5 Champions that once completely broke the League of Legends meta

Overpowered champions is the most loved discussion point of players all around the world. Who really are the 5 most broken champions that ever existed?

Broken here is defined as a state that is indisputably too strong, can roll over an enemy team and had little to no counterplay.

Yorick

In the older days of league of Legends sustain was one of biggest concerns champions had. There was no such thing as corruption potion or runes and items that generated mana and most champions were recalling quite often. This was not the case for Yorick. Toplaners nowadays can complain about oppressive laners such as Volibear and Gnar but nobody ever got onto the level Yorick did.

With his old kit that spawned several ghosts, winning lane was a given. There was an unspoken rule that even stipulated to never gank a Yorick since the only thing it did was give him two kills instead of one. He dominated every champion and loved to split push. Losing your turret to Yorick before minute 10 was the standard and according to some data he still holds the record of having the most gold at minute 10. He was an unstoppable monster. Well, for a while at least.

Skarner

The Juggernaut rework was one of the most argued over major balance changes to ever hit League of Legends. It defied what the power level of bruisers should be and reworked 4 champions in particular: Garen, Darius, Mordekaiser and Skarner. It was during this time Mordekaiser bot lane would become one of the most contested picks in pro-play but even he was nothing compared to Skarner.

Saying Skarner was a bit over-tuned is the same as saying the atomic bomb is a just a big firecracker. Skarner still holds the highest win rate of all time. Going through all the data Skarner once held an average win rate in solo queue around 65% across 30 days. During the first two weeks of his rework, before the hotfix, the data suggest it could have been as high 72%. This is obviously the definition of overpowered.

Kindred

When hovering over the tooltips on every skill in the game that does percent damage there is always a little note at the end that says there is a maximum it can do against epic monsters. If you have ever wondered why this needs to be the case, you can be friendly reminded of Kindred’s old passive. Instead of stacking attack range and/or attack speed when retrieving her marks on-release kindred’s auto attacks would do extra percent damage UNCAPPED, period.

An experimental and daring move from Riot. Once she got her snowball running, she could stack attack speed and get a ludicrous amount of percent damage. The problem that occurred rather quickly was that kindred, with her mobility and aggressive playstyle, could solo objectives, like baron, in under 12 seconds.

I urge you to look for clips where level 14 kindreds jump into a Barron pit, kill the baron without taking a sweat, and jump out before most junglers have decided what jungle camp they are going to do next. To top it all of the passive scaling was also infinite meaning that if the game dragged on for too long Kindred was a certain victory

Kassadin

In season 3 Kassadin received his famous nickname “Kassawin”. While not having the highest win-rate record, he does have the highest ban-rate record ever with a whopping 99.55%. Originally being designed as an anti-mage champion due to his silence he was also a tough match up against Melee champions.

The most notable difference from current Kassadin are that his Q ability was a 1.5-2 second silence, as he gained more mana back, scaled harder, and his ult was approximately the distance of half your screen. This was also during the time when games had the longest average play time so stalling for level 16 was a no-brainer which further increased his powerlevel.

Kalista

In the summer and fall of 2017 there were 3 certainties in life: Death, Taxes and Kalista being banned in pro-play. Kalista in 2017 had one of the most aggressive laning phases to have ever existed. Her passive dash was almost twice as big and was the same distance in all directions and the rend stacks did triple the damage then what they do now.

Combine this with the fact that’s when the ardent support meta was in full swing, it is no wonder Kalista was permabanned in competitive for 14 weeks straight. As soon as her power was shown to the world not a single team even had the slightest chance of playing against her.

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Image credit: Riot Games