one for a Status Buff.
 * Gladiator Games: The League is basically one. Noxus also has one called 'The Fleshing'. This is what Xin Zhao survived.
 * Glass Cannon: Some champions (unofficially known as "nukes") are designed to deal tons of damage very very quickly. Their defensive stats and abilities are usually quite low. An interesting case is Karthus who, thanks to his passive that lets him continue casting spells for seven seconds after he's killed and his ultimate that damages every player on the enemy team, actually has the potential to deal more damage once he's killed, allowing him to focus entirely on offense and ignore defense for the most part.
 * Glowing Eyes: Common for a number of champion's portraits for the English version of game. A Doylist explanation is that eyes are very hard to draw.
 * A Good Name for a Rock Band: "Pentakill" (the Announcer Chatter when one player kills 5 enemies in a very short space of time). It's been officially recognized, with Sona (on keyboard), Yorick (on bass guitar/shovel), and Mordekaiser (on guitar/axe), and Karthus (lead singer) getting Pentakill skins and an article on them in the Journal of Justice.
 * Good Is Not Nice: Demacia is the moral opposite of the Chaotic Evil Noxus... which punishes all crimes equally, has universal three-year conscription for all citizens, and does not allow its soldiers to surrender, flee, or make excuses.
 * Guide Dang It: If you have never played a game like this, you'll probably need to ask for help from more experienced players to get your head around it.
 * Needless to say, due to the negative effect of just one single newbie on your team, if you actually ask for help during a match you are more likely to get bombarded with insults and reported for intentionally helping the enemy than to receive advice.
 * Slightly averted with a fairly in-depth tutorial, which (with the introduction of Battle Training) now leads new players through the common arena of Summoner's Rift. It doesn't teach you about wards, jungling, laning and teamfight phases, what items scale best with what champions, what champions scale better, many statistics are hidden and lots of things require you to try them to understand them, team compositions... but it's better than nothing!
 * To a lesser extent, this can apply to veteran players who step away from the game for a seemingly short time. With champions and patches coming out every two weeks or so, not playing for a few months means having to learn the dynamics of several new champions and the results of many small but significant changes all over.
 * The Gunslinger:
 * Tristana, though it is more of a cannon than a gun.
 * Gangplank's Parrrley has him shoot a target with a flintlock pistol. Shooting enemies is also part of his regular, melee-range attack animation.
 * Miss Fortune shoots two enormous pistols.
 * Caitlyn has her trusty rifle.
 * Graves the Outlaw uses a customized double-barreled shotgun. And an ability that fires three bullets simultaneously.
 * Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Though there are exceptions the majority of male human characters are melee (tanks, fighters, or melee carries), and the majority of the female human characters are ranged (support, mages, or ranged damage dealers).
 * Hammerspace: You can carry up to six items, which can be breastplates, katanas, axes... none of them are even shown being held by your character or appear on their person. Some of them cause your character to have specific auras to let the enemy team know you have the effect up, but you never see the items themselves.
 * Possibly hand waved with the idea that the champions themselves don't get the item, but the summoner backing them does and merely channels the artifact's power to increase their champion's abilities.
 * Heroic Willpower: Tryndamere's Undying Rage. For the duration of the buff, his HP cannot be reduced below one, allowing him to tank the combined attack of an entire team and laugh in their faces.
 * Alistar's Unbreakable Will.
 * Olaf's Ragnarok.
 * Poppy's Diplomatic immunity. The text states that she focuses SO INTENTLY on her target that the rest of the enemies attacks and abilities do nothing to her.
 * Homage: The picture of Demacia has a ledge and a tree that makes one think of the White Tree of Gondor in Minas Tirith from the Peter Jackson movies.
 * Ezreal's dance is the dance from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
 * Nasus walks like an Egyptian.
 * Hailfire Peaks: Magma Chamber, a canceled map.
 * Homing Boulders: All ranged autoattacks will track you. This is most obvious from caster minions, whose projectiles are fairly slow. Some abilities do this as well, most of which are magical in nature.
 * Reaches silly levels when you include the fact that some projectiles will hunt you down no matter where you go. For example: getting close to an enemy tower (which shoots energy blasts), then teleporting away with the summoner spell. If there was a tower shot coming for you when you teleported, it will follow you across the entire map and execute tight turns to get you, resulting in a hit out of pretty much nowhere several seconds later. Works with caster shots too. Stories of players escaping a battle with <5 HP, only to see a slow floaty orb of inevitable doom following them abound.
 * Hotter and Sexier: Compared to other MOBA games, League of Legends is known for lots of fanservice.
 * I Call It Vera: Sion's Chopper, Poppy's Whomper, Miss Fortune's Shock and Awe.
 * Nunu's Willump or Willump's Nunu?
 * Image Song: A fan-made Mundo one.
 * There are a lot more now after the Songs of the Summoned contest.
 * Improbable Aiming Skills: Homing Boulders aside, Ashe's Enchanted Crystal Arrow and Ezreal's Trueshot Barrage can be aimed across the whole map. Interestingly, truly impossible shots are the player's Improbable Aiming Skills (or, more likely, blind luck).
 * Infinity+1 Sword: Averted. Although several items are very powerful in the right hands, there is no one strongest item in the game.
 * Infinity Edge, with its huge damage boost, high crit chance, and increase in critical damage done is probably as close as you can get for melee DPS champions. Of course on most spellcasters, it is next to useless.
 * Rabbadon's Deathcap is the caster version. Single biggest AP boost of any item, and raises the effective AP of every other source you have.
