Formerly OP #9: Old Rengar

Four years of League where walking past an unwarded bush was a decision with a death attached to it.

Old Rengar didn't out-play you. He picked a bush, waited, and removed you from the game in the time it took your screen to finish showing him arriving.

Formerly OP

Old Rengar

Seasons 3 to 6 · Ended Patch 6.22

Four years of League where walking past an unwarded bush was a decision with a death attached to it.

Old Rengar didn't out-play you. He picked a bush, waited, and removed you from the game in the time it took your screen to finish showing him arriving.

Assassins are supposed to be a trade. They get to delete a carry, and in exchange the carry's team gets to delete them, and both sides accept the deal because the timing and the positioning are visible to everyone involved. Rengar declined that arrangement. His leap came out of terrain the enemy couldn't see into, his damage came out in a single frame, and his ultimate let him start the whole sequence from most of a screen away while stealthed. The counterplay wasn't mechanical. It was buying a control ward and hoping you had put it in the right place.

When, And For How Long

Rengar arrived on August 21, 2012, in the middle of Season 2, shipped as part of the Rengar and Kha'Zix rivalry that gave both of them a trophy item for hunting each other. His kit then stayed structurally the same for over four years. Riot chipped at his numbers constantly across Seasons 3, 4, 5 and 6, but the abilities on his bar, the Ferocity system driving them, and the leap out of the brush all stayed exactly where they were.

The era ended in Patch 6.22, released on November 10, 2016 as the Preseason 2017 update. That patch carried a broad assassin rework across several champions, and Rengar's share of it went directly after the pattern that had made him miserable to play against for four straight years.

The Old Kit

Rengar ran on Ferocity. Damaging an enemy with an ability built a stack, and at five stacks his next basic ability came out in an empowered version that ignored its own cooldown entirely. The icons below are the archived art from that version of the kit.

Innate: Unseen Predator

While Rengar stood in brush or in stealth, his basic attacks gained enormous range and carried him to the target as a leap. The wording that mattered sat at the end of the tooltip: the leap worked whether or not the target had any vision of him. He wasn't punished for being spotted, because being spotted was never part of the requirement. The buff also lingered for a fraction of a second after he stepped out of the brush, which is why he could commit from the edge of it rather than the middle.

Item: Bonetooth Necklace

Rengar had his own personal item that collected a trophy every time he got a takedown on an enemy champion, up to twenty of them. The trophies weren't stat sticks. They upgraded his kit directly: extra movement speed out of combat and in brush at three, significantly longer leap range at six, a longer ultimate at twelve, and doubled stealth movement speed at twenty. Killing Kha'Zix during their shared quest handed him the whole set at once. The champion whose problem was that he snowballed too hard came with a built-in snowball mechanic that made him better at snowballing.

Q: Savagery

The basic version loaded his next attacks with bonus attack speed and bonus physical damage, and reset his attack timer on cast. The empowered version, shown by its own separate icon below, replaced that with a single enormous hit and then handed him a large attack speed and attack damage buff for the following five seconds. Landing empowered Savagery [Q] at the end of a leap is the entire reason people remember this champion, because the leap and the reset stacked into one arrival that resolved before the target's client had finished drawing him.

Q: Savagery, empowered

Same slot, different button, and it didn't consume the basic version's cooldown. That's the structural point people miss about the Ferocity system. Empowered abilities weren't a stronger version of a spell you had to wait for. They were an extra spell, cast in the same window, which is how a full combo came out looking like one action.

W: Battle Roar

A point blank roar that damaged everything nearby and gave him bonus armor and magic resistance, increased for each champion or large monster it caught. The empowered version healed him, and at release that heal was a flat fifteen percent of his maximum health. Riot cut it to ten percent in Patch V1.0.0.153 in December 2012 and then converted it to a scaling flat value the following patch, but for the first months of his life the assassin who deleted your carry also had a self-heal worth a sizeable chunk of his own health bar attached to a basic ability.

E: Bola Strike

A long range bola that damaged the first enemy hit and applied a heavy decaying slow. The empowered version rooted instead. Both halves are still recognisable in the modern ability, but pair the root with everything above and the escape window on the receiving end went from small to nonexistent.

