Meet the upcoming League of Legends champion reworks

League of Legends is constantly evolving to meet player expectations, and sometimes that means that old, outdated champions need to be rebuilt from the ground up to stay relevant. Big reworks in the past, like Warwick and Gangplank, have been mostly successful, and they’ve ranged in scale. Some updates, like the Karthus update three years ago, simply target aesthetics. Others, like Galio’s in Season Seven, completely change the champion to their core.

Here are the champions that are on the way to rework

Urgot

Urgot is a mess of a champion. He’s a sloppy hybrid of a marksman, tank, and mage all rolled into one disgusting package. Urgot’s update will be the next large scale champion rework.

No one is sure when Urgot’s update is coming, but Riot accidentally included some very early character models for his new look into the Public Beta Environment (PBE) before immediately taking them back down. The PBE is the client used by Riot to allow players to test out new features before they go live. Not many details are known about Urgot’s new spells, but a major leak on Reddit says that he’s going to be a juggernaut with shotgun-knees and a meat grinder for a stomach. Sounds intriguing?

Evelynn

Evelynn is also on the list of large-scale reworks. We’re completely in the dark on Evelynn’s upcoming work, but we can note some things that are wrong with her right now.

Her visuals are very outdated, which is usually the case with champs on this list. Expect new spell animations and new character models for all of her skins when the update goes live, keeping in tune with the other large updates. She definitely lacks an identity. She is supposed to be this succubus type of demon-woman that is one with the shadows, but she doesn’t feel like it aside from her stealth passive. Hopefully the update will include some spells that really make her feel like the champion she’s meant to be.

These updates usually either rework the abilities of a champion or their visuals, but not both.

Vanguard Tanks

The big mid-season update will be arriving with Patch 7.9, and with it, a slew of updates for some of League’s beefiest tanks. These updates will be targeting the spells of the tank champions, but not the visuals, and it’s likely that some abilities will remain the same.

The champions being significantly changed are Zac, Maokai, and Sejuani.  Most of these champions are too boring to play, too easy to play, and they don’t stand out from one another. The updates should add some identity to each of the tanks, while at the same time raising their skill ceiling and making them more of a challenge to learn and a reward to play properly.

Speculative updates

These updates were mentioned casually by Riot staff in the official League forums, Reddit, or other sources. They have little to no information other than the fact that we know Riot is either in the early stages of work or planning to begin work on them.

Aatrox

Aatrox has gone through a slew of small changes and buffs in an attempt to make him viable again. A Riot post on the official League forums mentioned that these buffs will act as a band-aid until the design team can get around to pushing a large-scale update for him. That’s all we know right now.

Ryze

Ryze has undergone more reworks than any other champion in the game, except maybe Rengar, who has gone through about three updates himself. Ryze has already gone through one large update, as well as a couple of smaller scale reworks here and there. Apparently Riot isn’t happy with how he’s turned out, and he has similar issues as Shen. He’s too strong in professional play, but nigh unviable in regular games. Because of this, Ryze is being looked at for another update, according to a recent Riot post on the official League forums.