 * Trinity Force is the most expensive item in the game, requiring three completely different mid-tier items to build, but its wide variety of stats make it only really useful to a small number of champions. Of course, it's totally awesome on those who can make use of it.
 * Instant Win Condition: Knock down their Nexus and that team loses. Even if they have twice as many kills as you, you have a Nexus and they don't, so they lose.
 * Item Crafting: A derivation of Defense of the Ancients' recipe system. Items are bought using gold and have useful effects in and of themselves, but once you have the right combination of them, you click a button, pay some more gold, and turn them into a new item. The reason the interface is awesome is that it shows and allows you to purchase not only your current item's ingredients, but displays what items it goes into as well.
 * Joke Character: Urf the manatee, who attacks with a spatula. There was some debate as to if he'd actually be in the game since he was launched as an April Fool's joke, deleted, then brought back, and deleted yet again. Now lives on in spirit as a skin for Warwick and Corki and as a ghost that sometimes shows up on the map. Oh, I get it, "in spirit."
 * For April Fool's 2012, Fizz was given a skin where his ultimate had Urf coming out of the "water".
 * Lee Sin was this at first. A cancelled character from the very beginning of the game's Beta, the April Fools of 2011 showcased him with a joke Champion spotlight that featured him doing things like killing the Baron Nashor by looking at it and dive-bombing the entire enemy team from across the map. Two days later he was released for real, with an actual champion spotlight.
 * Katanas Are Just Better: Youmuu's Ghostblade, whose icon is a katana inside purple ripples with some cherry blossoms floating around it, is a Legendary item to buy that provides attack damage, increased critical chance, armor penetration, cooldown reduction, and has an activatable ability that gives faster attacking and moving for up to 8 seconds. The item is also a Shout-Out to Touhou.
 * The character Shen uses two shorter katanas.
 * Master Yi's blade is as close to a katana as you could get without actually being one. He actaully does use a katana in his Samurai Skin.
 * Killer Rabbit: Most of the Yordle champions are kind of cute to some extent. That doesn't make any of them less deadly.
 * Invoked with the Yordle Teemo's Easter bunny outfit. Extremely fluffy, extremely deadly.
 * Kill Streak: Two types of these.
 * Just racking up a killstreak without dying will cause the announcer to declare after 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8+ kills respectively: killing spree, rampage, unstoppable, dominating, godlike and legendary. A variation is that it does not give anything for the player, but rather gives nice gold bonus to whoever dealed a killing blow on the player, bringing his kill streak down. Thus, those with big streak become primary targets and hunted by all means.
 * Getting a bunch of kills one after another, with no more than 10 sec gap between the subsequent two has her announce double kill, triple kill, quadra kill and penta kill. Pentakills are considered quite a feat amongst players, and those who got one receive Bragging Rights Reward. It is even possible to kill past that if a newly dead player uses the Revive summoner spell to run back into the fight to get killed again, giving a very, very rare legendary kill (kills in quick succession over 5 are just 'legendary kill').
 * Knight Templar: The city-state of Demacia in general. A more specific case is Kayle "The Judicator," a literal angel of justice.
 * An interesting distinction though as Kayle, although superficially an ally of Demacia (as her dark sister Morgana is allied with their rivals Noxus), appears to place her final allegiance with the League as the arbiter of law on Valoran (placing her on the "Law Before Good" end of the Lawful Good scale). Demacia on the other hand acts out of an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness in opposing the "evil" of Noxus -- a column by a Demacian writer in the Journal of Justice argued, not that Demacia was not responsible for breaking the cease-fire with Noxus or that they had been framed, but that they were justified in attacking the Noxians in Kalamanda, citing their moral superiority and quoting a section of Demacian Creed that is honestly rather scary:

"Mordekaiser: You only need to click once, fool.
 * Lampshade Hanging: Katarina used the British pronunciation of the word 'Macabre' (Muh-cahb-RUH) in the earlier stages of the game. When her voice actor was changed, she was given a new joke that subtly called attention to this.
 * Ditto with Janna.
 * Last of His Kind: Alistar the Minotaur from those he knows. As a species; it's implied there are other minotaurs.
 * Skarner the Crystal Vanguard fits this to a T. One of his quotes; "I miss my kind."
 * However in case you couldn't tell from his name he isn't the last, he is just the first of his kind to wake up.
 * Technically, Twitch the Plague Rat is the first of his kind, as are Blitzcrank the Steam Golem and Rammus the Armordillo.
 * Large Ham: Some champions fall in this category, most notably Demacian ones. The way they scream "DEMACIA!" has reached Ascended Meme status.
 * Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
 * All champions talk to their summoner in the game. Since the players act as summoners, this can lead to some playing with this trope as some champions remark about things that don't always make sense in-universe.

Akali: So many noobs. Will matchmaking ever find true balance?"


 * The 7th issue of the Journal of Justice has an interview of Mundo, in which he says he has opened a business, amongst other things. "Corporate businessman one of the many skins Mundo wear. Mundo also bodybuilder." Those sentences are interpretable literally, since those are skins you can buy to use for him.
 * “Come on, Orianna. Time to learn how to tower dive."
 * Leeroy Jenkins: This is both the worst kind of feeding and the best way to lose the game for your team.
 * Unless you are a tank, in which case plowing straight into the enemy team may cause them to panic and unload their most powerful abilities on your indestructible shell. Even if they kill you in the process, you just soaked up a lot of damage for your team (assuming they are actually on the ball and following behind you) and you are well on your way to winning the teamfight. Bonus points if you get hit with five ultimates at once and survive.
 * Lethal Joke Character: Literally, Shaco the Demon Jester and his Killing Joke weapon.
