Is Aphelios the worst champion by design in League of Legends history?

If you have been playing League of Legends or engaging within the League of Legends community as of late, you would have seen a very particular buzzword flying around… Aphelios, Aphelios, Aphelios.

The latest Marksman to enter the rift has an armory of weapons at his disposal and is proving to become one of the most troublesome, hotly-debated champions to exist within Runeterra. Aphelios was added in Patch 9.24 and has since received a few changes and alterations to his overall kit, including the most recent nerf to his Q’s range whilst wielding the Calibrum rifle in patch 10.3, reducing his absurd global range down to 1800.

On Aphelios’ initial release, a lot of players felt overwhelmed by the champions in-depth kit, it appeared at first that you would require a PHD to understand what Aphelios does inside and out. Although the complexity of champions in League of Legends has typically increased over the last year, (champions such as Sylas) attuning the League of Legends community to become more accustomed to complex champion designs, the likes of Aphelios is something that usually resides in League of Legends main competitor, Dota 2.

Across the top four leagues (League of Legends European Championship, League of Legends Pro League, League of Legends Champions Korea, and League of Legends Championship Series), Aphelios has a 92% presence rate with 35 picks and 34 bans, which speaks volumes to the value placed on Aphelios by the professionals competing at the highest level. Considering that Aphelios is such a contested pick right now, you would think developer Riot Games’ priority would lie in releasing a hotfix to address his clear and obvious design flaws in both his user interface and clarity issues.

Fnatic’s AD carry, Martin “Rekkles” Larsson, discussed the champion design and balancing issues on his live stream.

“Kai’sa and Xayah used to be like at least twice as good as every other AD carry in the game and now they are not even played… just because they released new champions that are even worse to play against,” Rekkles said. “Not really sure what their theory is here because if they keep making stronger and stronger champions at some point people will never play anything that is not newly released.”

Rekkles implies that almost every new champion that is released becomes a meta pick and professional players are forced to play those champions as they are miles above the older generation of champions in terms of raw power, which has become a consistent theme over the last few years.

One of the main issues with Riot’s approach to champion design and balancing is their inability to admit they are wrong and listen to valuable feedback from the community. Riot employee, Nathan Lutz, as known as Riot Lutzburg, gave birth to a new community meme on Twitter while discussing upcoming champion changes with League of Legends players. Lutzburg said in a tweet, “Being good at playing a certain character in a video game is valuable, but I think I’ll take the 200+ collective years of professional game design experience”.