League of Legends/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"If there's one person I'd trust to take on a difficult mission, it's Tristana -- all day long!"

  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
    • Morgana's story claims that she was cast out and branded a fallen angel because she opposed the tyranny of the angelic order, although it grants that she is not by any means innocent because of her use of dark magic.
    • Some argue that Demacia is even more of an evil empire than Noxus.
    • The League itself. It's supposedly a United Nations-esque organization with the sole purpose of stopping war on Runeterra: a purpose for which they shelter known criminals, bind Eldritch Abominations, employ Omnicidal Maniacs, interfere with off-world civil wars, kidnap benevolent extra-planar guardian entities, lure newly sentient creatures with promises of knowledge, recruit the experienced soldiers in the world (and small children) and then make them compete in the most brutal Blood Sport in the world. On top of that, despite supposedly being the final arbiters of justice on Runeterra, they are willing to forgive their own members for atrocities that should be considered gross personal incompetence worthy of dishonorable discharge at best, and horrific war crimes at worst. This is PRECISELY why Vayne joined the League: so she can eliminate targets she otherwise wouldn't have been able to get at, many of whom are League champions. She's also very upfront about her displeasure in regard to the League's acceptance of all sorts of horrible things.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Riot finally answered one of the two obnoxious requests they'd received for several patches. Maokai's selling point being that he is a tree, nothing more.
    • Riot Games introduced Journal of Justice, a completely free feature devoted only to the lore, and it's not just a wall of text somewhere on the web, it's a built-in fictional newspaper with interviews with the champions.
    • The announcement that Renekton, Nasus' Brother would become a playable champion was met with near universal approval, as opposed to the other previous champions which were more or less hit or miss.
    • Lee Sin, the Blind Monk, finally being added as a playable champion. ESPECIALLY after Riot messed with everyone's head due to April Fool's Day.
    • The tribunal, although experimental, may possibly get this, given that it's intended to combat the GIFT and some of the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys that Defense of the Ancients and this game is infamous for. However, some people are a bit skeptical and are afraid that since some of the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys are the ones reviewing the cases, that it'll be abused to run the friendly fans out of the game.
    • The announcement of Dominion. For no less than eight months, fans had been asking for a new map and less champions. Out of the blue, Riot announces both an intriguing new fast paced mode, and a new map to go with it. Nearly no one complained at all.
      • That's not quite true. There were (and are) concerns about the inevitable balance issues, not to mention griping over the Vaporware 6v6 map. But nobody felt Dominion was a bad move; at worst, it was simply mis-timed.
    • Riot finally bow to the demands of the fanbase and announce the next champ will be, yes, an armoured bear.
  • Author's Saving Throw: "Hi, guys, we halved all the IP gain so you now have to play up to one hundred games to unlock one champion" "Wait, what?" "No, nevermind. It was just a bug."
    • "Hi, guys, we rebalanced IP gain, but don't worry, it should be exactly the same as before!"
  • Awesome Music: A Champion Approaches.
  • Bellisario's Maxim: There is a decent amount of Fridge Logic in the game, go with A Wizard (Summoner?) Did It.
  • Broken Base: Game balance will be forever flamed over. Try reading the forums some time, about... any topic.
  • Cargo Ship: Udyr and Innervating Locket.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
    • A commonly-used accusation over anyone complaining about newly-deemed overpowered champions and disagreeing in turn ("People don't want this clearly Game Breaker champion to get nerfed only think so because it's all they play" versus "This champion is just doing something new that stops people from doing what they conventionally did before - learn to adapt"). Needless to say, it's on the YMMV tab for a reason...
    • In Classic, the standard metagame (1 top, 1 mid, 2 bot, 1 jungler) is so ingrained into the fandom that unconventional setups -- which are usually unconventional for a good reason - often result in complete curb stomps because the other team has no idea how to deal with, say, three mid.
    • Dominion. Every game starts off like this. Step one: One person goes bottom, four go top. One person gets the mid turret and then joins the fight at the top later. Step two: If you capture the top, then everybody runs around and tries to push the mid or the bottom... When the other team respawns RIGHT THERE next to them. Step three: They leave one person (maybe two) to defend their captures while everyone else constantly pushes. Step four: If you have a Twitch, Rammus, Teemo or Evelynn, then you steal their nodes while they're too busy pushing another one.
  • Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: The game is downloadable free of charge. Paying for new champions, boosts and skins are completely optional. Yet for some reason, every time the servers go down or are choked by a bunch of players, everyone's complaining and calling them incompetent. There's a subgroup who twists this further, and says that paying gives them the right to complain, but that free players shouldn't be allowed to.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Even as a child, Mundo was a sadistic psychopath who performed horrific experiments on anything he could fetch. Hasn't changed one bit.
    • Warwick was a sadistic, bloodthirsty psychopath before the transformation; if anything, the transformation made him even worse.
    • Singed, while not as bad as his teacher, is still a sociopathic asshole with no redeeming value who seems to have absolutely no limits as to what he won't do.
    • LeBlanc compared to the above while doesn't indulge in bloodthirsty slaughter is extremely manipulative to the point her organization have ruined more people lives using backstabbing treachery than through chemical warfare. Swain takes from her and applies on the battlefield as he dislikes the We Have Reserves approach to the problem and prefers battlefield treachery to gain an upper hand.
  • Creator Worship: The champion designer Xypherous is loved amongst the community for his champions. News that a champion is being designed by Xypherous tends to get "First day buy!" responses. In addition to that, he also loved on the forums for discussing his intents and history behind his champion designs openly, calmly and clearly.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Lux. While she is often compared to Morgana, she is still more or less beloved for fun and unique playstyle and being the second female champion in the game after Kayle to not have huge boobs and skimpy clothes (whilest looking fairly human).
    • The devs and tier list writers consider Mordekaiser one of the worst and most useless champions out there. Now go ask players.
    • Nasus has awesome voice acting and is considered one of the most balanced characters in the game.
    • Despite having very little mention, there's a fair number of threads requesting that Professor Stanwick Pididly be made into a champion.
    • Urf was meant to be a one shot joke, but he became so popular with the fanbase that he's been given a spot on Warwick's costume roster and a spot on Summoner's Rift. He's even the star of several fanmade flash games.
    • Riven has been getting this treatment too, due to her Moe-ness as well as just how Badass she is. Helps that she bears similarites to Cloud Strife.
    • Ever since Jax was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, he's been consistently well-loved by the fanbase due to being both highly unique and fun to play, not to mention manly as hell.
  • Evil Is Cool: Renekton oozes coolness due to being a savage croc with an awesome voice.
    • Katarina is this AND Evil Is Sexy.
    • Sion is basically Arnold Schwarzenegger if he were in LOL.
    • Swain. That Is All.
    • Let's just say that every evil champ has some Badassery to them.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Evelynn, Katarina, and Morgana are all prime examples.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Katarina and Garen. Garen's background clearly shows he has a thing for her, but whether she would reciprocate is undetermined.
  • Fan Dumb: Look on the boards.
    • Not to mention, it overlaps with Hate Dumb too. It gets criticized for not being enough like Defense of the Ancients. Yes, you read that right, a video game, which is especially prone to being being criticized with They Copied It, So It Sucks, is being criticized for NOT ripping off another game completely.
    • Such complaints are especially egregious because Defense of the Ancients is free-to-play, and there's nothing stopping people from just firing it up if that's the gaming experience they want.
  • Fanon: The very popular interpretation of Ryze is that he has literally been incarcerated in a real place called Rune Prison, which is why he has that rocking physique.
  • Fetish Fuel:
    • Miss Fortune is a female pirate (although technically a pirate hunter), for one. Her alternate skins resemble a cowgirl and a military officer of the 1800's. She had a holiday skin which was essentially Sexy Santa Dress.
    • One of Caitlyn's attack lines is "Sorry boys, I keep the fuzzy cuffs at home."
    • Ahri. Pretty much everything about her is made to appeal to someone.
  • Game Breaker: Inevitable, given the competition-oriented gameplay. Who/What exactly is one constantly changes, due to rapid updates, and what exactly is a "Game Breaker" is massively different depending on your level of play.
    • Twisted Fate, whose most notable abilities are an extra effect added to his next autoattack (but is highly unique in that it swaps between three options continuously in a pattern, requiring one to be chosen by the player when it is pops up. Or you can miss the one you wanted entirely), and a teleport that reveals every player on the map. Considered to be useless by many people, and there were large numbers of threads asking that he be buffed. Then he single-handedly won a match against one of the best teams on earth.
