League of Legends regularly has patches in which certain champions are quite strong. That’s the nature of a MOBA. But sometimes it happens that champions become much too strong, stronger than intended. This happened in 2019 with a new champion that was simply unfair.
Who is it about? On December 11, 2019, with patch 9.24, the new champion Aphelios appeared and he was already the subject of a lot of conversation. His overall package is something special, he even has a different interface and uses stats instead of abilities.
In the game he has 5 weapons that he can switch between and which offer other side effects to his Q ability and his ultimate. What is also important with Aphelios is the combination of different weapons, which creates different possibilities.
Aphelios is said to be complicated and it is said to offer great opportunities at high risk. The problem with the release was that Aphelios was far too strong, even unfair. In South Korea, one month after release, it had a ban rate of 223% in Challenger, the server’s top players.
That means every match he was banned by both teams. He manages over 200% because remakes count as a ban, but not as matches played. In other words, Aphelios was statistically banned from every match in Korea at the time. Interestingly, Akali and Qiyana also had a fairly high ban rate.
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Complex for the game and the players
What makes him so strong? His complicated skills are difficult not only for players but also for balancing. The interaction options created strong synergies. When the Deaths Dance item was changed in patch 10.6, it unintentionally created a strong synergy with Aphelios. He could fully heal himself in a few seconds, which allowed him to fight against groups alone.
You can’t nerf an entire ability with Aphelios, you have to change individual weapons and combinations for healthy nerfs. If you nerf him in general, he will be too bad and played less.
His ultimate was also a big problem. He was able to get a multi-kill with it without any problems because it caused too much AOE damage in combination with the flamethrower weapon.
The other reason is its complexity. Of course, in order to play it properly you have to understand it, but that also applies to the other side. You have to understand his different weapons in order to play well on the counterattack. In a busy team fight, it’s hard to keep track of things. E-sports commentators also had this problem at the time.
You can see how strong he really was back then in a YouTube video from Vandiril:
But you can also tell from the many nerfs in the first patches that not everything was perfect with the stats. Values were regularly adjusted to weaken it (via League of Legends Wiki).
In the first hotfix, right after its release, synergies with on-hit effects were nerfed because they seemed to work far too well.
Aphelios was the great example of a meme that he actually has nothing to do with
Thanks to Aphelios’ excellent performance, he essentially became the face of a meme within the LoL community. It’s about 200 years of game design experience. The meme originally came from a discussion about Wukong nerfs.
There, RiotLutzburg responded to a player on
This became a meme in the community, especially with Aphelios. When he performed far too strongly, people liked to talk about 200 years of game design experience.
What is the current situation with Aphelios? If you look at his stats on the current patch, 14.23 on U.GG, you realize how little influence he still has today. Across all ranks, he has a pick rate of 3.5% and a moderate win rate of 48.58%. In higher elos it’s hardly better. In Challenger, he has a disastrous 43.84% win rate with a 3.9% pick rate.
Accordingly, Aphelios is a rather inconspicuous ADC these days, which is more suitable for good and experienced players due to its complex kit. The opposite of this is Garen, who is currently terrorizing the midlane again: LoL: A champion has been dominating weak players for 3 patches, but he is in the “wrong” position