 * Figuratively, this happens unintentionally every once in a while. Being a competitive game, there are no deliberately bad or overpowered champions, but most players are well aware of which champions, items and summoner spells are weak. Every once in a while a new strategy emerges that employs one of those "useless" features to devastating effect. Just ask any veterans about Evelynn.
 * Level Grinding: The start of every match involves this, but to a lesser extent than DotA, which (in general) took twice as long to complete a match in as this game. Solo-laners will probably reach the level cap of 18 in just about 20 minutes.
 * You have to grind for gold to buy items, also. Learning to get the final blow on enemy minions is really vital.
 * Forced Level Grinding: Not as much as one would think, as players can group up and heavily damage towers at all levels with minion assistance. Towers can fall in less than 10 minutes. It is far easier at higher levels and with better items, though, and they will still have to watch out for the enemy team.
 * Lightning Bruiser:
 * Warwick combines both speed and power with the ability to detect enemies with low health and move faster when they're nearby.
 * Akali has an ultimate that lets her leap to an enemy up to three times, ensuring that she'll almost always be next to you. That, combined with the fact that she heals off of every attack, makes her difficult to get away from.
 * Even better, Udyr the Animal Spirit. His Bear Stance gives him a speed boost and causes his attacks to stun enemies briefly, allowing him to switch to his Tiger Stance and deal massive amounts of damage to his next target. Udyr started off a series of lengthy champion designs that have now come to be known as "Bruisers" by Riot dev team and "tanky-DPS" amongst fans. Some characters like Dr. Mundo were retroactively fitted into this category. Generally consisting of great defenses, offenses, and a distance-closing ability they were the dominant archetype for a long time in early 2011.
 * If Jax gets to you, you're in trouble. With his Leap Strike, that can happen a lot.
 * Wukong is a very fast and tricky character, with his decoy and leap (Nimbus Strike) being a very easy way to gain an advantage. He also becomes a very hard hitter later as well.
 * Renekton's playstyle involves bumrushing enemies and constantly spamming his abilities; having a double dash fits right in with this.
 * Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Zigzagged. Both mages and fighters scale with items. A caster with average scaling will have around the same damage output as a fighter with equally expensive builds, although mages' damage is delivered in short bursts, while fighters' is constant. Played straight with mages with good scaling, inverted with hard carries.
 * While all characters are different, this is generally inverted for the DPS classes. Casters tend to have very powerful base damage for their spells, but become less useful later in the game due items that give resistance to magical damage, or outright negate spells. Meanwhile physical damage characters like Tryndamere can become unstoppable simply if the game lasts long enough for them to get a full item build.
 * It depends. DotA tradition indicates that mages are very powerful early on and weapon users become very powerful in the end game. This is true for traditional mages (Annie) and carries respectively. However, there are also weapon users that dominate the early game but scale poorly, like most bruisers (tanky dps); assassins are heavily based around the early game; and there are even some mage carries (notably Veigar) that are expected to farm the first 30 minutes and then rock the house. Of course this delicate balance is offset by the efforts of the developers to reduce average game length and time spent farming, so a few balance changes will be needed.
 * Technically, the trope is inverted - casters scale on only one stat, ability power, while physical damage characters scale on damage, attack speed and crit chance, all of which apply multiplicatively. In practice, this is balanced fairly well and only in extremely long games where champions reach their perfect final build do physical damage champions noticeably outstrip casters who scale well.
 * You can have something of a "step-function tank" using Atma's Impaler, an item which converts HP into attack damage - buying one of these on a champion stacking HP can take them from low attack damage to something pretty substantial.
 * Of course, any way you slice it LoL handles this trope better than most other MOBA games because of its most significant innovation in the genre- Ability Power. In most of its rivals, mages ability damage generally cannot scale at all, causing their late game drop of to be FAR more extreme than in LoL, but LoL actually manages to have "AP carries" such as Cassiopeia, Ahri, Ryze, Karthus and Brand thanks to AP scaling.
 * The Load: Anybody who's a "feeder" -- that is, getting killed by the enemy without scoring any kills or assists in return. An alternate definition from the forums: getting killed more often than one's combined total of kills and assists-in-other-people's-kills.
 * This is a common insult for anyone that does not appear to be getting much kills, even if they are playing a support or tank character and intentionally holding back to let the carry have the kills and/or unable to do enough damage fast enough to get kills even if they tried.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: The game launched with 40 champions, and is going on strong. The current pattern is a patch and a new character every two weeks. There are over 80 characters now.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: You download the downloader that downloads the installer, the installer installs the game, then you run the launcher that downloads patches and launches the client that launches the game. If you want to play on EU with an US client and vice versa, though, you can also grab a fan made client launcher launcher launcher.
 * In almost every game there's that one guy that takes roughly five minutes to load the game so everyone has to wait and mentally sling curse words at the slowpoke. In the worst case, it takes so long that he disconnects from the game, leaving his team a man short. For obvious reasons this only happens to your team.
 * Part of the reason for this is actually because the game, like Sins of a Solar Empire, was designed to have low system requirements, so it was able to be played on most computers available on the market.
 * "Look, comrade dog! Can LOL playing on Nokia N-Gage!"
 * Loads and Loads of Races: Most champions are human with Yordles as the most common after them. The rest are a wide assortment of monsters and humanoids that range from animal-like humanoids to Eldritch Abominations, with a few "classic" creatures like trolls and minotaurs thrown in.
