The Nightmare Patch that Broke League of Legends

since League of Legends launched in 2009 there has been countless patches that in some way broke the game's balance there is one specific patch in 2015 that is credited not only with disrupting the game's balance in solo queue but for ruining the 2015 world's tournament this very same patch resulted in multiple Champions having a 100% win rate at Worlds in the games where they weren't banned of course because they were banned in almost every single game it doesn't stop there though this patch was absolutely devastating for a solo quue these charts show the ban rates

for the last 10 years of three different Champions can you guess when this patch released oh and don't worry we'll be looking at the win rates later this nightmare of a patch had such an impact that to this day almost 10 years later it is still brought up when discussing balance in League especially the topic of competitive Integrity if you played League almost 10 years ago you're probably having flashbacks to this if you didn't play in 2015 you're probably wondering how Riot let this happen this video is going to cover the story of world's 2015

and the legacy of one of the most infamous patches of all time 5.16 the Juggernaut update but first let me introduce you to this video sponsor exit lag there is nothing worse than having high ping in any online game except maybe playing versus a range top Lane High pain can be caused by inefficient routing to the game servers by your ISP exit lag optimizes dat data routing which can result in you having a much lower ping in whichever game you choose to play exit lag can lower your packet loss reduce lag in your game and

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it try it out and see what kind of results you get before actually paying for anything this way there's nothing to lose except for your lag of course thank you very much to exit lag for sponsoring this video and let's jump back into it the goal of patch 5.16 was to take four Champions who Riot felt lacked a real identity within the game and rework them into a brand new type of champion the juggernaut Riot wanted Juggernaut type Champions to be built around Brute Force they said that they should be powerful durable immobile and melee

they are leagues hulking Titans who in the late game would be super tanky carries their intent was that these Champions would be very strong but vulnerable to being peeled and kited for inspiration they look to nases who they considered to be the Prototype Juggernaut before jumping into details of the exact changes that they made I have to point something out we're going to look at four Champions and if you're a new player you you might be surprised because three out of the four reworks that we are going to cover are no longer in the game

yes almost every Champion included in this update have since been re reworked Riot eventually decided that the direction they took for these Champions was not the best for the game and brought them in a different direction later to start with we're going to take a look at Mizer but because he was such a strange Champion you need to understand what he was like before the jugernaut patch his passive made it so that he would Shield himself for a of the damage that he dealt his Q gave his next basic attack bonus range magic damage and

would bounce to three nearby enemies if there were no nearby enemies it would deal a ton of extra damage to the Target instead his W gave him or his ally bonus armor and Magic resist for a period of time while the buff was active enemies near him or his ally would take magic damage every second eventually they made it so that when he cast W on an ally he would also cast it on himself and he and his ally would move faster toward each other his e was magic damage in a cone that is literally

[Music] it his ult did damage over time to an enemy and healed him for the same amount if the target died while under the effects of his ult the target would come back as a ghost controllable by Mizer with bonus attack damage for 45 seconds M would also get a percent of their bonus health and also their ability power as bonus stats so the champion was very weird to begin with and the rework would make him even weirder in the Juggernaut update announcement they acknowledged that mord was a difficult Champion to balance because of his

Unique Mechanics they also noted that he was an AP burst Mage typically played in a Solo Lane but they wanted to try something crazy and oh boy was that ever an understatement they announced that he would now be a Duo Lane Juggernaut to provide an alternative option to a marksman pick huh the first change that has to be mentioned right away is to his W it now had a passive attached to it making it so that when he last hit a minion he received the full experience for killing the minion rather than splitting the experience

with his Lane partner the support would still receive their portion of the experience as per normal the Juggernaut post itself even had in the post word for word morer unless he dies horribly beforehand will always hit level six way before his Lane opponents what could possibly go wrong that was just the start of the changes the next most important change was to his ultimate it had a new passive attach to it too called Dragon Force if Mor Kiser hit the dragon it would be cursed for 10 seconds when it died if it was cursed he

would enslave its Soul as a controllable ghost this Dragon Ghost had 100% of the dragon's maximum health plus some of Mizer for good measure it dealt 100% of the dragon's ad and AP and also Mor kiser's bonus ad this meant that if Mor kiser's team got Dragon they now had dragon on their team if you tried to team fight you would be fighting the dragon with the actual stat of the Dragon if you chose to not fight Mor kiser's team plus Dragon then they could just group up and push down Towers oh and it had

