We counted every buff and nerf across 301 patches going back to 2013. Ten champions have dragged Riot back to the drawing board so often it still doesn't know what to do with them.
Riot has touched the average champion 24 times. Everyone on this list has taken at least 39. And the champion at number one has changed direction 28 separate times.
Top 10
Hardest Champions for Riot to Balance
We counted every buff and nerf across 301 patches going back to 2013. Ten champions have dragged Riot back to the drawing board so often it still doesn't know what to do with them.
Riot has touched the average champion 24 times. Everyone on this list has taken at least 39. And the champion at number one has changed direction 28 separate times.
Where these numbers come from
We've written up League patch notes since 2013, and this year we pivoted every single one by champion. One page. 301 patches. 173 champions. Search anyone and read every buff, nerf and rework they've ever taken. Every number below comes straight out of it.
This list has changed since we first ran it. We've since filled in 82 patches the archive was missing, including a two year stretch across 2024 and 2025, and roughly 1,400 extra champion changes rearranged almost everything. Four champions who looked fine before turned out to be problems all along.
One word to know first. A reversal is a buff that follows a nerf, or a nerf that follows a buff. It means Riot changed its mind. Change counts tell you a champion gets attention. Reversals tell you nobody's solved them.
#10: Graves, Who Riot Moved and Never Settled
Riot rebuilt Graves out of a marksman and into a jungler, and it's been arguing with the result ever since.
He's the only champion in the game who reloads, which means his damage lives in a burst window instead of a steady stream. That breaks the normal rules. Crit items, lethality items and jungle pathing changes all land on him harder than they land on anyone else, because two shells hitting at once turns a small number into a huge one. Riot alternated between buffing and nerfing him six times running between Patch 14.17 and Patch 26.7, and the last of those was another nerf.
#9: Maokai, the Most One Sided Record on the List
Twenty two nerfs against thirteen buffs, still the most lopsided record here, and Maokai earned almost none of it himself.
He breaks when something else changes. Jungle plants, a tank item overhaul, a support meta that suddenly adored a champion who roots two people and strolls away. Riot nerfed him six times between Patch 13.1b and Patch 14.18 without him gaining a thing in between. Then it turned around and buffed him three times running in 26.3, 26.4 and 26.15. Jungle, support, top, it makes no difference. The system moves and Maokai lands on top of it. You can't nerf a champion out of a problem that lives outside his kit.
#8: LeBlanc, Either Unplayable or Unfair
LeBlanc has no middle setting, and forty changes haven't built her one.
Her entire game is a combo that either deletes you or accomplishes nothing. The gap between not quite enough damage and erasing a carry from full health is a handful of base points. Riot nudges her by five and she rockets from unpicked to unbearable, because surviving the combo is the only counterplay and there's no partial version of surviving. Riot buffed her six patches in a row between 9.15 and 11.8, spent the next three years walking it back and forward again, and buffed her once more in 26.13. Every number that makes her playable makes her unfair about a week later.
#7: Akali, and the Shroud Riot Can't Stop Rewriting
Ten changes between Patch 8.18 and Patch 9.24. Eight of them nerfs. One of the longest sustained beatdowns in the whole archive, and nearly all of it aimed at one ability.
Twilight Shroud [W] grants no damage and no tankiness. It removes Akali from the enemy team's ability to click on her, and a champion nobody can click on is either fine or completely broken with nothing in between. Riot has rewritten what the shroud does under towers, how long she stays hidden, and what reveals her. Every rewrite launched her from unplayable to oppressive and back again, seven times running between Patch 10.16 and Patch 11.19 alone. Forty one changes in, half the playerbase thinks she does nothing and the other half thinks she can't be fought.
#6: Corki, Nineteen Buffs and Nineteen Nerfs
Nineteen buffs, nineteen nerfs, and Riot has moved Corki precisely nowhere. He's the champion the missing patches exposed, because nine of his buffs and nerfs landed in 2024 alone.
The Package is the reason. Corki gets a delivery that turns him into a different champion for a few seconds, so his power sits in a spike rather than in his numbers. Pro teams build entire mid game plans around knowing exactly when that spike arrives. Solo queue players mostly get a short range marksman with no escape. Riot buffed him in 14.11, nerfed him in 14.12, 14.14, 14.16 and 14.18, buffed him in 14.20 and 14.21, then nerfed him again in 14.22 and 14.24. That's one year, and it's the clearest picture of a champion Riot can't leave alone.
#5: Lee Sin, Buffed Eight Patches in a Row
Riot buffed Lee Sin in eight straight patches from 7.11 to 9.18, then spent 2021 taking almost all of it back with four nerfs between Patch 11.11 and Patch 11.18.
He carries the joint lowest reversal count on this list, and that is the whole problem in one number. Riot doesn't flip flop on Lee Sin so much as overshoot in one direction and then overshoot back. His skill floor and his skill ceiling are further apart than anyone else's in the game, so the same numbers produce a jungler who feeds at low ranks and a jungler who decides pro games. Balance him for the average player and he becomes a menace in organised play. Balance him for organised play and most of the people picking him lose.
#4: Caitlyn, the Ruler Riot Measures Everyone Against
Caitlyn owns the longest range of any marksman, which turns her into the yardstick Riot measures every other bot laner against.
