League of Legends regularly has patches where certain champions are quite strong. That is the nature of a MOBA. However, sometimes champions become much too strong, stronger than intended. This happened in 2019 with a new champion who was just unfair.
Who is it about? On December 11, 2019, with patch 9.24, the new champion Aphelios was released, and he had already sparked a lot of conversation prior to that. His overall package is something special; he even has a different interface and scales stats instead of abilities.
In the game, he has 5 weapons that he can switch between, each offering different secondary effects to his Q ability and his Ultimate. It is also important with Aphelios to combine the different weapons, which creates various possibilities.
Aphelios is meant to be complicated and to offer great opportunities at high risk. However, the problem at release was that Aphelios was far too strong, even unfair. In South Korea, a month after release, he had a ban rate of 223% among Challenger players, the top players of the server.
This means he was banned by both teams in every match. He achieves over 200% because remakes count as bans but not towards the played matches. In other words, statistically, Aphelios was banned in every match in Korea at that time. Interestingly, Akali and Qiyana also had a fairly high ban rate.
Complex for the Game and the Players
What makes him so strong? His complicated abilities are not only difficult for players but also for balancing. The interaction possibilities led to strong synergies. When the item Death’s Dance was changed in patch 10.6, it unintentionally created a strong synergy with Aphelios. He could heal himself fully in a few seconds, allowing him to fight groups on his own.
You cannot nerf a whole ability with Aphelios; you have to change individual weapons and combinations for healthy nerfs. If you nerf him universally, he becomes too weak and less played.
His Ultimate was also a major issue. He could achieve multiple kills with ease because it caused too much AOE damage in combination with the flamethrower weapon.
The other reason is his complexity. Sure, to play him properly, you have to understand him, but this also applies to the opponents. One must comprehend his various weapons for good counterplay. In a chaotic team fight, it is hard to keep track. This was also a problem for esports commentators at the time.
You can see how strong he really was back then in a YouTube video by Vandiril:
His many nerfs in the early patches also indicate that not everything was perfect with the stats. Regularly, values were adjusted to weaken him (via League of Legends Wiki).
In the first hotfix, directly at his release, synergies with on-hit effects were nerfed because they apparently worked too well.
Aphelios was the great example of a meme with which he had nothing to do
Due to Aphelios’s excellent performance, he essentially became the face of a meme within the LoL community. It refers to 200 years of game design experience.
The meme originally stemmed from a discussion about Wukong nerfs.
There, RiotLutzburg responded to a player on X.com: Being good at playing a specific character in a video game is valuable, but I think I’ll take the more than 200 years of experience in professional game design
(via YouTube)
This became a meme in the community, especially with Aphelios. When he performed way too strong, people liked to refer to 200 years of game design experience
.
What is the current situation of Aphelios? Looking at his statistics in the current patch, 14.23 on U.GG, you can see how little influence he still has today. He has a pick rate of 3.5% and a moderate win rate of 48.58% across all ranks. In higher ELOs, this is hardly better. In Challenger, he has a pick rate of 3.9% and a disastrous win rate of 43.84%.
Thus, Aphelios is currently a rather inconspicuous ADC who is suited for good and experienced players due to his complex kit. The opposite of this is Garen, who is currently terrorizing the Midlane again: LoL: A champion has dominated weak players for 3 patches, despite being in the “wrong” position
