LoL players confess which champions they have the most trouble mastering

Not all League of Legends champions are created equally, and like any character-based game, some champions are going to be harder to master than others. In League, though, the difference between the beginner-friendly champions and those with overloaded kits is far more stark than it is in other games. 

In a thread posted on Reddit earlier today, League players discussed which champions they find the hardest to play and which champions they refuse to even invest time into in an effort to master them. Whether it be because of their high learning curves, jampacked kits, or abilities with more lines of text than some champions’ entire bios, there are just some characters in League that are ridiculously difficult to play. 

In the thread, players agreed that the champions who give them the most trouble are ones that have any kind of form change or extra mechanics outside of what they’re given at the base level. Common answers included Nidalee, Jayce, and Aphelios, the latter of whom was the most-named champion among the player base. 

Some of the players debated over the difficulty of Aphelios and why he is so hard to learn. While it’s true that he plays unlike any other champion in the game (mostly due to how he’s got his own UI and custom-made ability bar), there’s actually a deceptive level of difficulty to the champion, according to some players. “He’s a LOT easier than most people think,” a player named MemeOverlordKai said in the comments. “The hardest part about learning Aphelios’s kit is actually reading Aphelios’s kit.”

The main reason why Aphelios is viewed as so complex is because of the way all of his abilities interact with one another depending on which guns he has equipped. You can combine any of his two weapons and get a completely new interaction between his abilities. While widespread Aphelios-related rules of “blue/white, don’t fight” are easy to understand for the everyday player, trying to actually dissect his kit is a difficult task in and of itself. “With enough time and practice I think every champion could be learned, I won’t give that time to Aphelios though,” another player said in the comments.

One player in the comments mentioned that Nidalee is among the hardest champions to play in League—and we’d tend to agree. Other stance-dancing champions like Elise and Jayce don’t have nearly as much interaction between their two forms as Nidalee does, as each of her abilities in human form has an effect on the way she plays in cougar form. A decade ago, Nidalee was one of the easiest champions in the game; her poke-focused playstyle could allow even the most inexperienced of players to only land spears and still have a profound impact on the game. Post-rework Nidalee demands a lot more out of players, though. 

In recent years, Riot has been making a noticeable effort to make new League champions extremely complex. Champions like Briar, K’Sante, Zeri, and others have a difficult bar for entry and make older champions like Twisted Fate and Nasus look like they’re from a different game entirely sometimes. 
Although Riot has yet to announce or tease League’s next champion, we would expect them to lean more on the overloaded side than the bare-bones side.