Formerly OP #2: Old Nidalee

She was killing dragon before your jungler even reached the pit. That was Tuesday.

With League of Legends Classic bringing old kits back onto the roster on July 29, we are still digging through the archive of champions whose "old kit" gets a groan out of anyone who played through it. Next up: the spear-throwing cat lady who made HotshotGG famous, and got Season 1 Championship opponents banning her on sight.

Formerly OP

Old Nidalee

Season 1 – Season 4 · Ended Patch 4.10

She was killing dragon before your jungler even reached the pit. That was Tuesday.

You take one step past minion aggro range to last-hit, and a spear lands on your head from a distance you didn't think was possible. It costs her almost nothing. It hurts a lot. You back off, and she just does it again, because the trap she dropped in the bush behind you already burned the ward you thought was covering your escape route, and the heal she has queued up means she will happily out-sustain your entire harass rotation without ever buying more than boots and a Doran's item. That was laning against Nidalee for the better part of four years, and it is why old-kit revivals like Classic mode tend to come with a specific kind of dread attached to her name.

When, And For How Long

Nidalee launched in July 2011 and was a fixture of competitive and solo queue play essentially from day one, made famous in no small part by HotshotGG, whose Nidalee was banned in nearly every Season 1 Championship match he played. She stayed a top-tier menace across Season 1 through Season 4, surviving plenty of number tuning along the way, until Riot finally rebuilt her kit from the ground up in Patch 4.10, released in June 2014.

The Old Kit

The icons below show the current versions of these ability slots, since the old spear arcs, trap radius, and cougar-form animations from this era are not something the game keeps an archived image of. The descriptions are all the old kit.

Passive: Prowl

Bonus movement speed for staying off the beaten path, in brush or on unpathed terrain. It sounds minor next to everything else on this list, but it is a big part of why old Nidalee could rotate across the map, contest scuttle crab before it existed and dragon before your jungler did, and generally be somewhere she had no business being on time.

Q: Javelin Toss / Takedown

In human form, an absurdly long-range spear that scaled hard off ability power and cost almost nothing to sling. Landing four or five of these over a laning phase was often the entire game plan, and the honest answer to "when do I stop throwing spears" was never. It also carried a hitbox nearly twice as wide as what it would eventually get trimmed down to, so "just dodge it" was a lot easier said than done. Worse, a spear thrown out of a bush or straight from fog of war would frequently render invisible on the receiving end, meaning half the server spent this era eating full-damage javelins that never actually appeared on their screen, a bug infamous enough that Riot had to keep re-patching it. In cougar form the same button became Takedown, a finishing strike that erased anything already worn down, turning every spear that connected into a countdown timer.

W: Bushwhack / Pounce

A trap that revealed a wide area, including anything hiding in it, and for a stretch of this era that included enemy wards themselves. A Nidalee who knew the common ward spots could functionally deny a team's vision budget for the price of a few traps, no Oracle's Elixir required. Riot eventually walked back the ward-clearing side of it, but the traps stayed absurd through the rest of the era regardless. In cougar form the same slot became Pounce, an instant gap closer that got a full second shaved off its cooldown at one point, a nerf so much bigger than the number implies that it single-handedly ended a lot of all-ins overnight.

E: Primal Surge / Swipe

A heal-over-time and attack speed buff she could drop on herself or an ally, strong enough that a single Doran's Ring was all the itemization old Nidalee needed to sustain through two people harassing her at once. In cougar form the same button became Swipe, a cone attack that punished anyone who bunched up to help their laner, closing out fights the spear had already half-won.

R: Aspect of the Cougar

The shapeshift into cougar form, which for most of this era only became available at rank 6, 11, or 16, one of the few real restrictions on the whole kit. Once it came online, Nidalee stopped being a poke mage and became a skirmisher who could delete a low-health target in a single Pounce into Takedown, with nothing you could do about it once she committed.

Why It Was OP

None of this was one broken number. It was several structural advantages stacked on top of each other, and that is what kept Nidalee a must-ban for four straight seasons even as individual patches nerfed and re-buffed pieces of her along the way:

Poke with no punish window. A spear from max range costs the thrower almost nothing and forces the target to either eat it or give up lane position entirely. There was no all-in that reliably answered it, because closing the distance meant walking through more spears to get there.

Vision denial as a lane tool. Bushwhack's ward-clearing years meant a good Nidalee could deny an entire team's vision investment with traps she was already dropping to poke and scout. That is not a damage advantage, it is an information advantage, and it compounds every time a jungler tries to path through a lane she has already swept.

Free sustain, no itemization tax. Every other lane bully needs to build sustain into their item path. Nidalee's was built into her kit from level one, which meant her gold could go entirely toward damage while she out-lasted harass for free.

A genuine two-phase kit. Poke someone down from human form, then finish with a cougar-form Pounce into Takedown, all on one champion with one set of summoner spells. Few champions of this era offered both a safe long-range punish tool and a committed all-in finisher in the same kit.

The Fall

Riot spent years chipping at individual numbers, the Pounce cooldown nerf and the Sheen and Trinity Force changes that made her cougar-form burst harder to itemize into among them, without ever addressing the underlying design. That changed in Patch 4.10, released in June 2014, which rebuilt Nidalee's kit mechanic by mechanic rather than tuning it. It was a full gameplay rework, not a new model or splash treatment, but it changed how the champion actually played more than any visual update would have.

What Changed

Aspect of the Cougar became available at level 1 instead of being locked away until rank 6, trading a hard restriction for a completely different power curve. Javelin Toss's damage was cut down significantly. Bushwhack was rebuilt around a new Hunted mechanic that marked a damaged target and rewarded following up with an empowered cougar-form ability, replacing its old identity as a wide-area vision and ward-clearing tool with something far more single-target and combo-dependent. Later tuning passes, including further cooldown and healing reductions in Patch 6.21, kept sanding down what was left of the old sustain-and-poke playstyle.

Where She Stands Now

Modern Nidalee is a jungle-first pick, occasionally mid, who still throws spears and still turns into a cat, but the entire loop now runs through the Hunted mechanic the 4.10 rework introduced rather than raw poke damage and free sustain. She shows up in pro play in bursts when the meta rewards early skirmishing and has a small, extremely dedicated one-trick following in solo queue, but nobody is banning her out of dread the way Hotshot's opponents did. The spear still hurts. It is just an actual skill matchup now instead of a free lane.

Nominate The Next One

With Classic mode putting several of these old kits back on the client on July 29, we suspect this list is about to get some very passionate feedback. Catch up on the rest of the series below, then drop your nomination for the next one in the comments.