a global leash range so if he wanted to he could split push with dragon from the other side of the map you're probably thinking okay I understand how this Champion would become a balancing nightmare but we're not done with Mor yet see his queue was changed to empower his next three basic attacks at Max rank each of those three basic attacks dealt three times the damage of the last one this meant that his third attack would deal 180 damage plus 270% of his attack damage or 180% of his ability power if math isn't your strong

suit this should sum it up for [Music] you the initial reaction regarding the strength of his rework was pretty mixed many players felt that Mor simply didn't stand a chance because he was a melee champion who was basically always going to be playing against range champions in bot Lane many players felt that Mor Kiser should not have been reworked in this way at all if Riot wanted a champion to be a melee bot Lane pick and take the dragon as a pet then Riot should have just designed a new Champion for that purpose the whole

premise of having the dragon was cool but it did feel like a gimmick that would always either be way too good or way too weak some people felt that Mor Kaiser's old design just didn't work the way Riot intended though and that they did the right thing by reworking him and giving him a clear-cut defined role the overall reception even in terms of strength was pretty mixed this like complete garbage I don't think we'll see this in LCS anytime soon who knows I think that was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life remember

those words because we'll be talking about the impact that these reworks had on competitive later but first we have more reworks to cover next up is scarner and the most interesting change to him was the addition of his Crystal Spire passive whenever scarner was in the game six Crystal spes would appear that you could capture the team that captured a Spire would get gold and temporary Vision scarner though would receive boost his attack speed movement speed and Mana regen if he was near a Spire that his team controlled they also made his W Shield scale

with his percent Health which made him quite a bit tankier his e also now made it so his next Auto attack stunned that Target which was obviously a large buff these may not sound like huge changes but this version of scarner was extremely broken on release even that is still an understatement scanner's numbers were so overtuned that he actually had one of the highest win rates ever seen in Solo que his overall win rate was sitting at about 65% and depending on what stats you were looking at it got as high as 74% he was

so good that it became a meme in the community there was a post on the League of Legends subreddit where someone announced that they had actually managed to win a game against scarner with one of the top comments asking if scarner had just gone AFK Riot quickly responded with meder mentioning in a forum post that scarner was way too strong and that he would be hot fix nerfed at the earliest possible opportunity less than one week after the rework launched scanner was nerfed pretty hard his base stats W and E were all hit with his

e in particular having its numbers significantly reduced in the same notes that covered scanner's hotfix Riot scarizard said the following scarner released at the strongest State we've seen a character pretty much much ever considering that this is the same game that had released zenzo that quote really says a lot I wanted to mention here when scarner was reworked again in 2024 he also needed a hot fix Nerf because he was simply too strong scarner and rework being in the same sentence is a bad Omen for the league Community the next rework is Darius and his

changes were pretty simple he already had his passive Hemorrhage which caused the enemy to bleed when attacked it stacked up to five times the rework added the blood rage effect which triggered when he got five stacks of his passive on someone or when he executed someone with his alt this increased the damage he dealt and applied maximum stacks of his passive to any enemy he hit Darius actually received Buffs in the same hot fix that heavily nerfed scarner they said that Darius was underperforming compared to the other juggernauts they increased the damage and healing of

his queue by quite a lot they mentioned in the announcement post that Darius should be a pentacle machine and well they definitely succeeded in that triple pressure on all the careful here's the jump in it's a two man he catches balls sneaky out there's a turret alive though they got to be careful a big knock back and that's the K Morana air goes down as well but the tungster coming through a double kill for balls a triple kill for balls holy cow kill for balls holy cow that's why team's been picking Darius Darius would reach

over a 90% ban rate in Solo qu by far the highest ban rate he has ever had we'll be looking at at his Pro play impact two but first we need to look at Garen they gave him a new passive on his alt that made it so that the most recent enemy to kill one of his teammates would be marked as the villain his basic attacks and each hit of his spin dealt 1% of their maximum health as true damage they also made it so that garen's Al would deal true damage to the villain the