 * Loophole Abuse: Whenever a deal to unlock a skin for free with a champion is offered, if you don't have that champion but take advantage of the offer, you can get the champion and the skin, sometimes for free. In November 2011, a code was published in PCGamer magazines that would unlock unlock Caitlyn and a skin. As you guessed it; a lot of people have reported not getting codes because people have been going into stores, writing down or snapping pictures of magazines with the codes in them and using those.
 * Luck-Based Mission: For most public matches, you don't get to choose who your teammates are.
 * Aside from players, chance manipulation is made key in-game through every champ having a chance to critical attacks. (Which can be increased) Dodge used to be part of the game but was removed because it was too random; and one character (Jax) was too overly-dependent on it.
 * Gangplank's ultimate ability used to cause cannonballs to strike randomly in a target area, damaging and slowing anything hit by the cannonballs. The area used to be so large that every cannonball could miss hitting anything entirely (which is when YOU used it), or have every cannonball smash your face into the dirt. (Which was typically when you were playing against Gangplank.) It was changed to be much more reliable with a smaller ability area that the cannonballs drop on, and having the slow being applied constantly from standing in the ability's area rather than happening from being hit by a cannonball.
 * Macross Missile Massacre:
 * Not in the typical sense, but one of Corki's signature moves allows him to rapidly fire missiles at his enemies.
 * Heimerdinger's Hextech Micro Rockets also apply.
 * This trope just got properly credified by Urgot's Acid Hunter spammage.
 * Rumble's ultimate, The Equalizer, is an even better example, as it's an actual barrage of giant missiles.
 * Mad Scientist: Singed the Mad Chemist.
 * Warwick did also count, considering he was Singed's teacher. Now that he's a murderous werewolf, not so anymore.
 * Mundo is so mad he ended up creating the monstrosity you see as a champion now from experimenting on himself.
 * The "prevailing scholar" of Zaun, Professor Stanwick Pididly, who enabled Urgot to come back as an undead warrior, by essentially building him a new body with mechanical crab legs, a plasma cannon and pneumatic claw for hands.
 * Magikarp Power: any champion described as a "carry," and especially, a "hypercarry" falls into this category. The point of a "carry" is to, well, carry their team to victory, and they have above-average stat growth to aid this; to compensate, their starting stats are crappy. The result is a Difficult but Awesome Future Badass. There are other champions not labelled as a carry that nonetheless follow a similar effectiveness curve too.
 * The trope isn't exactly as positive here as it is in other games, due to the nature of MOBA's to reset character levels at the start of every match. At first glance, having a team full of carries is an excellent idea, but the enemy may capitalize on top of this and grab an early victory by merit of stopping you from reaching your peak in strength and scoring an early victory. See Crutch Character up above.
 * Nasus and Veigar recieve special note here. Most carries scale into the late game by getting better items. Veigar and Nasus, however, can scale without items. Veigars basic energy blast skill will give him extra ability power whenever he kills an enemy with it, including minions. Nasus basic special attack skill does more damage for each target it's killed. While fairly weak early game, a well fed Veigar or Nasus is capable of absurd amounts of damage late game, as their power scales off of more than just items or levels.
 * Magitek: The technology Hextech is even essentially said by a developer to be this, but with Steampunk asthetics.
 * Mana Meter: Most champions use mana when they cast spells. Both their total mana reserve and the rate at which it replenishes itself increase with champion level and items. There are some exceptions and variations on the theme:
 * Akali, Shen, Kennen, and Lee Sin use Energy, which has a fixed cap and regeneration rate. The cap is low, but the regeneration is high, putting a limit on how man spells they can cast if they don't space them out.
 * Tryndamere, Renekton, and Shyvanna all use the Fury resource very differently. About the only consistent features are that it generates when they attack an enemy and they can expend it to enhance at least one of their abilities.
 * Vladamir, Mordekaiser, and Dr. Mundo all Cast From Hit Points.
 * Instead of draining mana, Rumble gains Heat whenever he uses one of his abilities and his abilities get a boost if he has enough. If he maxes out, though, he overheats and is briefly silenced, giving his attacks a little extra punch until he cools down.
 * Garen, Katarina, and Riven don't use any resources and are completely reliant on cooldowns to cast their abilities.
 * Master Swordsman: Garen, Yi, Irelia... to keep this list short, if a champion uses X weapon, they sure as hell are a master of it.
 * Cranked Up to Eleven with Jax, who is such a master of everything, that he was undefeatable. To make him equal to others, he was saddled with special restrictions to fight under. In protest, he tossed aside his arms and began using a brass lamppost as a weapon, and still kicked ass with it. Even when the restriction was lifted, he continued using the lamppost as a self imposed handicap.
 * Metagame: Changes all the time with new patches and characters. They're seperate between the North American and European regions, even. Champions can be considered useless on one of the servers and overpowered on the other.
 * The Millstone: Any Leeroy Jenkins or player who believes It's Up To Him. To a lesser extent, feeders.
 * Min-Maxing: This is what Runepages (and, to a lesser extent, Masteries) are for. Made a little easier by the addition of purchaseable runepages and free Mastery pages; now you can have one per character, instead of having two "generic" rune pages and one Mastery page that have to multi-purpose.
 * Morality Kitchen Sink: Very close to Grey and Gray Morality. Demacia, Noxus and Zaun are all neutral. Demacia is a fascist state, Noxus is full of murderous assassins and cutthroat individuals who believe power goes to the ones who do what it takes to get it, and Zaun of insane mages, chemists, and bureaucrats. Zaun's total lack of lawful regulation may have turned the city into an industrial hellhole, but its respect for the freedom of all sentient creatures led it to grant Blitzcrank autonomy when golems were still considered mere property everywhere else. And in Noxus, where all are protected under the law, the sort of rhetoric common to Imperialist Europe is used to justify invading and "civilizing" other nations. Demacia is a citystate that, despite being militaristic and nationalistic, is really supposed to be trying to extol and display the values of justice and benevolence to the people of Valoran. Bandle City, Ionia, Freljord are either neutral or good with Piltover being one of completely pure intentions, and there are also unaffiliated purely evil creatures from the Void, and purely good creatures, like Soraka and Kayle.