    • Kog'Maw was considered pretty weak when he came out, but when play shifted towards really tough characters, Kog turned out to be the best tank-killer in the game.
    • Vayne was disgustingly overpowered on release, easily on the same level as release Xin or beta Twisted Fate. She was intended to be a Defense of the Ancients-style hard carry, but there was one problem with that: she was pretty much a hard carry from the get-go. Seriously, she could blow off half of a tank's life at level two or three with nothing but a Tumble-augmented autoattack that processed the Silver Bolt true damage. It only got worse from there. She's been hit with increasingly severe nerfs since then, but has remained the top ranged carry in spite of them. Seems pretty telling of just how broken she was on release.
    • Graves was also this on release; one early Buckshot could blow off massive chunks of life, and his passive allowed him to relentlessly attack the enemy lane with almost no fear of death. His scaling was less spectacular than some of the other carries, but the fact that he still was a carry meant that he'd be terrifying when fed anyways, and the early strength meant that he'd get fed with far more regularity.
    • After the order of effects upon death were patched, Maokai gained the unique ability to combine the Guardian Angel with his Vengeful Maelstrom to do this quite literally. This bug breaking the game is itself a gamebreaker, meaning Maokai could never lose.
    • Morgana's Black Shield, for its ability to make the target temporarily immune to all forms of crowd control (an incredibly powerful ability given how much of a major role these play in the game).
    • It's been notoriously hard to balance Mundo on Twisted Treeline... but he's unlikely to be fixed, as Riven, Shyvana, Poppy, Mordekaiser and especially Singed have begun to overshadow him.
    • Renekton is a borderline example. While he does have a less-than-spectacular early game and does tend to drop off the radar near the end, his sheer speed and power makes him into a near-godlike threat midgame, able to trigger his ultimate, dash in, and kill multiple targets with ease before escaping. He can be theoretically countered here with armor, but the process of getting the armor will allow him to rack up the kills even more and will leave his opponents underprepared for the endgame. It's not uncommon for surrenders to occur well before the teamfight phase even starts simply because Renekton has gained such a large advantage that the opposition simply cannot catch up.
    • Ryze is more likely to get hit with this charge than most champions. Extremely short cooldowns, high damage output over a long period of time, and tank-like durability make him extremely effective in almost any situation. He's also one of the cheapest champions in the game. And his rather simple play style ("Q, click on enemy, W, click on enemy, E, click on enemy, R, click on enemy, win") leads to the backlash you'd expect.
    • Xin Zhao, as released, was a Leeroy Jenkins... who won battles single-handedly. Post-nerf, he's a solid if somewhat unimaginative toon.
    • They're still trying to figure out how to balance healing spells properly. Taric and Janna haven't got messed with much, but Alistar's was removed entirely, Soraka (as of late August '11) has been re-specced as The Red Mage, and Sona's, well, Sona. It's interesting to note that the latter two have some of the highest win-loss ratios as champions.
    • Many of the champs with high learning curves have eventually become this once people get the hang of them. Lee Sin? Underpowered on release, buffed massively, then people began to realize that the sheer strength of his kit coupled with his new numbers was simply too much. Orianna? Took a bit for people to get the hang of her, but it soon became clear that she was staggeringly overpowered by way of being able to do the vast majority of tasks in the game far better than the champs dedicated to them. Even after steady nerfs, she's still damn close to this trope. And Rumble? Initially thought to be worthless, then people noticed how he was the strongest pusher in the game and had some of the highest, most consistent damage in the game coupled with a terrifying ultimate that could annihilate entire teams when placed right. This is a common theme in League of Legends: champ with a heavy learning curve is released, people slowly learn what said champ can do, people realize that Riot underestimated just how much a master of said champ could pull off and realize that the champ is extremely overpowered, champ gets nerfed.
    • Fiora's Ultimate. Build her with at least two Tiamats and watch as her Blade Waltz slash away her enemies' healthbars teamfight after teamfight.
      • Building 4 tiamats is a case of Awesome but Impractical. It only offers so-so Attack Damage, making it useless outside of her ult.
