Formerly OP #7: Release Graves

He was an AD carry who traded like a bruiser, and bot lane never forgave him for it.

Every era of League has a champion the enemy team bans on reflex before they even see your pick order. For four straight years, in bot lane of all places, that champion was Graves.

Formerly OP

Release Graves

Season 2 & 3 · Ended Patch 5.22

He was an AD carry who traded like a bruiser, and bot lane never forgave him for it.

Every era of League has a champion the enemy team bans on reflex before they even see your pick order. For four straight years, in bot lane of all places, that champion was Graves.

Ranged carries in this game have always followed the same rule: massive damage, paper health, punished hard for getting caught out of position. Graves broke that rule the moment he launched. He walked up, traded auto attacks and point blank shotgun blasts like a melee bruiser, and somehow had the resistances to walk away from the exchange still standing. Bot lane duos who played him correctly did not out-damage their opponents. They just refused to lose the fight, over and over, until the other side stopped bothering to contest the wave at all.

When, And For How Long

Graves launched on October 19, 2011, right at the tail end of Season 1, and was a fixture of bot lane for essentially all of Season 2 and Season 3. He stayed a viable pick well into Season 4 and Season 5 as Riot chipped away at his numbers, but the kit itself, the actual abilities on his bar, never changed. Riot finally tore it out and replaced it wholesale in Patch 5.22, the November 2015 preseason update that opened Season 6, which is over four years of a single kit staying intact from launch to retirement.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the actual archived art from Graves' original kit, not current reskinned versions, so this is what players genuinely saw on their action bar during this era.

Innate: True Grit

Every second Graves dealt or took damage, he gained a stack of bonus armor and magic resistance, up to ten stacks total, and the whole pile fell off if he went three seconds without touching a fight. There was no cast, no cooldown, and no mana cost. It just sat there rewarding him for staying in the fight, which is exactly why a ranged carry with a squishy carry's damage output could also walk away from most trades looking like a tank.

Q: Buckshot

Three bullets fired in a cone, and any bullet beyond the first that connected with the same target did extra reduced damage on top of the initial hit. Most skillshots punish a ranged champion for standing at max range. Buckshot inverted that. The closer Graves stood to someone, the more of that cone actually landed on them, which meant his single best trading pattern was walking into true melee range and firing point blank, the opposite of how every other marksman in the game was supposed to play. Buckshot itself is gone from Graves' Q slot today, but its cone of pellets did not really disappear, it moved onto his basic attacks as the New Destiny passive.

W: Smoke Screen

A canister landed on the target area, dealt magic damage on impact, and then sat there as a cloud for a full four seconds, slowing and nearsighting everyone caught inside for the entire duration, not just on the initial hit. Anyone standing in that cloud lost vision from allied wards and teammates too, so it was not just a slow, it was a genuine blackout in the middle of a fight. Smoke Screen is largely the same ability today. The vision block still holds for the whole duration of the cloud, and the only real change is the slow, which now only applies on impact instead of the entire time a target stands inside it.

E: Quickdraw

A dash that granted a hefty attack speed buff for several seconds, and every basic attack Graves landed while Quickdraw was on cooldown shaved a second off that cooldown. Stack enough attack speed and Quickdraw effectively never went away, letting him dash in, out, and back in again through an entire extended fight. Quickdraw is also still a live ability on Graves today, but the attack speed steroid is gone. The modern version dashes for bonus armor and magic resist instead, which is a completely different reward for a completely different playstyle, not the same button with smaller numbers.

R: Collateral Damage

A shell fired in a straight line that punched through every minion and monster in its path for heavy damage, then either detonated on the first champion it hit or at the end of its range, dealing a further cone of damage behind that point. Anyone who dodged the initial line still had to dodge the explosion behind it. This is the one piece of the old kit that survived completely intact. Present day Collateral Damage still fires the same piercing shell and still detonates in the same cone.

Why It Was OP

Every piece of this kit pushed in the same direction: a ranged carry that got to play the aggressor. That is not how marksmen are supposed to work, and stacking enough of these advantages onto one champion made him close to unbeatable in a straight lane fight.

A carry that did not need to kite. True Grit meant Graves gained real defensive stats simply by being in the fight, no item requirement, no combo requirement, just staying engaged. Every other bot lane carry in this era had to out-position or out-kite their opponent to survive. Graves could just stand there.

A kit built for point blank range. Buckshot's falloff rewarded closing the distance instead of holding it, and Quickdraw's on-hit cooldown refund meant he could dash into range, fire, and dash again almost as fast as he could reload the idea. Bot lane opponents who played the matchup like a normal ranged fight walked straight into his strongest range band.

Vision denial as a lane tool, not just a teamfight tool. Smoke Screen's four second persistent field meant Graves could blind and slow a target for the length of an entire trade, not just the split second of impact. Losing all shared vision from wards and allies while standing in that cloud turned a normal skirmish into a fight the enemy laner could not see clearly enough to fight back in.

An execute at the end of every trade. Collateral Damage's piercing line into a cone explosion meant a Graves who won the earlier exchange with Buckshot and Quickdraw could usually finish the kill from a safe distance too, punishing minion wave positioning as hard as it punished the enemy carry directly.

Itemization made it worse. Lifesteal was not a unique passive during this era, so Graves could buy more than one Bloodthirster and stack their lifesteal on top of each other, with each copy separately building its own stacks of bonus attack damage and lifesteal from kills. Layered on top of True Grit's free resistances, an AD carry who was already hard to burst down could also out-sustain most trades outright. Riot closed that loophole across the entire game in Patch 4.12, which made lifesteal unique, well over a year before the full kit rework finally arrived.

The Fall

Riot tuned Graves' numbers down repeatedly across Seasons 3 through 5, but number changes alone never solved the actual identity problem, a tanky ranged carry that fought like a bruiser. Riot addressed it directly in Patch 5.22, released in November 2015 as the preseason update heading into Season 6. Riot did not just delete True Grit and Buckshot, it reshuffled them. Buckshot's cone of pellets moved off the Q entirely and became the New Destiny passive, the reload-gated shotgun basic attack Graves still fires today, while the vacated Q slot got a completely new ability, End of the Line. True Grit's stacking resistances moved too, folded into Quickdraw instead of surviving as their own always-on passive. Smoke Screen and Quickdraw kept their names, but Riot rebuilt part of their effects in the same patch, dropping Smoke Screen's persistent slow and Quickdraw's attack speed steroid described above. Collateral Damage was the only piece of the kit Riot left completely untouched.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Graves is built around New Destiny's shotgun-and-reload cycle, unloading a burst of shells and then having to reload before he can threaten again, a much spikier, ammo-gated rhythm than the old kit's constant close range pressure. Riot's own rework pushed him out of bot lane entirely into jungle, where he has lived ever since, occasionally splashing into mid lane. The True Grit name did not disappear completely either, it now shows up as the buff Quickdraw grants when Graves dashes toward an enemy champion, a small callback to the old innate rather than a revival of it. Smoke Screen's vision block is one of the few pieces of the old kit still doing almost exactly what it always did. He is a perfectly healthy jungle pick today, but nobody bans him on sight the way bot lane did for four straight years.

Nominate The Next One

Release Graves belongs right alongside the rest of this series, a champion who did not need broken numbers so much as a kit that broke the rules his entire role was supposed to follow. Catch up on the others below, then drop your nomination for the next one in the comments.