 * More Dakka: Tristana's rapid fire quickly approaches this.
 * Heimerdinger can also do this with both of his turrets.
 * So is Corki's Gatling Gun.
 * Twitch's Spray and Pray used to be a poisonous-crossbow example of this.
 * Miss Fortune is all over this trope, especially in her Make It Rain and Bullet Time.
 * Multiplayer Online Battle Arena: Trope Namer. The term MOBA was coined by Riot Games for League of Legends as a marketing term specifically because everybody referred to the genre as "DotA clones" and they didn't want their game always being compared to DotA.
 * My Rules Are Not Your Rules: As the computer says, "Lag? What's that? Disconnectors? Griefers? You can do that?" They receive items on a timer, rather than buying it. Also see The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Very few of the champions' actual names, but a great deal of their associated titles (The Terror of the Void, The Crimson Reaper, The Eternal Nightmare, The Saltwater Scourge, et cetera) count as these, especially if they're aligned to Noxus (which itself probably counts).
 * The Napoleon: Veigar, the Tiny Master of Evil. Emphasis on Tiny.
 * "'It's just a short way?' WAS THAT A SHORT JOKE?!"
 * Nested Mouths: Kog'Maw has this.
 * Not So Different: For all their talk Noxus and Demacia are not that much different.
 * They both use conscription.
 * Both their champions Katarina and Garen are parallels to each other (they even both use no resources for casting their abilities, only cooldowns).
 * They are very set in their country's philosophies.
 * They're the two "superpowers" militaristically of Runeterra.
 * Not the Intended Use: Very prolific. Perhaps the most extremeexample is Sion. He is clearly intended to be a tanky melee physical DPS champion, but due to high Ability Power scaling, he is most often played as a burst mage.
 * Non-Indicative Name: The "First Win Of The Day" bonus, which doesn't calculate by calendar date but rather by how long it's been since your last win. It's not a day bonus either: as of the 10 May 2010 update, it refreshes every 22 hours!
 * Damage dealers that are strong early game but fade late are referred to as 'Tanky DPS' characters. While most of them are indeed tough, the name is still applied to characters like Kayle or Riven that skew towards being a Glass Cannon.
 * Offscreen Teleportation: literally, with the Teleport summoner spell. More subtly in that stealth characters that have gone missing while cloaked could be anywhere. Maybe that Evelynn just beelined across the map towards you. Maybe she's standing right behind you waiting for you to make one wrong move. Or maybe, while you are cowering at your tower so she can't kill you, she's merrily farming the dragon or even in town.
 * One-Man Army: The champions.
 * Less so in the beginning of the game, and more so later.
 * This is actually an Averted Trope comparing the champions together. Even champions who could later kill the entire enemy team alone if they all just used auto-attack require help from other champions because there's a lot more to the game then just those statistics. Players who think they can win the game alone just end up feeding and eventually losing.
 * Our Elves Are Different: Runeterra has all sorts of supernatural creatures, monsters and gnomes, but what it does not have is elves. The two pointy-eared characters are explicitly not elves.
 * Overdrive: Blitzcrank has a move called this. It allows him to run at high speed and significantly boosts his attack speed while it's active.
 * Perpetual Beta: Sort of. The game is in its official release, but it's patched roughly every two weeks. This will probably only end if the game's plug was pulled entirely. Being a PC-multiplayer game (As well as Riot's sole product), this was probably expected.
 * Play Every Day: You get an extra 150 IP from winning once every 22 hours.
 * Power of the Void: There are two champions who draw their power from this, and there are two who are FROM there. And you had better fear them, too; all of them have relatively high difficulty ratings, but all of them are quite powerful as well.
 * Cho'Gath is a powerful tank with a silence, knockup, and a devastating ultimate that inflicts heavy true damage. He can also grow in size and health by using his ultimate to get kills, making him large enough to simply prevent the enemy from clicking on the carries as targets.
 * Kog'Maw has the highest potential damage in the game (with sheer range to back him up,) and with team support to cover for his lack of escape mechanisms, he can easily deal some of the best damage in the game. His abilities also let him be the perfect tank killer-exceptional on Dominion, where durability is king.
 * Malzahar has incredibly potent crowd control, pushing power, and decent damage on Summoner's Rift, while on Dominion he can run either his normal AP build OR a specialized AD build to abuse his Voidlings hidden AD ratios on bottom lane.
 * Kassadin has a number of flaws on Summoner's Rift that lead to him being more of a niche pick (bad laning phase, vulnerable to zoning, etc,) but on Dominion he's widely considered to be a complete Game Breaker. due to his absurd mobility (his ultimate is essentially a spammable, damaging Flash that costs increasing amounts of mana...on a map that has a very large number of walls,) great crowd control, ability to build either AP or mana (the latter to abuse his ultimate's stacking damage), and no longer relying on minion kills to get the gold he needs to be effective.
 * Practical Taunt: Rammus, Shen and Galio have useful taunt abilities; see the trope page for details. Tryndamere is a special case in that his Mocking Shout reduces nearby enemy champions' attack damage and slows them if their backs are turned, letting him more easily catch up with you.