  • Genius Bonus: Lux's Meaningful Name.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Brazilians love Mordekaiser.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Typing /d in the chat bar for the dance emote while Garen is casting Judgement amusingly causes him to spin in place forever if he doesn't move, sans the damage and golden particle effects of the ability.
  • Growing the Beard:
    • Not the game itself, but the skins. Back in the days all the skins were just recolors (of both the loading screen and the champion itself). Now you will have to look hard to find a new skin that is not a remodel with brand-new loading screen art.
      • And these days, it's becoming more and more common to get new particle effects and secondary changes (like Teemo's mushrooms instead being Easter eggs in his Easter Bunny skin).
  • Hate Dumb: Of course there's lots of Hate Dumb, a lot of people hate it because it's popular, or because it's not Defense of the Ancients or Heroes of Newerth.
    • On the forums, this happens a lot. Before a champion's even released, everyone's bitching about how they're OP or UP.
  • Iron Woobie:
    • Lux feels like she lives an empty life on the inside, but she doesn't let it show.
    • Poppy saw her father murdered by Noxian assassins, and continued with her delivery anyway.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Even though Sona isn't considered overpowered, she's still looked down upon because it's entirely possible to play her well just by spamming Q-W-E and pressing R occasionally (ask those players whether they'd rather have a competent player running an easy toon at their side, or The Load, and they go curiously silent).
  • Magnificent Bastard: LeBlanc is strongly implied to be responsible for the disappearance of General Du Couteau, and the subsequent promotion of her compatriot Swain to the opened position. There's also some very subtle evidence that she disguised herself as Jarvan IV to start the Kalamanda war.
  • Mary Tzu: Swain.
  • Memetic Badass: Iron Stylus, concept artist of Riot Games, got a thread on himself like this due to being a popular Rioter from posting often on the forums.
  • Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
    • One example that its fanbase didn't make up, but the game itself uses: if the servers are full, the position for waiting in the queue will up to a maximum of Over 9000.
  • Memetic Sex God: If the Riot employee Jeff Jew is mentioned, his sexiness will be also.
  • Misaimed Fandom: On almost every single one of Phreak's champion spotlight videos, there are people saying that his builds don't work that well or that he plays terribly. Despite the fact that these videos are to demonstrate the mechanics of a champion, rather than how to play them well.
  • Moe:
    • Lux is a young and cheerful magician with an endearing and innocent-sounding voice to match.
    • Miyuki Mitsuhashi, one of the game designers. Also known as Shurelia. ADMIT IT.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • "Pentakill!"
    • For newbie players, the jangle of coins that comes from last-hitting a minion, especially if heard a few times in a row.
  • MST3K Mantra:
    • Following the release of Graves, one thing has been pointed out. Gun: two barrels. Ability: three simultaneous shots.
      • Note that he isn't the only one. Another gun-related champion would be Miss Fortune. Weapon: twin flintlocks. Ultimate: shooting more bullets than any flintlocks are capable of shooting in a very short time.
  • Nausea Fuel: Urgot's character design is very heavy on the Squick.
  • Older Than They Think: No, Wukong he's not based off of Goku. He and Goku are both ripoffs of someone else.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • Whenever stealth-based characters such as Evelynn or Twitch disappear, you're going to be seriously worried about an ambush.
    • Both Nocturne and Twisted Fate have abilities that let them travel great distances instantly. Twisted Fate's allows the entire enemy team to see where you are. Nocturne's prevents you from seeing where any teammates not right next to you are. Both can be quite a scare when you're alone.
    • Warwick's Blood Scent lets him see enemies that have less than 50% health in a pretty big radius. If you hear howling and see a pair of evil-looking eyes above your head, you'd best call for backup. Or run.
    • Fiddlesticks isn't really much of a threat early game, more of a slight annoyance with a silence, fear, and refusal to die with Drain Health. He becomes a major problem after he picks up Crowstorm and starts roaming. If you can't see him, there's a chance he can jump over a bush or wall with Crowstorm active. Not only is the ability devastating if you're standing in its area of affect, it's also incredibly shocking due to its accompanying sound effect of "LULULULULULUCAWCAWCAWCAW".
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Evelynn got this big time. Revive/Smite + AD + jungle + Evelynn = #1 ban in Draft mode or freewin in Normal mode.
