The history of League of Legends has known incredible and terrible moments, like the very first meta and how Fnatic won the first Worlds with an Alistar who was moving away from the Tier Lists of the moment, or the scary Kassadin of several seasons ago who became one of the most banned characters in MOBA history.
This time we go back to 2017, more precisely in May, when Riot decided to release one of the most important patches in the history of the game: the tank update. As happened this year with a major update aimed at increasing the durability of champions as a whole, patch 7.9 completely changed more than 7 champions, added about 30 new items and even added something that seems to be very necessary these days but appeared out of nowhere and by surprise: the Rift Herald.
The birth of a monster for ADCs
Obviously tank champions benefited a lot from this, as these items helped them to have more stamina than they had. Many characters have risen to the top of the meta, but there’s one in particular that’s become a real beast, especially to ADCs of the era: Cho’Gath. As soon as this patch arrived, the Dark Terror could reach 10,000 normal health in any game, which seems absurd if we’re trying to do that this season.
Many of you will think the same thing: he was unkillable, but at least he didn’t do that much damage. I’m sorry, but I have to tell you that you are completely (in part) wrong. While he didn’t do much damage with his normal abilities, it was his ultimate that really took its toll on the weaker champions in the game. Two factors are responsible for Cho’Gath’s terrible way of eliminating enemies in one bite:
- Among all the new items they added, we could see the Gargoyle Lithoplastron, which is currently in the game but does not have the same functionality. This item allowed you to double the amount of health you had at the time if you had three enemies nearby; in other words, if you had 8,000 hit points and activated the item, you had up to 16,000 hit points.
- In addition to that, Cho’Gath’s R scaled to your HPmaking it a real monstrosity for ADCs and assassins alike.
Many of you would think Riot would have backtracked almost instantly, but in reality, it took more than 4 months to fix this totally broken synergy, so the meta at the time consisted of picking Cho’Gath and four other champions. Fortunately, this kind of situation is now fixed in no time and Riot Games is doing everything to avoid broken combos that anger Summoner’s Rift players.