 * Precision-Guided Boomerang: Sivir's main gimmick. She has a blade similar to that of the Huntresses from Warcraft 3, and she can gain the ability to both toss it a long distance and have it return, dealing damage along the way, as well as the ability to make it bounce off of enemies she targets onto other, nearby enemies when she uses a normal attack.
 * Lux can throw her wand like a boomerang, casting a shield on herself and every allied player it touches.
 * Properly Paranoid:
 * The players themselves need to maintain vigilance at all times. When an enemy hero is visible, their icon shows up on the minimap... but there's Fog of War to consider.
 * Some champions have Invisibility Cloaks, like Teemo, Evelynn, Shaco and Twitch: they are always missing, and you have no idea why. Some players get annoyed if you spam them with numerous warnings; others get annoyed if you don't.
 * When there is a Fiddlesticks in the game, and he just hit level 6 and walked into a patch of tall grass, you may want to call mia and keep your distCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAW
 * Even worse, Nocturne, whose ultimate (aptly named "Paranoia") decreases all opponents' sight radius and removes shared vision, so that nobody knows who's getting ambushed until the announcer pipes up. He then has a homing teleport he can use on any character in range he sees. The range for lower levels of the ultimate is fairly small, but at level 3 he can hop across about 1/4th the map to get to you.
 * Most players won't even try to engage Baron Nashor (a huge, strong, neutral monster that gives multiple buffs when defeated) unless at least a couple of the enemy's players are dead. It generally only takes one time for players to get ganked while at Baron for them to never make that mistake again.
 * Proud Warrior Race Guy: Many of the champions, but especially Tryndamere the Barbarian King.
 * Pantheon, for sure: "They disgrace the art of war!"
 * Rasputinian Death: Are you a tank? If yes, are you out of escape buttons? If yes, are your enemies all present at the same time your teammates are all absent? Take a deep breath. This won't be over any time soon.
 * Reality Subtext: The champion Tryndamere is also the username of the president of Riot, Marc Merrill. His wife's name is Ashley. The champion Tryndamere has a political marriage to Ashe. But actually this is averted - the creative design team simply had the two champions marry since the champions both hail from the same region, and they were not aware Ashe was named after Marc Merrill's wife.
 * Red Oni, Blue Oni: The warmongering Noxus is Red, Ionia and Demacia are Blue with spiritual enlightenment and pursuit of justice, respectively.
 * Retcon:
 * Originally Yordles and Meglings were seperate races -- the tiny Yordles varied from somewhat animalistic little critters like Teemo to gnome-looking fellows like Heimerdinger and Corki, while Meglings were equally tiny, blue-skinned and white-haired, but otherwise humanoid. This was eventually retconned to make Tristana and Poppy Yordles as well, with "Megling" becoming the name of the Yordle commando unit that Tristana belonged to. Word of God is that this change was made because players would be confused by two species of tiny humanoids at once.
 * The lore entries of several champions have changed over the years, some in slight details, others in major character overhauls. Teemo and Nunu have probably been hit the hardest with the Retcon Hammer; Teemo's lore took a big step towards Darker and Edgier and then a slightly smaller step back towards Lighter and Softer. Nunu's lore changed him from a boy to a girl and then back to a boy, causing much Viewer Gender Confusion.
 * The name of the tribe of warrior mountain-dwellers to which champions Pantheon and Leona changed from the Stanpar to the Rakkor, most likely to make the parallels to the Greek Spartans a little less obvious.
 * Rocket Jump: Tristana's Rocket Jump skill. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
 * Ziggs can use his Satchel Charge to leap over map geometry.
 * Rule of Three: Explicitly played straight with the three ninja champions of Kinkou.
 * Rule 34: Compared to every MOBA Game out there, League Of Legends is well known for it's rule 34 and a doujin dedicated to it...god help us when Japan properly gets League of Legends with their own seiyuus voicing the game.
 * Running Gag: Tamat, Lead Community Manager at Riot Games, is well-known for his favourite champion being Pantheon. This patch preview featured him looking slightly unhappy hearing about upcoming changes that would reduce Pantheon's power. A later patch preview had him say he took a break from Pantheon to play Nocturne, and asked how he would be buffed. Morello holds in laughter and tells him Nocturne would be nerfed. Tamat is again, displeased.
 * Schizo-Tech: Despite being a fairly magic heavy fantasy world, the Lore journals reveal that Runeterra is actually pretty technologically advanced above and beyond their magical capabilities. For instance, the Journal of Justice reveals that there have been dirigible races for the last 16 years with ships, at the smallest, being 27 meters. Such ships are worked on by both mages and engineers as one ship was modified by a chrono mage to be faster.
 * Shout-Out: See this page for the exhaustive list.
 * Secret Test of Character: League Judgements, depending on how well Champions had studied the League beforehand.
 * Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: No, really.
 * Sensible: Lux, Leona, Irelia, Riven, Kayle, Karma, Vayne
 * Skimpy: Katarina, Morgana, Eveylnn, Cassiopeia, Leblanc
 * Sentry Gun: Heimerdinger's turrets.
 * Sex Sells: A common complaint on the forum is that any new, upcoming female champ with questionable choices in clothing means that Riot is concentrating way too much on Fan Service.
 * Subverted with Lux's skimpier original outfit, which was met with negative feedback by the community (she looked more like a cheerleader than a battle mage). Riot listened and gave her a make-over.
 * Averted with Karma, Vayne, Irelia, and Riven, all of whom are dressed at least kind of sensibly.
 * Also averted with Anivia and the Yordle females, who not only are dressed sensibly but lack any kind of sex appeal (at least for the usual tastes).