    • Kennen is a very notable example. He was considered the worst caster in the game, and for a good reason: low damage spells, bad ultimate, easy controllable. After the remake he is more or less perfectly balanced.
    • In early days, Teemo was reviled for being so cute. Now he's arguably one of the most popular characters in the game and one of the official mascots.
      • Debatable since he's still one of the most-hated champions in the game, just not for his cuteness.
    • Vladimir was once hated due to his ridiculous durability, high damage, and obnoxiously effective laning abilities. Has since been nerfed and has fallen off the radar somewhat.
    • Urgot was a Tier-Induced Scrappy for awhile until people learned how to use his transposing ult, not to mention realized just how thoroughly he could dominate virtually any lane.
    • Yorick and Caitlyn were both severely underpowered on release, and the act of even selecting them was enough to provoke a queue dodge. Then they got buffed (Yorick got an absolutely massive buff, Caitlyn got a series of smaller buffs) and gained renown as some of the best laners in the game. In fact, Yorick's first buff was so massive that it actually made him brokenly good in lane, forcing Riot to nerf him a bit. Even then, he's still known as the best solo top laner in the game.
    • Skarner was considered an incredibly weak jungler on release because he would run out of mana long before he would be able to do anything remotely useful. He recieved a buff that compensates for these issues and makes him a viable ambusher.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Riot gave Fiddlesticks a significant overhaul because he was unpopular and regarded as being too weak to be viable in competitive play. The community almost universally agrees that the remake only succeeded in making him weaker.
    • This happened to Kayle, as well as any changes to a champion. Well, except for Alistar and Gangplank which made people think "Game Breaker" instead.
    • Dominion brought new uses to Evelynn and Twitch.
    • One patch preview forecasted an overhaul of Jungling mechanics to make it more accessible to new players, as well as several other changes to promote aggression and prevent passivity in-lane. Just read some of the youtube comments.
  • Scapegoat Creator:
    • Morello is a particularly big case as the Lead Champion Designer. Occasionally crosses over with Misblamed for people who don't realize what he, or other reds, actually do. He has embraced the title of "Nerf Master Suck Town" bestowed on him in a patch preview comic; other devs often commend him on his impressive forum aggro tanking abilities.
    • Shurelia has her own personal hatedom that partially stems from her DarkShurelia persona. Naturally, she also has legions of fans White Knighting for her as well. She was also Misblamed for Kayle's rework (she was doing it, but it got handed off to someone else part of the way through... and accusing one person entirely ignores the rest of the people who also worked on it, because they've stated they don't do that alone). She also worked on changes to a number of support champions to reduce them from having a dull and unstoppable sustainability use in the lane, which was met with claims of Ruined FOREVER, "hating" support and placing the blame on her despite Lead Champion Designer Morello expressing himself outright that they were terrible gameplay problems (and of course, other people worked on it too). So, then, anyone upset about either these accused anyone of defending her to be White Knighting, and the anger ran freely on both ends.
    • Similarly, Zileas gets plenty of flak on his post about Game Design Anti-Patterns from amateur armchair designers who take every opportunity to try to disprove them, point out their presence in-game as a form of hypocrisy (while completely missing the point), or try to argue that it's the reason League of Legends will never cater to "hardcore" gamers.
    • Every time someone complains about the Magma Chamber map not being released while saying that a new champion being announced for the next patch shows the Riot Games needs to be working on it more, someone has to be reminded that the map designers are not the same people who make the champions. Or for that matter, people complaining about characters being released while bugs aren't being fixed when, again, the designers and the programmers are likely different people.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Any champion that is "cute" is being regarded this way by the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys, especially Teemo, who is a cross between Team Fortress 2's Scout and Pikachu. Except armed with a blowgun. And poisonous.
    • Most agree that there are few or no overpowered champions. But quite a few champions are commonly considered useless and many players will ditch out of games ("queue dodge") when a teammate chooses them.
    • Vladimir is pretty much this all the time: if he's considered underpowered, he's obviously disliked for that reason. On the opposite end, many find the only thing worse than getting grinded down and killed by an enemy in the lane is getting grinded down and killed by one who simultaneously heals himself pretty much the majority of the time he damages you to quash your hope entirely.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Having an Energy meter instead of Mana makes life difficult if you plan on Min-Maxing your characters using Runes (and trust us, you are planning that). Mana-related runes don't affect Energy (and vice versa), and most Energy runes cost double; some of them are more expensive than Champions.
