Sylas may be hot, but man does he suck

Who has two thumbs, two chains, a beautiful chiseled jaw, and absolutely sucks rocks at League of Legends? That’s right, it’s Sylas.

Now that Patch 9.3 has arrived on live servers, it’s been exactly one patch since Sylas, League’s newest champion, joined the impressively long roster of the game. That means he’s had two full weeks to get acclimated, and, more importantly, players have had two weeks to get acclimated to him. All of those early-release low winrates while players figure him out should all be resolved by now, especially with his hotfix buff shortly after Patch 9.2 launched. Well, guess what? They’re not.

On the last day of Patch 9.2 (yesterday), according to stats site Champion.gg, he still had the worst winrates in the top lane, mid lane, and jungle. Here’s a screengrab of the site just to really help it sink in.

That’s right, he sucks the most at three separate roles, and we can’t blame new release jitters on his bad performance anymore—he’s just bad. He’s real bad. He’s like “LJL at Worlds” bad. If you just asked, “What’s LJL?” that only proves our point further. It’s the Japanese competitive League… league. And they don’t exactly have a great track record on the big stage.

But why exactly does he suck on such an astronomical level? The pieces are all there for him to be strong. He’s got mobility, long-range crowd control, a big game-changing ultimate, self-sustain, high damage, and rock-hard abs. That list checks more than enough boxes to throw a champion into the OP category, but he’s still crawling through the dirt.

Related: Sylas is hot

The answer is, unfortunately, that while he does have all those incredible tools, they’re all undertuned. Honestly, we don’t blame Riot for shipping him with low damage numbers, high cooldowns, and the like. It’s way easier to slowly nudge a champion into viability than to have to smack them with the nerf bat over and over again because they’re just too strong post-release, and it makes a lot fewer people angry. To fix Sylas in his current state, all Riot will have to do is bump him in the right direction. His base damage could probably stand to be a little higher, and the cooldown on his Q could be lowered to allow for easier lane harass. There are a lot of possibilities.

But the fact of the matter is, if you’re a big Sylas fan, you may have to wait a while before you can competitively play him. On the bright side, so far in today’s Patch 9.3, the newly-nerfed Aatrox and Akali have even lower winrates than him in top and mid, so at least he doesn’t suck the most—for now.