Formerly OP #10: Old Udyr

He had no ultimate, no dash, no ranged ability and no crowd control worth the name, and he still ran the entire early map.

Old Udyr never needed to go home. That sentence sounds small until you remember that going home was the only window most junglers of this era ever gave you.

Formerly OP

Old Udyr

Seasons 1 & 2 · Ended Patch 12.16

He had no ultimate, no dash, no ranged ability and no crowd control worth the name, and he still ran the entire early map.

Old Udyr never needed to go home. That sentence sounds small until you remember that going home was the only window most junglers of this era ever gave you.

The early jungle in Seasons 1 and 2 was a survival problem before it was a strategic one. Camps hit back hard, sustain items were expensive, and every jungler on the roster had a clear rhythm of clearing, running out of health, and disappearing to base. That rhythm was the counterplay. It told the enemy laners when they were safe. Udyr simply didn't have it. He walked a full clear, arrived at your lane at three quarters health, stunned you, and walked back into the jungle to do it again, and there was never a moment where he wasn't somewhere doing something.

When, And For How Long

Udyr launched on December 2, 2009, in Patch V1.0.0.61, and he was a defining jungler through Season 1 and Season 2. His fall wasn't one patch. It was the longest, slowest dismantling in this series so far, and unlike old Jax or release Graves, he never got a clean rework that ended the era in a single update. Riot took his identity apart one component at a time across a decade.

The full relaunch finally landed on August 24, 2022, in Patch 12.16, which converted him into the Spirit Walker kit he has today. By then the champion the relaunch replaced had already lost almost everything that made him frightening, so the visual and gameplay update was less an execution than a burial.

The Old Kit

Udyr had four basic abilities and no ultimate. Each one was a stance: a persistent effect that stayed on until he swapped to a different one, with an instant activation effect on top. Swapping put a short shared cooldown on his other stances, which is why old Udyr play was really about deciding which animal you wanted to be for the next few seconds. The icons below are the archived art from the pre-relaunch kit.

Innate: Monkey's Agility

Every stance swap stacked a temporary buff on him. At release that buff granted attack speed and dodge chance, the same removed statistic that old Jax was built around, and Udyr got his by doing the thing he was going to do anyway. Since his whole gameplay loop involved cycling stances constantly, he held the stacks essentially permanently. Riot pulled the dodge component out in Patch V1.0.0.131, one patch before dodge left League entirely, and later versions of the innate handed him armor and magic resistance and eventually movement speed instead.

Q: Tiger Stance

Passively raised his attack speed and, in the original version, split each of his attacks into three rapid hits. The activation loaded his next attack with a heavy damage over time effect scaling off his attack damage. Tiger was the burst stance, the one he swapped into for the moment he actually wanted somebody dead.

W: Turtle Stance

The stance that built the champion. Activating it gave him a shield, but the persistent half is what mattered: while in Turtle, his basic attacks couldn't critically strike, and in exchange they restored both health and mana as a percentage of the damage he dealt. Not a flat heal. A percentage of damage, on every attack, with no item requirement and no cooldown. A jungler whose sustain scaled with his own output doesn't have a clear health problem, which meant he didn't have a recall problem either.

E: Bear Stance

Passively, his basic attacks stunned the target for a full second, with the target then immune to being stunned again for a few seconds. Activating it gave him a large burst of movement speed. Read those two halves together and you have the gank: sprint at a laner with the speed buff, land an attack, and the stun applies with no skillshot, no cast time and nothing for the target to dodge. It landed because he touched you.

R: Phoenix Stance

Occupying the ultimate slot without being an ultimate, Phoenix made every few attacks release a cone of fire in front of him, and the activation surrounded him with pulsing waves of damage. This was the clearing stance and the teamfight stance, and because it sat in the R slot it levelled on the same schedule as any other basic ability rather than at six, eleven and sixteen.

Why It Was OP

Udyr had no ranged threat and no mobility beyond running fast in a straight line. He was strong for structural reasons, and most of them came down to time rather than damage.

Four maxable abilities instead of three plus an ultimate. Every other champion on the roster spent skill points on a bar where one slot only opened at level six. Udyr's fourth ability was available from level one and levelled whenever he wanted, so he was simply further along his own power curve than his opposite number for the entire early game.

His sustain paid out on item damage, not just his own. Turtle Stance healing a percentage of damage dealt meant it read damage from anywhere, and for the first two years that included the on-hit magic damage from Madred's Razors, the component that built into Wriggle's Lantern, which was the standard jungle item of the era. Every jungler bought that item. On Udyr, its proc didn't just clear the camp faster, it fed straight back into the heal. Riot classed this as a bug and fixed it in Patch V1.0.0.122 on July 26, 2011, and it's the single clearest example of how his sustain scaled with the rest of his build rather than sitting still.

