The new champions of League of Legends may not convince the whole community, but they are the most successful in history. Riot Games no longer feels the need to rush release dates, nor is it under too much pressure from players about it. This, together with the learning from more than a decade of work, helps avoid major mistakes in skill building. Everything is tested thousands of times before it even reaches the PBE. In the past, however, things haven’t worked out so well and this has resulted in completely ridiculous spells for some champions.
Worst ability in League of Legends history
One of the most obvious examples of characters that came into the game with a completely mismatched skill is Zyra. There are hardly any players who remember the old version of a champion who received her rework more than six years ago. However, one of his old spells was so bad that he was responsible for updating the champion. We are referring to his passive, which was called “Rise of the Thorns”. It was a total failure, to the point that we consider it to be the worst ability in League of Legends history.
Passives that only activate after death aren’t usually very good (there are exceptions), and Zyra’s passive took first place. The champion would freeze for two seconds before being able to throw this kind of dart which dealt a small amount of true damage. At this time, her impact on the fight was minimal, and she could at best get revenge on an enemy who couldn’t flee in time. To give you an idea, it’s an aggravated version of Kog’Maw’s ability, because at least the little Voidling can move around and doesn’t need to aim.
All sorts of suggestions have been made to improve this spell, both on the official League of Legends forums and in other community discussion areas. Even the developers knew this was a problem. However, they couldn’t find a way to fix it. For a few weeks, a version of the champion was tested (on Riot Games internal servers) in which she could revive herself if an enemy was killed with the use of her passive. However, the studio felt this gave the character too much power and decided to reverse the change, with the rework taking place just over a year later.
The truth is that League of Legends hasn’t found itself in many similar situations since then, and that’s largely because they’ve been much more cautious. The developer got into a lot of trouble for too hasty releases, like the famous case of the champion created in three days. In addition, it ended other practices, such as “class reshuffling”, which also resulted in a large number of failures.