intent here was that Garen would have a unique role and that he could Revenge kill people easily they thought this would also match his character fantasy of being a protector of the weak this patch would also give in His Highest win rate and ban rate of all time which as you've probably noticed is a trend with these reworks with that we have covered all the reworks included in the Juggernaut update the reception to each rework was pretty mixed with the main point being that every single one of them ended up with ridiculous ban rates and

very high win rates the impact these Champions had on the game cannot be exaggerated enough keep in mind this patch dropped just one month before the start of Worlds which we'll talk about next actually we won't be talking about worlds yet because there are still two more Champions that absolutely need to be included in this discussion while there were only four Champions reworked in the Juggernaut patch Fiora and Gangplank are often mentioned when talking about worlds 2015 the reason for this is simple both Fiora and Gangplank also received full reworks within a couple of months

of Worlds fiora's rework was barely 2 weeks before the release of the Juggernaut patch when she launched she was seen as so weak that she was actually hot fix buffed 5 days later she also very quickly hit an 80% ban rate and was seen as an absolute Terror in Solo Q rest in peace to this Champion gone but not forgotten well just 15 days before fiora's rework Gangplank had also received a complete rework as part of the burning Tides event which I happen to have a full video cover in that I'll link down below gangplank's

win rate was actually pretty low on release this wasn't because he was weak it's just that players struggled to learn how to play him properly at first and as you can tell by his ban rate people were aware of his strength especially in higher elos between his release and the start of Worlds gang Clank was also nerfed in two consecutive patches because he was instantly a priority ban in competitive when you look at all the tournaments leading up to Worlds both Fiora and Gangplank were very contested picks being banned in the vast majority of games

games so that means that when the Juggernaut patch had launched there were actually six Champions that were all considered to be extremely strong and very high priority mans in solo queue as a result of recent reworks and not only that a patch two weeks before the start of Worlds included Nerfs to Fiora Mizer and Gangplank keep that in mind as we fast forward to world's 2015 Mor Kiser band first of its kind that we will see it has actually been left up with Gangplank going down there's a gangplank ban how can I hold all of

these Top Lane juggernauts in my Champion Select here mous Darius and and gang flank as well I don't like the combination but it looks like they're going to lock it in Mizer and Gangplank were by far the most contested picks of the entire tournament Gangplank had a 100% presence being picked or banned in literally every single match Mor Kaiser had a 98.6% presence being picked or banned in every game except for one when either of these Champions weren't banned this is what happened if a barrel explodes on multiple people uhoh maybe a catch gorilla does

combo onto stake chain though out gang CL go going to Z them away this is not a bad fight for the flash rolls but the ulti up bar does get it spam jumps in with a flash but car has already taken out flash double kill there from G going to keep running kuro's forced to flash out up we got one yeah Lo it in you have to we don't care about kass's champion pool you got to get look at that SM look at that smirk well what's funny is h2k going h2k is one of the

three teams the world championship to ban moris on the blue side but it still means we're able to play it our first Mor Kiser of worlds let's talk about how you build your team around Mor Kiser he brings so much pressure to the bottom Lane constantly shoving and the extra experience he gets guarantees you're going to outlevel your opponent so you get to the level six quicker and then you immediately take Dragon you can just objectives right after taking the dragon use that ghost run straight mid open up the entire jungle it's all about that

early snowball pad homeg guard will land in the St but a thre man pulverize says hello G4 is going to be the first ghost of the game and here it is maybe they can change a bit more Ryu is in it's not a dragon but they're going to be killing everyone all the same Ryu cannot get the UL off in time though stunned up but we got more targets here odna had held aggro now it's Kass sing's got to run the turret might kill him and it will actually M getting chased down by Ryu shouldn't

be a hard one for him hean steals the kill away as is his right as the mor Kiser player big engage from Cass sing knocks up three and the dragon is still chasing the enemy ad carry Lloyd's got to be careful and down they go a double kill the dragon value is big on this one all is well there's a triple kill they're going for four now will it be the piser the dragon takes it in they go warlock says no Mor Kiser and Gangplank each made it through champ select four times and they won

