Rework champs © Riot Games

Over the past couple of years Riot’s great League of Legends regeneration project has switched into full gear. What began with full-scale reworks of champions like Poppy and Sion is now been accompanied by class-wide refreshes like the Assassin, Marksmen and Mage updates. The Champion Update teams have revitalised a huge number of League’s senior citizens, but the job is far from over.

Whole classes, like the supports, remain relatively untouched, and certain champions have been excluded from class-wide tinkering because their problems are too darned serious. Evelynn, whose own issues make her one of the most pressing cases, is probably the next champion on the Rift scheduled for rebirth, but there are plenty of other candidates whose gameplay, visuals and general feel doesn’t meet the standards set by Riot’s contemporary releases.

The below list of champions deserve to go under the knife for a top-to-bottom rework, whether that’s because they’re suffering from old age or long-term design problems which need fixing.

Blitzcrank

Rework champs © Riot Games

Oh Blitzcrank. The Great Steam Golem is a League of Legends staple, but he’s beginning to look and feel his age.

Model and animation issues aside, Blitz just isn’t all that interesting to play. His damage and utility are almost entirely dependent on landing Rocket Grab, followed by his E + R combo. If he doesn’t successfully grab, his performance in lane is woeful, and when he does wrap those metallic mitts around an enemy champion, they’re dragged a mile out of position, suffer significant damage, are knocked up and as if that wasn’t enough, they’re also silenced. He’s lopsided, with too much of his total usefulness resting on a single ability.

Technically Blitz is classed as a Fighter / Tank, but he’d be better served by a mechanical makeover that steers him toward his support brethren. More general utility, less of the 100 percent AP scaling on abilities please.

Urgot

League of Legends' Urgot © Riot Games

It’s not exactly news that Urgot is in trouble but we’re including him in this list anyway. He’s consistently been ranked among the least popular, if not the least popular champion in League for years and with good reason. Riot best summarised his particular raft of issues in a champion update post earlier this year:

“Urgot is like the poster child of champions with confused thematics, kit, visuals, and narrative. He’s a ranged character with a knife-hand, he’s a Marksman that’s also kind of a tank, that swaps himself INTO the enemy team. He’s Noxian but he looks like he’s from Zaun.”

Not to mention his lack of impact on team fights, terrible late game and complete dependence on Q spamming. Thankfully Urgot is finally on the chopping block, and Riot have settled on a new direction for the Headsman's Pride, a name which will probably be one of the first things to go, along with Hyper-Kinetic Position Reverser. (We won’t miss you)

It’ll be fascinating to see how far Urgot 2.0 departs from the original. His core concept – a grotesque, legless fiend trotting around on mechanical legs – is compelling, but across his kit and character, there are likely to be heavy casualties during the transition.

Jax

Jax makes an appearance © Riot Games

He leaps his way through engagements, but compared to more recent champions, Jax feels flat.

His ultimate, which is barely distinguishable from Alistar’s, contributes nothing toward the sensation of being a lamppost-wielding master of the martial arts, and abilities like Empower which merely augment the next attack without actually doing anything, no longer cut the mustard. In short, half of his abilities fall well below the bar for Riot’s development standards in 2017.

That said, he’s far from broken, and his model and character animations haven’t suffered the ravages of time as badly as other champions. With a Poppy-scale rework which ditches Grandmaster's Might in favour of a more fitting ultimate, he could easily be made to shine.

Kayle

Kayle certainly looks the part © Riot Games

Kayle’s divine presence is welcome on the Rift, but parts of her kit just don’t make sense. Her role as a mid-range damage dealer isn’t in itself problematic, but the way that she accesses that power is awkward: having to constantly activate Righteous Fury in order to extend the range of her attacks and increase their potency. By the end game, its cooldown can be brought in rough proximity to the ability’s duration, leading to a situation where Kayle players must robotically press E at regular intervals as a kind of physical upkeep for her status as a ranged carry.

Her ranged attacks also undermine the core fantasy of playing a winged warrior with an enormous sword. Kayle looks like she should be smacking around her enemies with that gigantic blade, but instead she swishes it around from a distance: a frustrating mismatch between mechanics and thematics.

Kayle should be freed from these opposing forces with a rework which centres her kit around her character or the other way around.

Nidalee

Nidalee needs a rework © Riot Games

By their own admission, Riot find Nidalee hard to balance. Her win-rate is either soaring high as she unassailably mauls the competition, or falling through the floor. When she’s atop the meta and not being nerfed into insignificance, it feels like there’s very little effective counterplay available to the enormous damage jungle Nida is capable of dealing. Once the spear has impacted, and she’s within striking distance, most opponents are dead meat.

In order to prevent Nidalee’s yo-yoing, and make her less of a nightmarish opponent, her kit needs a rethink. There’s a tonne of mileage to be had in her concept: a stalker of the brush who impales you and then transforms into a nimbler beast to secure the kill. We’re sure that the Champion Update team could take that idea and produce a more dynamic skillset which isn’t quite so polarising.

Nunu

Nunu © Riot Games

Nunu’s ageing model and character animation in need of an update, but the real problem is his kit. At the moment he’s a chimeric hodge podge of ideas: an AP driven melee hero with an insane heal, attack speed buff for allies and one of the most devastating AoE ultimates in the game.

Very little about this combination of abilities says “boy riding yeti” either. Riot have previously stated that they’re not interested in producing champions that separate into several parts (like The Lost Vikings of HoTS, for instance), but they have embraced a champion with dual nature in form of Kindred, and a pairing where mechanics and thematics meet in the form of Kled and Skaarl. A renovation along these lines could work wonders for Nunu.