      • It doesn't help that all four of the Energy-based champions (Kennen, Shen, Akali, Lee Sin) are pretty solid champions, and the last two in particular are often seen in competitive play.
    • Malzahar's Voidlings. Unlike other champion's pets/clones, they are directly uncontrollable.
    • The Flash summoner ability, being an ability that allows a player to instantly move their champion a short distance away to a different spot, is considered to be one of the absolute most powerful summoner abilities in the game, considering the emphasis on positioning and coordination within the game. It can be a get-out-of-jail-free card whenever available on the defensive and make powerful ultimates for champions that demand very proper placement, coordination and positioning to be used at their best be significantly easier to use. While initially going for a complete removal, Riot instead nerfed it so it no longer dodges homing projectiles and has a longer cooldown. Outcry stopped... for a while, because people still got tired of entire teams running Flash.
    • Stealth is heavily hated to fight against, Evelynn and Twitch inciting your team to either stay together all the time with an Oracle's Elixir on someone to avoid letting them take advantage of their stealth, or just forcing you to never go out of the range of your lane's turret while laning. Riot Games has noted this and stated they're want to remake stealth mechanics, but have been frustrated by their attempts in internal testing, and currently a good remake has yet to be attained.
  • "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: The fanbase is from Defense of the Ancients. To put it lightly: if you don't know what Defense of the Ancients had a bad reputation for... it's best just look at the trope name.
  • Surprise Difficulty: Anyone who doesn't read up on a champion a bit before trying them out might run into this. Some champions are listed as "Easy" or "Medium" when they're actually a bit tougher than other champions in their "Difficulty" level, and vice versa. Thankfully, people may practice in Co-op vs. AI if they don't know how a champion works.
    • Inverted with Sona, who had a difficulty rating of 'Hard' when released despite being very simple to operate. After a great deal of laughter and mockery, Sona's difficulty rating was eventually dropped to the lowest possible value.
    • Not to mention, a lot of people assume that because bots have Artificial Stupidity, that they can just think "Co-Op vs, AI? FREE EXP/IP!" and just spend half an hour dinking around and are somehow surprised to find bots at level 18 with tank-like stats, free gear and loads of crowd control (and Anti-crowd control) or finding bots focusing on a turret and it going down before they can do a thing.
  • Tier-Induced Scrappy:
    • Kassadin is a common ban due to how powerful and mobile he becomes once he becomes level 6.
    • Morgana is almost ALWAYS banned because she's nearly immovable in lane, thanks to her CC, ability to shield herself against enemy CC, long ranged farming skill and ability to self-heal from all her damage spells. This is without even mentioning her devastating, battle-winning ultimate.
    • Freaking Teemo. Nothing is more annoying than stepping on explosive mushrooms that damage and slow you every three seconds.
    • Amumu was Misblamed for AoE teams' overpoweredness.
    • Evelynn is one of the most controversial champions in the game, having run the gamut of almost completely useless to severely overpowered multiple times.
    • Previously considered considerably overpowered, Jax was whacked so hard with the Nerf hammer that "being Jaxed" has entered the community's parlance as an Unusual Euphemism for a popular champion being brutally and excessively nerfed to near-uselessness. Subsequent patches have yet to make him very powerful and ignored some issues, but he is at least playable now.
      • Jax's main shortcoming was that he was very item-dependent, and very skill dependent because of the skills that have passives attached to them. (His ult primarily) As a result, he could have sometimes been a liability early-game where he was very easily harassed but later on, he started to really push damage out. The same can be said for others like Tristana who relies on her "E" skill for harassment early game but later on gets a much bigger range, and Sivir who easily runs out of mana early game and relies on an easily dodged-skill for harassment. But later on, those two become machine guns capable of ruining a turret if one doesn't stop 'em.
      • Both Jax and Sivir were remade once the Dodge Mechanic was removed, so they may have the same status as before.
    • Katarina at one point considered to be one of the worst characters to have to lane against to the point she was a Game Breaker. She has since fallen behind other champions and is dependent on an easily stopped ultimate, making her dead weight against a reasonably well-picked team with experienced players behind it.
