Who is the best mid laner in League of Legends after Patch 9.18?

Welcome back to the League of Legends tier list aggregations, where we attempt to give a neutral overview of how various tier list sites around the internet perceive the current meta in League. For our first stop in Patch 9.18, we check in on the mid lane. Previously, there was plenty of stagnation at the top but – as the title of this piece likely gave away – a new champion has hit made his way into our S tier!

These rankings are determined by collecting data from the tier lists and rankings of ten different sites to give you the average strength of each champion in the five roles of League of Legends. To explain how we develop this tier list we take each rating for the tier list and normalize that value, making sure that an A rating on one site and a “God tier” rating on another can be accurately compared. This is done by creating a normalized value based on all rankings given out by that site so the average standardized rating is 0.00 with higher numbers being good to very good rankings and negative numbers being bad rankings.

If you’re interested, you can also find all of the underlying data for this and all the past patches here. We also provide some guidance for how to use these tier lists (i.e. what do we mean when we say a champion is S tier vs. A tier) here. When evaluating the sites and tier lists, we used data for Platinum plus players worldwide. The individual sites we audited are also listed below (note the rankings are as of 11 PM EST on September 12).

The aggregated tier list for mid laners in Patch 9.18, was determined by the average ranking among the following sites, excluding the highest and lowest scores:

The tier list

S tier: Zed, Ahri, Talon, Fizz

A+ tier: Katarina, Kassadin, Malzahar, Ekko

A tier: Vladimir, Zoe, Pantheon

B+ tier: Cassiopeia, Qiyana, Lux, Yasuo, Diana, Anivia

B tier: Galio, Neeko, Syndra, Twisted Fate, Sylas, Xerath

C tier: Akali, Vel’Koz, Orianna, Leblanc, Aurelion Sol, Taliyah, Veigar, Zilean, Swain, Annie, Ryze

D tier: Irelia, Kled, Mordekaiser, Karma, Rumble, Ziggs

F tier: Nocturne, Jayce, Aatrox, Malphite, Morgana, Azir, Lissandra, Heimerdinger, Corki, Tristana, Viktor