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Welcome to the Mobalytics Predictive Tier List for League of Legends!

This list was curated in collaboration with our analyst, Hewitt “prohibit” Benson, our Challenger Coach, Adam “Morïarty” Isles, as well as our very good friend Exil (check out his Youtube channel here!). Unlike most tier lists, we publish ours before, or as a patch goes live, according to the predictions of our in-house experts.

Here are the Patch 7.21 notes for reference.

If you have any questions about our choices or process, ask us on Discord!

The Format and Methodology

Our tier list is ranked by what we believe are the best champions for climbing Solo Queue in Patch 7.21. They will be ranked as Optimal (S-tier), Great (A-tier), or Good (B-tier) by their overall climbing potential and as Intense, Hard (a new addition), Moderate, or Simple according to the difficulty of utilizing their moveset to their highest level.

If you’re a skillful player with the time to learn an Optimal champion with Intense Difficulty, we believe you’ll be able to make great strides in climbing. If you’re a lower level player that wants to climb but has less time to learn the intricacies of a complex champion, it may be a better option to choose a Great or Good champion with Simple Difficulty.

To categorize these champions, we considered factors such as buffs and nerfs, overall meta shifts, and item changes. We also looked at champion win rates from Lolalytics and considered our own in-game experiences in high-elo Solo Queue.

A quick disclaimer: If a champion isn’t on our Tier List, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t climb with them. You’ll just have to put in more effort to get similar results as our Optimal, Great, and Good choices for climbing. Remember that this is a PREDICTIVE Tier list – we will be wrong on things, but we’re confident that we’ll be more right than wrong.

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Key commentary

Rising stock

Warwick

Our experts see Warwick as “The New Sejuani”. With a super sustained jungle clear (even without proper runes), few skillshots, forgiving gameplay due to his tankiness, and a decent amount of damage, we see the Wolf rising to Optimal as we head through Halloween.

Aurelion Sol

Aurelion makes his return to Optimal due to his map impact potential and reliable win rate. Playing him to his potential is a bit Hard, you’ll need to understand wave manipulation, roam timings, and Q stuns.

Tristana

Tristana hits Optimal due to her good laning phase, especially in combination with the rise of aggressive Supports. She’s extremely forgiving due to her self-peel, mobility, CC buffer, and point and click mechanics.

Blitzcrank

Overall, the Ardent nerf will be making room for the rise of playmakers. Blitz has a very simple play pattern but you’ll need the mechanics to land his hook (otherwise you’re better off choosing someone else) and the roaming know-how of when its cool to leave your ADC for a bit.

Pantheon

Pantheon is jumping back to Optimal due to his easy laning phase and overall simple execution. Maximize his point and click spear and stun combo and you’ll be able to win most matchups.

On the decline

Akali

The Fist of Shadow will disappear from Optimal because of the lack of hard CC and reliable players aside from TF Blade. She’s still a Great pick for climbing Solo Queue due to her easy point and click mechanics, healing in lane, and snowball potential.

Sejuani

This shouldn’t be surprising, Sej will be falling off from Optimal due to her nerfs this patch. She will still be effective as a Great pick – just make sure to land her ulti.

Malzahar

Malzahar falls down to Great because his placement is more due to his ease of play rather than his actual power level. With his point and click ultimate, shoving power with W and E, and a forgiving spell shield passive, it’s pretty hard to mess up playing the Prophet of the Void without screwing up too much.

Rakan

Rakan will be losing some steam with the Ardent nerfs, they probably hurt him the most because he’ll be missing out on tons of extra damage (especially with Xayah). That being said, Rakan will still be a Great choice due to his potent W > R combo as the Support meta moves toward playmaking.

Twitch

The Ardent nerfs will cause the rat to fall to Great – Twitch will still be successful if you play defensive and wait to scale. When you hit your items, you just open up on people with R and press right click. W/E are superfluous so he basically only needs his autos and steroids late game.

Special mentions

Galio

We expect him to be hot-fixed soon! We placed him based on where he should be after that.

Veigar

Buffs from two patches ago combined with the rise of more passive mid matchups will make it easier for Veigar to survive the early game and scale into a late game monster. HIs point and click nuke R does upward of 1k damage late game, and his E at level 13+ makes it really easy to look for picks. The hardest part of the champ is getting out of lane, but in lower ranks you are not punished nearly hard enough for this to matter – our experts are projecting Veigar to be Great this patch.

Evelynn

Our experts believe Evelynn will be good this patch due to her potent pick potential (something that is always really strong in Solo Queue). She does have a low win rate at the moment because she just got reworked and could use some buffs, but in the right hands, she is much, MUCH, better than her win rate suggests.

As always, we welcome all discussion and feedback. If you have any questions about picks that we didn’t expand on or would like to let us know how you feel about Patch 7.21 and our predictions in general, join us in our Discord!