 * Shoot the Medic First: Why you don't see many people playing support champions. Well, other than that they don't score a lot of kills, and in these games, people are all going after kills... which is why you'll see ones who're either tanky (Galio, Blitzcrank) or can also deal damage or carry (Teemo, Lux) more than the actual medics (Soraka, Sona, Karma).
 * Small Girl, Big Gun: Tristana is almost more gun than Megling Gunner. If you count the ammo she carts around, she probably carries more in weaponry than she weighs.
 * Miss Fortune's pistol barrels are thicker than her arms.
 * The Smurfette Principle: Highly averted, in comparison to other games in the genre- at least a third of the roster is female. This is exceptional compared to its competitors. Although notably, although there are female champions with heavy survivability, none of the female characters was a dedicated tank (until Leona, anyways). There also wasn't a melee female carry until Fiora.
 * Songs in the Key of Panic: In Dominion, when a team's nexus drops below 50% health, the music gets a little more intense.
 * Spin Attack: Katarina's Death Lotus. Rammus' Powerball. Renekton's Cull the Meek. Tryndamere's Spinning Slash. Wukong's Cyclone. Now who could I be forgetting...
 * DEMACIAAAAAAAAAA!
 * Spiritual Successor: To Defense of the Ancients, but at the same time, it tries to be different and even diversifies the MOBA Genre with adding a Capture-and-Hold mode.
 * A number of individual champions are also Spiritual Successors to their DotA predecessors; Ashe to Drow Ranger, Blitzcrank to Pudge, Twitch to Clinkz, Hecarim to Spirit Breaker, Varus to Windrunner, Shyvana to Dragon Knight, Twisted Fate to Nature's Prophet, Karthus to Zeus, Nidalee to Enchantress, Nocturne to Spectre, Corki to Gyrocopter, and so forth.
 * Squishy Wizard: Many of the mages, particularly Annie and Veigar. An aversion are the "Battle Casters", which are hybrid melee and spell-slingers and good at everything but Master of None. Even more averted by the ones who can heal others, including themselves. A careful player who can heal may rarely have to return to base aside from buying items.
 * Summon Magic: The justification for the game.
 * Support Power: Most summoner spells, but especially Heal and Clarity which restore health and mana respectively to all nearby allies.
 * Standard Status Effects: Poison (Teemo/Singed/Cassiopeia have the usual HP-reducing effects, while Urgot's causes decreased damage), Burn (Ignite, Annie and Brand), Paralyze (or really Stun), Silence (Cho'gath, Malzahar, Kassadin, Fiddlesticks, Soraka), a pseudo-Berserk (in Taunt, with Rammus, Galio, and Shen), Blind (though only the auto-attacks miss), two different slows (one ice-based, the other for all other types), and Fear (Fiddle, Nocturne, Shaco). The less standard ones include Snare (which holds you in place but you can still attack), Knockback, Knockup, and Suppression (which is effectively Stun, but is unable to be removed by anything other than Quicksilver Sash).
 * Stripperiffic: Almost every non-Yordle female. Worst offenders:
 * Janna's clothes can be summed up as two long pieces of cloth covering just her chest and privates. When you send her to attack somebody, she responds "Stop looking at me like that!"
 * Evelynn is essentially a blue-skinned cloaking dominatrix who gets pleasure from the deaths of her enemies. If you buy one of her skins, she loses the blue and becomes a human female in black leather. Presumably this is to give you something to look at every once in a great while when you're not dead.
 * Nidalee wears a Fur Bikini has a dance where she pole dances on her spear. There is even a skin for her that dresses her in a french maid costume instead of her furry jungle outfit. Her cougar form becomes black panther form.
 * Kayle is a notable aversion: she wears full plate armor and a helm. Subsequently, people think she's male.
 * Garen's sister, Lux, wears plated armor pieces that don't cover her midriff, thighs and upper arms, but she wears chainmail and blue clothing which covers those areas. This after fan criticism, in which that design lacked that clothing covering her thighs and midriff.
 * Karma is another good aversion, but people can obviously tell she's female.
 * Annie is a child, so she averted that for a long time to reduce creepiness... but the popular fan-made Teen Annie skins often portray her as a skimpily dressed teenager.
 * Soraka doesn't wear much at all, and there is a Dryad skin if blue doesn't turn you on.
 * Most of Sivir's armor covers her arms. She's basically wearing a fur bra and a big, jewel-encrusted loincloth.
 * The Exiled Morgana skin. Angelic and very revealing.
 * Ruthless Pantheon. Amusing He-Man reference, or eye-candy for the ladies?
 * Sona is another aversion... except for her Impossibly Low Neckline.
 * Miss Fourtune's in-game sprite is practically topless, and almost all of her quotes are a double entandre.
 * Vayne's original aversion of this trope didn't hold true with Dragonslayer Vayne, which bares a midriff and cleavage.
 * Ashe and her basic outfit which is similar to Sivir with slightly more clothing (and she lives in the coldest part of Runeterra). Woad and Sherwood Ashe justs amps up the fanservice.
 * Akali anyone? Epic Sideboob.
 * There's even a tier list now.
 * Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: When you really really hate your teammates during a match for some reason, but are close to winning your team becomes this.
 * This also happens if you get in a team whose strategy is to faceroll the opponents' team so hard they surrender, and the other team is very stubborn and refuses to surrender. And if you're doing this in a bot game? This will ascend beyond Teeth-Clenched Teamwork and go into And I Must Scream. Unlike players, bots don't surrender and get items for free, so really, you shouldn't just decide "I'll farm kills cause it's a bot game" Because they will outgear you if you let the game go on too long. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though; if the players who turtled the game decide enough is enough they can always turn 'em around and fight Baron or backdoor them.
