Top 10 Champions That Scale With Enemy Stats

Most champions get scary when they finish an item. These ten are scary because the stronger you get the stronger they get.

Percent health damage, stacking scalers and one champion who hits with his defensive stats: there's a whole category of champion whose threat level barely moves when you look at their build, and understanding which ones they are changes how you itemize against them.

Top 10

Champions Impossible to Itemize Against

Scaling and Itemization

Most champions get scary when they finish an item. These ten are scary, because their damage scales with enemy items too.

We're counting down from the ones with a single build independent tool to the champion who turns his defensive items directly into an offensive stat.

#10: Kog'Maw, Bio-Arcane Barrage

Kog'Maw's W adds bonus magic damage on hit based on a percentage of the target's maximum health (building health against him has always been a losing proposition). He still wants attack speed to fire it more often, and a fed tank still melts to a Kog'Maw with two items, because the percentage doesn't care how many items he actually has.

#9: Amumu, Despair

Despair [W] is a toggle that deals a flat amount plus a percentage of maximum health as magic damage to everyone nearby, every second, for as long as it's on. That's real damage output from an ability that doesn't ask Amumu to do anything except stand in the fight (which he was going to do anyway). Pair it with a passive that makes his magic damage apply bonus true damage and he's contributing a meaningful chunk of a team fight while building purely to survive it.

#8: Dr. Mundo, Infected Bonesaw

Mundo's Q deals damage based on the target's current health, so it hits hardest exactly when they're at their strongest. His E then converts his own maximum health into bonus attack damage, so every health item he buys to survive is also a damage item. Mundo goes where he pleases, and a fair amount of the time he gets there without buying a single thing the shop would call offensive.

#7: Garen, Demacian Justice

Demacian Justice [R] deals a base amount plus a percentage of the target's missing health as true damage. True damage means armor doesn't matter, and the missing health scaling means their build doesn't matter much either. Garen's own build barely enters the equation (the base value sees to that). A Garen who's gone entirely full tank still deletes a low health carry with one button, and that's an unusual thing for a tank to be able to say.

#6: Gwen, A Thousand Cuts

Gwen's passive adds bonus magic damage to her attacks based on the target's health (and heals her for a portion of what it deals to champions). It's the reason Gwen has always been a tank's problem specifically. Her items make her faster and harder to kill, but the actual mechanism that chews through a frontline is a passive that reads the enemy's health bar rather than her own inventory.

#5: Fiora, Duelist's Dance

Fiora's Vitals deal true damage based on the target's maximum health, and Grand Challenge [R] reveals all four of them at once. So the tankiest champion on the enemy team is the one Fiora most wants to fight, and there's no amount of armor that changes the math. Her build decides how well she survives the duel. The Vitals decide whether the target survives it, and they aren't listed on any item.

#4: Vayne, Silver Bolts

Every third consecutive attack or ability on the same target deals a percentage of that target's maximum health as bonus true damage. It's true damage, so armor and resistances do nothing to it (neither does damage reduction from stats). Vayne is the reason "just build tanky against the marksman" hasn't ever been universal advice, and a Vayne who's behind in items is still the single worst champion in the game for a fed tank to walk at.

#3: Cho'Gath, Vorpal Spikes and Feast

Cho'Gath attacks a fed tank and takes a percentage of their maximum health off with Vorpal Spikes [E], then finishes them with Feast, which deals a large chunk of true damage that grows as he stacks it rather than as he shops. Feast is also the rare ability that pays for itself (every successful cast permanently increases his own maximum health). That's a champion whose two most feared tools both scale off something the enemy team can't itemize against and he can't buy.

#2: Nasus, Siphoning Strike

Nasus is a little different. He doesn't scale directly with enemy items but the longer the lane goes even the more likely Nasus comes out ahead. Siphoning Strike [Q] gets permanently stronger every time it lands a killing blow, so his damage is a number he farms rather than one he purchases. A Nasus with six hundred stacks doesn't need damage items to hit harder than most champions do with a full build, and gold doesn't buy him much beyond the ability to survive long enough to keep swinging. Twenty minutes of last hitting is worth more to him than twenty minutes of gold is to almost anyone else.

#1: Rammus, Spiked Shell

Every other champion on this list focuses on dismantling tanks. Rammus doesn't. He inverts it completely and goes straight after the squishies. Spiked Shell [Passive] grants him bonus attack damage that scales directly off his armor and magic resistance, and Defensive Ball Curl [W] returns magic damage to anyone who attacks him while it's active. Buying pure defense is how Rammus buys offense. Meanwhile, the more attack speed you buy the faster you'll die to him without him buying a single damage item.

Conclusions

What you buy changes when you're facing these names on the enemy team. Health is a liability against percentage health damage, and against true damage armor isn't much more than decoration. Neither one does anything at all about a stack count. Against most of the roster, stacking defenses is a real answer. Against these ten, you're usually better off killing them faster or staying away from them entirely, because the item that solves them doesn't exist.

The same blind spot runs the other way too, and our list of champions who carry without dealing damage covers the players whose scoreboard number never explains the game they just won. Every list we've ranked is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.

Think we missed a champion whose damage comes from nowhere? Let us know in the comments below.