In League of Legends there are always Champions that annoy players. For a long time, people complained about the “magical cat Yuumi.” But since Riot Games took away her claws, players have identified two new heroes as problems: Aphelios and Netflix star Jinx (Arcane). You can now see them in every professional game.
This is the situation:
- Players’ frustration in LoL often targets individual champions that allegedly destroy LoL, take all the fun out of the game, and need to be removed.
- For a long time, the cat “Yuumi” was such a hate object. Now, LoL has simply excluded Yuumi from the tournament MSI 2023.
- But without the cat, 2 more champs come into focus of criticism.
Fans cheer that Yuumi was banned at MSI
This has been the most hated champ all along:
Yuumi faced criticism for years because she attaches herself to an ADC and cannot be attacked. Originally, Yuumi was planned as a champion for beginners, allowing them to focus on casting while the supporters handled running and positioning with their ADC.
However, Yuumi was used by top supporters to dominate tournaments.
Many e-sports fans and even e-sports professionals hated Yuumi, demanding for years: The cat must go, ideally deleted from LoL entirely.
After the big tournament MSI 2023, there was a huge thread on reddit with 9,000 upvotes that stated: “It was really great that Yuumi couldn’t be played at MSI 2023.” The very fact that the parasitic cat was not played improved e-sports. Support players could now show what they were capable of.
Previously the game would have just been: “Put Yuumi on Zeri and then you probably win.”
In the bot lane, only Jinx and Aphelios are planned
These are the new problems: But now that the cat is gone, there are further issues. In the comments, it is said that the current meta feels very rigid. There are very few variations, especially in the lower part of the map.
This leads many games to resemble each other, which would detract from the joy of e-sports and MSI 2023.
It is described as a problem that almost only 2 heroes are played in the bot lane: Jinx and Aphelios. Only when the two are banned do professionals turn to heroes like Xayah or Zeri.
In fact, Jinx has a presence rate of 75% with 43 picks and 14 bans – just like Aphelios with 46 picks and 11 bans (via gol.gg).
Xayah has a presence rate of 42% with 24 picks and 8 bans.
What is the reason for this? As Dotesports describes, Jinx and Aphelios are currently “hyper-carries” in LoL. Because the current meta revolves around the ADC, the two heroes are so dominant. They statistically do their job of dealing physical damage best.
While in other roles it is about providing crowd control or other useful abilities to a team, the ADC role is purely about damage. That’s why the two heroes are so essential right now.
The rigid meta could change again with the next patch:
