When a new champion arrives in League of Legends, it’s very important not to jump to conclusions. Victory statistics recorded during the first few days by a character new to Summoner’s Rift are rarely reliable or indicative of their true potential. Only after a few days we can draw first conclusions about the champion in question. An exercise that in the case of K’Sante has not been at all positive and that allows us to anticipate several challenges that will test the expertise of Riot Games in the face of a very difficult job.
The serious problems of the early days of K’Sante
Starting with the obvious, K’Sante is too weak. If that wasn’t an alarming sign in the first few days after his release, the champ hasn’t progressed at the rate one might expect. His win rate barely reaches the 44.1% (considering only the most recent data) of the average League of Legends player. This weakness is easy to correct. Riot Games has more than enough tools to increase the performance of champions. However, this is where the big problem with the character comes in, as their performance increases dramatically as you level up.
To show the data closest to the champion’s break-even point, the following chart shows K’Sante’s win rate on November 7 (latest data).
This data is obtained from an analysis of more than 80,000 games played on all League of Legends servers and seems to be quite reliable, as there are no major differences in the choice of builds depending on the rank players. Thus, the only possible conclusion is the obvious: the chances of success with K’Sante increase with the level of the players. It is therefore a character who shines when a very gifted person faces an adversary who is equally gifted in this field. He is, of course, not the only champion to go through a similar experience. However, this is not such a common phenomenon and is one of the most pronounced cases.
This situation poses several problems. The first is that K’Sante could dominate the professional game when the competition returns next season and the second is that Riot Games cannot increase its power. This is also due to two different situations.
- Start of the 2023 preseason : The start of the new preseason adds new items and brings back the Freezing Gauntlet, which seems to be tailor-made for the champion. Riot Games can’t increase its power because it doesn’t know how the arrival of this item will affect it.
- A dangerous improvement : Increasing K’Sante’s potency for most of the community would make it “broken” at higher ranks, preventing it from balancing in the long run.
In the entire history of League of Legends, few champions have been able to get out of a situation like K’Sante.. It’s a similar situation to Zeri or the current fate of Aphelios, Ryze, and even Azir. It’s still too early to predict such a bleak future, but that’s what the samples we have so far say. It seems obvious that Riot is going to have to put everything it has learned from its previous bumpy rides to the test. Something that never worked well for them.
In any case, it does not seem that the solutions will come immediately. Unless the developers surprise us with some emergency tweaks or a special change, the next patch will be exclusively for the 2023 preseason. characters.
K’Santé is the first champion openly introduced in League of Legends as belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. Nevertheless, Riot Games had to adapt to the mores of certain countries and admitted to having censored its history in certain regions.