every game they were picked in since both had a 100% win rate for the entire tournament you're probably surprised to hear that Mor Kaiser and Gangplank both made it through the ban phase during fnatic and edg's second match and both of these Champions were actually played so how did both maintain a 100% win rate wow both of them are up what do Edward gaming take gang Plank and M are available Kobe just said right I would take Gangplank for normal first pick however fnatic as a team has shown a lot of picks that could do

well against gang flank like a river but fnatic will get in this one EDG really want to play around botland in this game then who plays gang flank on ftic has Fe been put in the time to play well 20 minutes in the game was pretty even overall both teams were within 1,000 goal of each other with EDG having a two dragon Advantage just as both teams were rotating to Dragon the game was paused with only one kill on the board I've heard from production that there is a keyboard related issue with rainover uh the

q key actually specifically so we're getting that res very important getting that resolved right now the players did unpause the game to test whether or not rainover could cast Q uh for obvious reasons the test did fail I'm afraid so the guys are busy triaging the problem we need to get that spell once again resolved the proposed situation which there's a known bug with gragas where uh you can't use your queue until you die all right well because of the game altering bug that prevented rainover from casting gras' queue the game will undergo a full

remake with new picks and bands as we do get into picks and bands I do want to take a moment to clarify the situation and where we find ourselves the issue that appeared in game prevented rainover from casting the gragas Q spell and the refereeing team they did investigate and exhaust every single option to resolve the issue in game including all Gras to die and attempt to resolve the matter after the issue remained fanatic was then offered the opportunity to remake which they accepted that is as per the rules the Remake will now include new

picks and bands because team strategies were revealed including play style gragas will re remain enabled because of the popularity of the champion on the current patch the Remake will be starting shortly with pix and band so let's shake this off and talk about morai Z in my opinion GP do we think teams are going to allow both of these Champions to once again go through picks and bands Mor Kaiser and Gangplank both would be banned in the remade match gragas was allowed to be played in the remake however it was later announced that he would

be banned for the rest of the tournament to avoid the situation repeating this was a much bigger deal than it may seem at first see Champion diversity in the jungle was extremely low at this point the top pick was Elise who had a 97% presence for the tournament next next to her was both rexi and gragas who were pretty close together in terms of pick priority and that was pretty much it sometimes Lee sin would make an appearance but really there were only three main picks for the jungle across all of Worlds and one of

those Champions had just been removed from the tournament completely along with Lux and ziggs who both had not made a single appearance anyway now is a good time to remind you that at this point league did not have 10 bands for each game back then there were still only six this meant that the team on red side had a pretty significant disadvantage in every game of the tournament the team on blue side was able to basically Force Red side to ban out the op things because if they didn't then blue side would get to first

pick it on top of that this gave blue side the freedom to Target ban players on red side because they didn't have to worry as much about banning all the crazy overpowered stuff which there was a lot of Mizer and Gangplank were the obvious contested picks but then there was Elise in the jungle and Lulu in mid Lulu in particular was the mid lane pick of the tournament with a 95% presence these four picks alone meant that even if redside chose to ban as many op things as possible they would still be leaving something strong

for blue side to first pick all right so we've talked a lot about Mizer and Gangplank but what about the other recent reworks well let's start with Darius coll they got finish coming amazing can jump over the wall who's going to win this fight it goes to the red team that goes to origin here's the battle Cara alone in front absorbing get dunk so as is online down he's still going he doesn't get the third until zonas comes across he gets some damage on his thing he gets he's on the and it's to save the

game so get a pill after Baron Darius was picked a lot he was by far the most played Top Lane champ with 38 games the next closest Fiora had 19 games Fiora was seen as a more technical Champion overall and without much time to learn how to play her not many Pros were actually picking her Marin and smed both played her the most and they had a lot of success Marin actually won every game where he picked Fiora although to be fair SKT only lost one game at Worlds that year so it's not really a

fair example that said Fiora was definitely strong and Marin was able to really show what he was capable of Marin has been an absolutely Immaculate Fiora player so far this world championship SKT HQ with the d4s at the bottom Marin going to go all in let's take a look level 50 to level 13 Zip's going to be able to proc the Grand Challenge nox and might will not even get activated it's not as easy as I'm saying here now you end up walking into SKT instead well there's the shuffle fake has got Empress divide that's