A gank that couldn't be dodged. Bear Stance's stun was an on-hit effect on a basic attack, not a skillshot and not a targeted cast with a visible animation. There was no flash timing, no sidestep, no minion to body block. If Udyr reached you, you were stunned, and the movement speed activation existed specifically to make sure he reached you.

Constant map presence with no downtime. Put the sustain and the ganks together and the result is a jungler who never left the map. Laners couldn't read his position from his health bar, because his health bar didn't tell them anything. That absence of information was worth more than any single number in his kit.

He also collected the same removed statistic old Jax did. Monkey's Agility's dodge chance was small individually and stacked to a meaningful amount because he was always swapping stances. It's a smaller part of his story than it is of Jax's, but it's the same underlying mechanic quietly making an already sturdy champion harder to actually damage.

Open Da Gates

No champion in this series is more closely tied to one player than Udyr is to Timothy Foley, better known as Trick2g. He has been making League content since 2010, near enough to the start of the game itself, and he built an entire identity on this champion. The community started calling him Godyr, and he eventually named his own organization Team Gates after the thing he was famous for doing.

Opening the gates meant split pushing. Not the careful, warded, back-off-when-they-rotate kind, but standing in a side lane deep in enemy territory, taking the tower, taking the next one, and daring the other team to come and deal with it. That's a strategy every League player has tried, and for most champions it ends the same way: three enemies collapse from three directions and the split pusher dies with nothing to show for it.

Old Udyr is the champion that let him get away with it, and the reason sits in the kit described above. Turtle Stance meant he could hold a side lane indefinitely without recalling, so he was never forced to give the lane back. Bear Stance's activation gave him a large burst of movement speed and, after Patch 3.5, let him ignore unit collision entirely, so a wall of minions or a body block did nothing to slow the escape. Bear also carried the stun on every basic attack, meaning anyone who arrived first to stop him got frozen in place while he walked out. Phoenix Stance sitting in the ultimate slot meant he hit the tower fast enough to make the whole trip worth it.

Put those together and a solo split push stopped being a gamble. Udyr could take the objective, survive the collapse, and leave, and the enemy team had spent three players to accomplish nothing. Trick2g didn't invent that pattern, but he demonstrated it often enough and loudly enough that a generation of players learned what old Udyr actually did from watching him do it.

The Fall

There's no single patch to point at here, which is exactly what makes Udyr different from the rest of this series. Riot took him apart piece by piece over eleven years.

Patch V1.0.0.122 in July 2011 cut the Madred's Razors interaction out of Turtle Stance. Patch V1.0.0.124 the following month trimmed both the health and mana restoration percentages. Patch V1.0.0.131 removed the dodge from Monkey's Agility. Patch 3.5 on March 28, 2013 delivered the heaviest single blow, removing the mana return from Turtle Stance entirely, allowing him to critically strike in the stance in exchange, and converting Monkey's Agility from defensive stats to movement speed. Patch 7.8 in 2017 replaced Turtle's lifesteal with a fixed heal on a three attack cycle, which finally severed the link between his damage output and his sustain that had defined him since 2009.

By the time Patch 12.16 arrived on August 24, 2022 with the full relaunch, Riot wasn't ending a dominant era. It was replacing a champion whose dominant era had already been dismantled a decade earlier, and giving him a kit that could actually carry a modern game.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Udyr keeps the four-stance structure and rebuilds every stance around an awaken mechanic, where casting the same stance twice in a row spends a stack for a stronger version. Wilding Claw [Q], Iron Mantle [W], Blazing Stampede [E] and Wingborne Storm [R] map loosely onto the old Tiger, Turtle, Bear and Phoenix, but they're new abilities rather than retuned ones, with real scaling and a teamfight presence the old kit never had. He's a healthy jungle and top lane pick who shows up whenever bruiser stats are in a good place.

What hasn't come back is the thing that made him feel oppressive rather than merely strong. Old Udyr's power wasn't in what happened when he arrived. It was in the fact that he was always able to arrive, from full health, at any point on the map, forever. Riot fixed that in 2011, and every version of him since has had to be balanced like a normal champion.

Nominate The Next One

Old Udyr closes out a run of entries where the pattern keeps repeating: the champion was rarely the problem, the system underneath was. Dodge, jungle sustain, snowball items and fog of war did more damage to this game's balance than any individual ability ever did. Look through the rest of the series below and drop your nomination for the next one in the comments.