    • As launched, Sona was considered overpowered due to the sheer strength and usefulness of her buffs and heals (even accounting for the Necessary Drawback of being a Squishy Wizard). Some players have been known to ragequit if they die while laning against her.
    • Soraka was a cornerstone of a strategy in which the team keeps a single carry-type character alive to bear down of their opponents by sheer attrition. Later nerfed and temporarily considered to be nearly equal to Evelynn in uselessness to many, though she's being reconsidered to be very useful to babysit and save that precious physical carry on your team... a similar strategy in which support champions with heals sustained their lane partner to a less extreme but still very significiant extent later which made them nearly impossible to budge became popular with Soraka, so that aspect of her was nerfed... to not make her useless, her Starcall ability was remade and buffed in range to allow her to zone out enemies. You guessed it, people still hate fighting against her.
    • Don't mistake this for some champions you never see like Tristana, Soraka, Gangplank or Taric (for that matter a lot of the original 40). Unless they're in the free champion rotation for the week, you often don't see them because people, especially veterans, are more interested in the new champions than people they've played for years. The original 40 aren't bad, they're just "old news". Unless they get an overhaul, like how Alistar's passive was changed to "Trample". In ranked matches, you see more variety.
    • Yorick was released in an Obvious Beta state. He had a Game Breaking Bug that would cause allies temporarily resurrected by his ult to constantly die again and again and be caught in a Fate Worse Than Death and make the team lose the match. His ghouls also rarely lasted long enough to cause any form of threat whatseover so people just kited the ghouls or ignored them and shot him instead.
    • Akali is infamous for being really freaking good. As in "gets into a 1v3 fight, kills two and gets away easily" good.
    • Like Evelynn, Twitch was intentionally overnerfed because new players had no way to deal with him. For the same reason he is literally never chosen as a weekly free character.
    • Shaco gets hated on because of how infuriating he is. While not very hard for experts to counter, people dislike to tower-hug since it gets boring and that in solo-queue, they have no trust in random people to not feed him or to understand that it's the only way to counter him.
      • There's also the fear that enemy Shacos tend to stomp while ally Shacos feed.
    • Tha majority of the community turn their noses up at Sejuani because, even though she's a half-dressed warrior princess wielding a massive morningstar and riding on a giant boar, she's just mediocre at pretty much everything- she can't be played for damage because her damage skills are weak, when played as a tank she's inferior to pretty much all other tanks because she lack any actual tank abilities, she's a sub-par jungler but has to jungle anyway because she's a worse laner and she has no sustain abilities despite generally being very vulnerable. The only thing she really has going for her is her devastating AoE stun ultimate.
  • Toy Ship: Amumu is sometimes implied to have a crush on Annie which may not be entirely one-sided.
  • Ugly Cute:
    • Kog'Maw. It helps that he dances the can-can, chases his tail as one of his idles, and hums a cavalry charge as his joke. His skins are also pretty adorable, turning him into a butterfly and a reindeer.
    • Maokai's saplings have glowing green eyes and a large mouth made of grooves in them. They also have amusingly short limbs that mesh also amusingly by their moving animation resembling a sprint from a normal human being that is highlighted by the glowing leaves attached to their head, and make a sort of "Whhhhheeeeeeeeeeee" sound while being thrown through the air.
  • Unfortunate Character Design: The chest hair in Gangplank's old portrait [dead link] really looks like it could be sprouting from... somewhere else.
  • The Woobie:
    • Amumu.
    • Yorick's entire family is long dead, all traces of his life are long gone, and he's been trying to finally pass on for hundreds of years to no avail. His backstory just makes you feel incredibly sorry for the poor guy.
    • Skarner. In his judgement you will just feel sorry for the guy.
    • Riven deserves a mention. After what she went through, it's hard not to see why she left and went on the path to atonement.
    • Nautilus. Being left for dead sucks. Being left for dead while being dragged down by some kind of sea monster sucks more. Waking up on the friggin' ocean floor to find that you've been totally abandoned and that your suit has fused to your skin sucks even more than that. Making your way to land and finding that not only is your mind going, but that there are absolute zero traces of your existence really, really sucks. Poor dude.


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