a Twan body slam and fake is down the EMP divide not even used the N is not going to get channeled just yet B is going to be the next Focus y was able to kill Faker now minen looking for Ryu and might just find him and challeng is down but ryu's going to stay alive and get away Bang left uncontested on the back line he continues to Auto attack wolf with a two-man knock up y it get in the fight man no Auto attacks down yet the boang goes out not going to play Slow

wow Mor just iner Beau a double and SKT demolish h2k speaking of SKT they of course made it to the Grand finals along with coup Tigers most of the impact the Juggernaut patch though came in the form of bans Mizer and Gangplank were banned in each match of the series and Darius wasn't picked or banned a single time by this point in the tournament Players were opting to deal with Darius by picking either rennington or Fiora and C Tigers banned rington in every match versus SKT they also picked Fiora in two of those matches in

the final match of Worlds 2015 there was not one single Juggernaut picked but SKT did ban three of the recently reworked Champions as they were playing from redside so while SKT did not get to pick any juggernauts what they did have was a certain midlaner who you may have heard of he also happened to have a pocket pick rise who by the way was only played by one other person in the entire tournament for one single game that they lost for players that weren't playing League almost 10 years ago there's another twist to this story

then this poor Nar Top Lane right now mid lane turn also goes down the flash engage from Faker yeah that's the room prison in there all of the spells all of the time Faker the 1 V one against Pawn we spoke about six Champions that were reworked right before four worlds but rise was also reworked in 2015 at the end of April and in patch 5.12 which was at the end of June he received some big changes as well it's not fair to say that this was right before worlds or anything like that but it's

something at least worth mentioning rise had been hovering around a 40 to 45% win rate in solo queue at this point and basically no one was playing him in competitive except for one person he still just going to say it yeah and now we get to see Fiers rise when you push faker's champion pool he just goes back to rise everyone had to do the right thing to avoid dying there which is a little bit dangerous flashes were blown in the mid lane as well looks like Faker and kurl went hard so there's no flash

for this hjin in a real bad situation with the last bit of Mana Faker takes him down 2v one B for a long time he's waiting to TP somewhere he's going now just going into the river brush but it's going getting dropped immediately who has no idea how to deal with Faker that is the thing that is them this game 4 01 100% kill participation and also two of those kills were 1 V2s and he didn't even have to burn flash while killing them two eners down here SKT comes on the hunt goes in that's

going to be hjin in a real sticky situation he goes down a full three man Nar ultimate that's going to be smab down now eyes on to the 80 carry but the support hits it's going to be C out safely prey however has to run away from his base SK Telecom looking to take down the final Nexus turrets it does not look good good for Kuro and his team C tigers are falling SKT will be your first ever two time World [Applause] Champions SKT infamously won world's 2015 and became the first team to win Worlds

twice despite the Juggernaut patch being considered one of the worst balance patches in League of Legends history many people remember worlds 2015 very fondly while it is common to hear people say that the patch ruined the tournament as a spectator it was actually a very fun worlds to watch it was the most diverse worlds tournament League had ever had at that point largely because so many op things simply had to be banned when there are broken Champions like Mizer and Gangplank their impact isn't always obvious because they rarely make it into a game most of

the impact of these Champions is in how they forced players to draft around them and how redside was forced to ban them or potentially deal with them as a first pick the question of competitive Integrity also comes into play here because the patch that these players qualified for worlds on was a very different patch from the one that worlds was actually played on this is not great for players because they needed to figure out the meta as they played picks or comps that they had practiced or they planned to play may now be completely irrelevant

at the same time there is a valid argument that part of being a very skilled player is being able to adapt on on the fly to be able to work with your team to figure out what works in the meta and how you want to play out each game the Juggernaut update whether you enjoyed it or not is one of the most influential patches in the game's history it is by far the biggest example of Riot shaking up the meta before a World's tournament and something they now apparently tried to avoid doing at least to

that extent in hindsight many people consider the Juggernaut update to be a failure overall not just because of the impact on worlds or even for its insane impact on solo que but because three of the four champions in the patch have since been reworked again I'm curious what do you think about world's 2015 did Riot make a huge mistake by having such big changes so close to Worlds or as a viewer did you like having so many Champion picks and more chaotic games before finishing up I wanted to take a moment to thank you all

for supporting the channel every like or comment really does go a long way and again thank you for watching