Too strong and her rivals all look unplayable, because they have to walk into her range just to exist. Too weak and the lane becomes a coin flip. Riot can't park her anywhere except almost exactly right, so it recalibrates her every time item economy shifts, crit scaling changes, or a new support makes her traps mean something different. It buffed her six patches running from 9.6 to 10.15 and then reversed course three times in the next eight. Fifteen reversals, and hardly any of them are really about Caitlyn.
#3: Varus, Three Champions Wearing One Name
Forty four changes, the biggest riser once we filled the archive in, and the reason is that Varus has never been one champion.
Lethality Varus is a sniper who deletes somebody from off screen. On hit Varus is a lane bully who melts tanks. Poke Varus sieges towers with his team behind him. They share a name and almost nothing else, and every build responds to a different set of numbers. Riot buffs the Q to help the poke build and arms the sniper. It trims the passive to calm the on hit build and deletes the other two. Six straight buffs from 10.17 to 11.7, then three straight nerfs across 11.12, 11.18 and 11.19 once the wrong build found them. He's been nerfed five times since the start of 2025 and he still hasn't landed anywhere.
#2: Ryze, Rebuilt More Times Than Anyone
Forty five changes, six of them full reworks or adjustments, and Riot has never once landed him.
The cause is the oldest problem in the game. Ryze scales off mana and ability haste instead of raw power, so he wins by casting more rather than hitting harder. That makes him nearly worthless in a chaotic game and terrifying in a coordinated one. Riot has rebuilt him more times than almost anyone in League specifically to escape that trap, and every rebuild dropped him back in the same hole. We used to say nobody had touched him since 2023. That was only true because the archive had a hole in it: Riot has nerfed him four times since, most recently in Patch 26.12.
#1: Azir, Reversed Twenty Eight Times
Fifty five changes. Twenty eight reversals. The most rewritten champion in the entire archive, and it isn't remotely close. Second place is ten changes behind.
More than half of every change Riot has ever made to Azir undid the previous one. Sixteen of those changes came from patches the archive was missing, and they pushed his reversal count from twenty one to twenty eight.
He does this because he's two completely different champions depending on who picks him. Azir's soldiers reward precise spacing and setup, so a coordinated team turns a wall of soldiers and a Shurima Shuffle into a fight that ends before it starts. A solo queue player gets a mid laner with no burst, no reliable escape, and a standing appointment with the enemy jungler at level six. Every buff meant for the second Azir arms the first one. Every nerf meant for the first one buries the second. Riot has sat trapped between them for a decade, and the patch history is the receipt.
The Full Count
| Champion | Changes | Buffs | Nerfs | Reversals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Azir | 55 | 27 | 23 | 28 |
| 2. Ryze | 45 | 18 | 21 | 19 |
| 3. Varus | 44 | 25 | 15 | 15 |
| 4. Caitlyn | 42 | 23 | 15 | 15 |
| 5. Lee Sin | 42 | 23 | 15 | 12 |
| 6. Corki | 41 | 19 | 19 | 18 |
| 7. Akali | 41 | 22 | 14 | 16 |
| 8. LeBlanc | 40 | 22 | 15 | 15 |
| 9. Maokai | 40 | 13 | 22 | 12 |
| 10. Graves | 39 | 20 | 16 | 17 |
Buffs plus nerfs won't always equal the change total, because we count reworks and adjustments that went both ways at once separately. We ranked by total changes, breaking ties with reversals and then nerfs.
Who Dropped Off
Filling in the missing patches pushed four champions out of the top ten. Gragas fell to fifteenth, Kassadin to fourteenth, Lucian to twelfth and Karma to eleventh. None of them got easier to balance. Everyone above them simply turned out to have taken more punishment than we could see, which is exactly what you'd expect when the gap in the archive covered two of the most change heavy years League has ever had.
How We Counted
These numbers come from our patch notes archive: 301 patches, from Patch 3.0.1 in February 2013 through Patch 26.15 in July 2026. A champion counts once per patch per category, so a patch that adjusted four of Akali's abilities counts as one nerf, not four.
Two things worth knowing about the source. For the 219 patches we wrote up ourselves, the buff and nerf split is the one Riot published in its own patch highlights. For the other 82, there's no write up, so we read Riot's official notes directly and worked out the direction from the numbers, which is a judgement call in a small number of cases rather than a label Riot handed us. Riot's own news archive also stops at January 2019, so a handful of pre 2019 gaps can't be filled by anyone. Treat this as the most complete public count of champion changes we know of rather than a perfect one.
Conclusions
Three problems built this list. Azir, Ryze and Lee Sin are split between what a coordinated team can do with them and what you can, so Riot has to pick a side and loses either way. Akali and LeBlanc each own one mechanic so binary there's barely a range where they're merely good. Varus, Corki, Graves, Maokai and Caitlyn keep getting shoved around by item reworks, jungle changes and builds that have nothing to do with their kits. The pattern that survived filling in the archive is the last one: most of the champions Riot can't balance aren't broken on their own, they're just standing wherever the game moves next.
Want to know where these ten sit right now instead of across thirteen years? The solo queue tier list has the current read. Want to check your own main? The patch notes history hub has all 173 champions.
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