Top 10 Champion Passives Stronger Than Most Ultimates

Every champion gets one ability they never press, never level, and never lose. For these ten, that ability is the best thing in the kit.

A passive costs nothing. No mana, no cooldown, no button. Riot balances around that by keeping most of them small, and then hands a handful of champions something that would be a fair ultimate on anyone else.

Top 10

Champion Passives Stronger Than Most Ultimates

Kit Design

Every champion gets one ability they never press, never level, and never lose. For these ten, that ability is the best thing in the kit.

Counting down from the passives that quietly win a lane to the one that hands a champion a second life on repeat.

#10: Braum, Who Stuns With Someone Else's Attacks

Concussive Blows [Passive] marks a target when Braum hits them, and then every ally attack on that target builds toward a stun. Braum contributes one auto attack and his bot lane partner supplies the rest. Most support ultimates lock down one champion for a couple of seconds on a long cooldown. Braum does that on an auto attack timer, over and over, all game, and the enemy laner has to respect it from the first minion wave.

#9: Kindred, Who Grows Her Own Range

Mark of the Kindred [Passive] turns farming into permanent stat growth. Every completed hunt extends her attack range and sharpens her damage, and none of it can be taken away by a death or an item sale. A Kindred who gets to play the map freely for twenty minutes ends up outranging the marksman she's shooting at, which isn't a thing marksmen are built to lose. Her ultimate gets all the attention, and her passive decides whether the game was ever close.

#8: Vladimir, Who Gets Two Items From One

Crimson Pact [Passive] converts a share of Vladimir's bonus health into ability power and a share of his ability power into health. That single line rewrites his entire shop. Health items give him damage, damage items give him health, and a build that would leave any other mage squishy leaves him with mage numbers on a bruiser health bar. No ultimate in the game is worth an extra item, and this passive is worth roughly that on every purchase he makes.

#7: Ornn, the Shop That Walks Around

Living Forge [Passive] lets Ornn buy items without going home, forge upgraded versions of them that nobody else can build, and eventually hand free upgrades to his teammates. Read that again as a team fighting statistic: Ornn's passive makes four other players stronger without them spending gold, and it saves him recall trips they still have to take. Riot has spent years balancing his ultimate. The reason he keeps showing up in professional drafts is the one he never presses.

#6: Bard, Who Plays a Second Game

Traveler's Call [Passive] scatters chimes across the map and rewards Bard for collecting them with meeps that add damage to his attacks and with permanent power. It's a whole progression system running underneath the game everyone else is playing, and it explains every strange thing a Bard does. He isn't roaming badly. He's farming a resource the enemy support doesn't have and can't contest. A good Bard is ahead by a full item at twenty minutes without ever winning a lane.

#5: Kayle, Who Changes Class Three Times

Divine Ascent [Passive] hands Kayle a different champion at each of three level breakpoints, finishing with permanent attack range and waves of damage on every swing. Most champions get stronger as they level. Kayle stops being a melee fighter and becomes a ranged carry, which is a category change, not a stat increase. Her ultimate is a good ultimate. Her passive is the reason enemy teams have to end the game before minute twenty five or accept that they can't.

#4: Yasuo, Who Starts With a Free Item

Way of the Wanderer [Passive] doubles his critical strike chance and gives him a shield for moving around. Riot lowered his critical damage to pay for it, and it's still one of the best deals on the roster, because doubled crit chance means every crit item he buys counts twice and he reaches the build he wants an entire purchase early. The shield is thrown in on top. Champions have won games on ultimates that do less than the movement half of this passive.

#3: Veigar, Who Has No Ceiling

Phenomenal Evil gives Veigar permanent ability power for hitting things, and it doesn't stop. There's no cap, no decay, and no way for the enemy team to remove it. Every other mage in League is limited by what the shop sells. Veigar is limited by how long the game lasts, which is why a forty minute Veigar game ends with a champion doing numbers the item system was never designed to produce. His stun is the famous ability. His passive is the reason the stun kills you.

#2: Senna, Who Collects Her Own Stats

Absolution [Passive] turns dead units into souls, and souls into permanent attack damage, attack range, critical strike chance and lifesteal. A support who spends the game collecting them ends up with marksman range and marksman damage while holding a support item and a support gold income. The whole role economy in League assumes the person warding isn't also the person carrying, and Senna's passive is a standing exception to that rule that Riot has been carefully adjusting for years.

#1: Anivia, Who Refuses to Die

Rebirth [Passive] turns Anivia into an egg instead of a corpse. Kill the egg fast enough and she dies. Fail, and she stands back up at full health with every cooldown she had before. It's a free revive on a cooldown measured in minutes, given to a champion who also has a wall, a stun and a permanent damage field, and it has been in the game since 2009. Riot sells an item that does something similar and charges three thousand gold for it. Anivia gets it at level one for nothing, and every dive onto her has to be planned around a health bar that has a second health bar underneath it.

Conclusions

The pattern across this list is that a passive gets dangerous the moment it stops being a stat and starts being a rule. Braum's stun rewrites who's allowed to trade in a lane. Ornn's forge rewrites how much gold his team has. Veigar and Senna delete the ceiling the item shop is supposed to impose, and Anivia deletes the part where dying ends your fight. Ultimates are loud, they cost a cooldown, and you can play around them. These ten are always on, and there's nothing to play around.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.

Think we missed a passive that outclasses an ultimate? Let us know in the comments below.