R: Thrill of the Hunt

Rengar went stealthed after a short delay and gained true sight of every enemy champion in a radius that reached four thousand units at max rank, which is a very large portion of the map. While stealthed he moved faster toward nearby enemies, and coming out of stealth handed him five Ferocity over the next five seconds, meaning he arrived with an empowered ability already loaded. Enemies got a warning that he was nearby, but the warning told them he existed, not where he was or which of them he had chosen.

Why It Was OP

The individual pieces here are all things other assassins had in some form. What made Rengar the one people banned was how completely they closed off the space where counterplay usually lives.

The engage started from inside fog of war. Every other diver in this era had to physically approach. Rengar's leap fired out of brush at a range most champions couldn't respond to, and it didn't require him to have been seen or to have seen you first. Warding a bush is real counterplay, but it's counterplay you have to buy in advance and place correctly, which is a very different thing from reacting to a mistake.

Ferocity let him skip the cooldown queue. Because an empowered ability came out free of its basic version's cooldown, his burst wasn't a sequence of spells spaced by their timers. It was a leap, a reset, an empowered hit and a basic hit compressed into roughly the length of one animation. Damage delivered that fast stops behaving like damage and starts behaving like a removal effect, because nothing on the receiving end has time to respond to it.

His ultimate scouted, approached and loaded his combo at once. Thrill of the Hunt [R] gave him information about where everyone was, movement speed to reach them, stealth so they couldn't track the approach, and a full Ferocity bar on exit. Most ultimates do one job. This one did four, and the true sight component in particular meant he was picking targets with better information than the team he was picking them from.

Snowballing had its own item slot. Bonetooth Necklace turned every kill into permanent kit upgrades, and the upgrades sharpened exactly the parts of him that were already the problem. A fed Rengar didn't just have more damage than a fed anyone else. He had more leap range and a longer, faster ultimate, so the fed version was harder to see coming than the even version.

Riot spent four years tuning it and the pattern never moved. The patch history here's a long list of small corrections. Stealth delay up, cooldown up, movement speed down, damage ratios trimmed, and at one point in Patch 6.7 a bug fix for his basic abilities having no cooldowns at all. None of it changed what playing against him felt like, because the feeling came from the shape of the kit rather than from the size of any one number.

The Fall

Patch 6.22, on November 10, 2016, was the Preseason 2017 assassin update, and Riot used it to take the ambush apart rather than to shrink it. Maximum Ferocity dropped from five to four, and Ferocity now fell off entirely after seven seconds out of combat, so he could no longer walk around the map permanently loaded. Bonetooth Necklace's trophy cap fell from twenty to five and its bonuses became plain attack damage instead of kit upgrades, which ended the version of him that got structurally scarier every time he killed someone.

The ultimate took the heaviest changes. True sight radius came down hard, the guaranteed critical strike on the leap at the closest enemy came out and became an armor shred effect instead, and Riot added the change that mattered most: the enemy nearest to Rengar now alerted every ally within a wide radius that he was there. The information advantage went the other way. Riot did give things back in the same patch, including a longer leap and higher stealth movement speed, so it isn't accurate to call 6.22 a straight gutting. It replaced an unanswerable engage with a loud one.

Where He Stands Now

Rengar is still a jungler, still an assassin, and still fully capable of ending a squishy target in one leap with the right build and enough of a lead. Riot has come back to him several times since, including a further mini rework in Patch 12.6. What changed is that the enemy team now gets told he's coming. The modern version asks him to find angles, manage his Ferocity timer and pick a moment, which is a real skill expression and a genuinely well-liked champion for the people who main him.

The old version asked nothing of the enemy team except that they should have warded better. Both champions can one-shot a carry. Only one of them could do it from a bush that nobody had any reason to check.

Nominate The Next One

Old Rengar is the clearest case this series has run into of a champion who wasn't broken by a number. Every part of his kit was individually defensible and the combination wasn't. Read the rest of the entries below and let us know in the comments who should be next.

See more Formerly OP posts

One Shot, One Shoe

If the write-up above sounds exaggerated, here's the version of it that circulated at the time: a full combo landing on a target who didn't survive long enough to react, with a boot in the build.