 * Teasing Creator: Riot gets all over this on April Fool's Day. They released Lee Sin, the Blind Monk AND an Urf the Manatee Corki Skin at once. Not ONLY that, but in the following Journal of Justice, there were two articles that talk about both. One mentions how Urf could be revived, and the other was a talk with Lee Sin. Not too bad, but the name of the article about Lee Sin? Trolling with a Monk.
 * Riot then released this "spotlight". Game Breaking... no DESTROYING power, a "blurry" screen debuff, and the ability to kill members of your own team who defect to the other side. They released an actual spotlight video shortly after.
 * Their 2012 prank (a really bad 3D mode) was obvious (made even more so by the Urf cameo at the end), but nonetheless hilarious. Incidentally, they've actually named April Fool's Dy "Urf Day."
 * Thanatos Gambit: Many Karthus players intentionally sacrifice themselves so they can use his passive to take champions down with them. Other times, champs such as Xin Zhao intentionally dive into the fray and allow themselves to die so the team can wreak havoc while they're focusing on them.
 * The Magnificent: Each champion has a title that applies to them examples of such:
 * Garen The Might of Demacia.
 * Katarina The Sinister Blade
 * Irelia The Will of Blades
 * Total Party Kill: Also known as ACED by the announcer.
 * Two Guys and a Girl: The three Ninja champions of Kinkou are two males and a female; Shen, Kennen and Akali, respectively. Their actual relationship between each other aside from working together is unknown, and probably nothing bad will come up out of it, since the plot of the game is an Excuse Plot.
 * Unstable Equilibrium: this game, like most MOBA titles, features this quality, particularly via gank loops. If we're laning opposite each other and I kill you, I get a Gold and EXP advantage, not only from ganking you but because you then have to spend upwards of 75 seconds out of the fight (dead, respawning, traveling back up the lane). This G and EXP advantage lets me gain new equipment and abilities with which to repeat the process. When the page refers to a Champion getting "fed", it means that s/he was the beneficiary of this vicious cycle... and because it only has to happen two or three times for the advantage to become insurmountable, the match can be all but over within ten minutes.
 * Unstoppable Rage:
 * Tryndamere can go into one of these for a few seconds during which he cannot die. It even says ENDLESS RAGE! ENDLESS RAGE! ENDLESS RAGE! over his head.
 * Alistar's Unbreakable Will, removinging crowd control effects on him as well as giving him massive damage reduction and attack damage to charge in and lay on the hurt.
 * Olaf's Ragnarok makes him immune to crowd control effects and directly reduces damage taken by a set amount.
 * Useless Useful Stealth: For the first three years of the game, the stealth mechanic that assassins Evelynn and Twitch were based around was incredibly problematic, being amazingly overpowered after some patches and almost useless after others. In 2011 & 2012, however, their stealth mechanics are in the process of being fully revamped so that stealthed characters are visible at close range and Evelynn and Twitch have Metal Gear Solid like stealth indicators to let them know who can see them, making their stealth more of a sneaking mechanic than an invisible Intangible Man.
 * The Usual Adversaries: It seems many champions have gotten there due to Noxian generally-underhanded actions either for or against them.
 * Walk It Off: Everyone regenerates health naturally...but to varying degrees of usefulness. Mostly, sticking around with abysmally small amounts of health is suicidal at best and pointless at worst since you'll probably have to stay too far away from enemy minions to actually get experience and last hits.
 * We Need a Distraction: See that guy? That teammate who just ran into a crowd of enemy champs, provoked them into chasing him across the map, and then died? No, he's not Leeroy Jenkins. He just bought your team a priceless minute of unobstructed pushing.
 * Wait, why did one of them die? Two? THREE!? Is that a tea kettle I hear? No, it's Singed. And if the enemy is chasing him, not only did your team gain a boatload of free time to knock down a turret or three, but they're likely not too intelligent. Why? Well, Singed LEAVES POISON GAS BEHIND HIM. If you've ever fought a good Singed, you know just how difficult that bastard is to bring down.
 * There's also Master Yi. If you're building to troll, dunk or just be a distraction, Boots of Mobility and five Phantom Dancers coupled with the might of Highlander might just buy your team the time it needs to take that vital turret/inhibitor down. And you can rest assured that your teammate is likely laughing his ass off.
 * There's a good reason most people don't chase Teemo into the forest or through the river. Some people do it anyway.
 * Why Am I Ticking?: Zilean can plant time bombs onto units, including enemy champions. It's very possible to get one of these on you while you're running away and accidentally get a teammate killed if you don't keep your distance.
 * And then there's this. Hilarity Ensues.
 * World War Three: A sort of parallel -- according to the August 3 entry to the Journal of Justice, there were 5 horrific Rune Wars. To avoid another, where Real Life has the United Nations, Runeterra has the League of Legends.
 * World of Badass: League requirement for joining: be a Badass.
 * World of Buxom
 * Wretched Hive: Zaun and Noxus both qualify. Especially Zaun: sure, they may respect sentience of every type (as evidenced by Blitzcrank's freedom), but it's an industrial cesspool that values science above everything else, including morality, and is loaded with complete sociopaths who are given a free run of the place.
 * The X of Y: Most champion's subtitles are this if not simply The X.
 * You Kill It, You Bought It: Instead of randomly-spawning runes in DotA, there are certain neutral creeps scattered about the map which give temporary Status Buffs. If you get killed while wearing one, they pass to your killer, with the sole exception being King Mooks like Baron Nashor; their buffs just disappear if you die.