Best Teamfight Champions in LoL: 10 Picks Who Decide the 5v5

Ten champions who decide a 5v5 on their own, counted down by how little the other four teammates get to contribute.

Most teamfights aren't won. They're decided by one person about a second in.

Best Teamfight Champions in LoL

10 Picks Who Decide the 5v5

Teamfights

Ten champions who decide a 5v5 on their own, counted down by how little the other four teammates get to contribute.

Most teamfights aren't won. They're decided by one person about a second in.

Everybody's teamfight looks the same from the inside: a lot of colors, a lot of guessing, and a result you work out afterward from the scoreboard. But a few champions genuinely settle the thing before anybody else has committed to anything, and this is the countdown of who does it hardest.

#10: Vi

Somebody on your team is about to get taken somewhere they don't want to go, and none of the other four can stop it. That's the whole Vi experience. She picks a person, crosses the fight, and delivers them to her team like a package.

The catch is that she gets one. Spend it on a Sion and she's an ordinary bruiser for the next twenty seconds, which is most of a teamfight. Land it on the carry and your team never got to play.

#9: Hecarim

Backing out cleanly is the most underrated skill in League, and Hecarim is the champion who takes it away from you.

He arrives at full speed into a group that had already decided to leave, sends everybody the wrong direction, and turns an orderly retreat into five people sprinting into five different walls. A lost fight everyone walks away from costs almost nothing. A lost fight where everyone scatters costs three deaths and a Baron.

#8: Vex

Vex punishes the exact thing a teamfight is made of, which is people trying to get out of one. Everybody dashes, everybody Flashes, and she gets paid every single time.

Then there's the part that ends games. She crosses the whole fight to whoever's standing furthest back, kills them, and immediately gets to do it again to the next one. Two of those in a row and the 5v5 your team was losing on paper has three people left in it.

#7: Jarvan IV

There's a moment in every Jarvan fight where somebody works out that they're in a room with him and their team is outside it. Everything after that is arithmetic.

Good teams play around the shape of it. They wait, they walk around, they let the trapped player die and take the fight afterward. Bad teams pile in one at a time to help, which is what he was hoping for. About four seconds of not panicking is the entire difference between those two teams.

#6: Briar

Most engage champions have to decide when to go. Briar doesn't decide. She goes, from most of a screen away, and everything where she lands turns around and runs.

That's ugly to play against because the fear lands before the fight does. Your team is scattered and facing the wrong way while she's already chewing on somebody, and she heals through most of what gets thrown back at her.

Teams that beat her kill her fast, and the window for that is real. Teams that don't watch their backline go one at a time while five people stand around waiting for permission to turn back.

#5: Zyra

No other support on this list can make a piece of ground unusable. Zyra fills a choke point with things that bite, then throws everybody still standing in it into the air anyway, and the whole setup keeps working after she's dead. Killing her first is everybody's instinct and it buys almost nothing.

#4: Diana

Diana lands in the middle of a group, drags all of it toward her, and does an enormous amount of damage to everything that arrives. It's the most output per button on this list, and it asks her own team for nothing beyond being somewhere nearby when it happens.

She does have to be standing inside you to do any of it. Against five people paying attention, that's a real price. Against five people looking at a dragon, it's the whole fight in one motion.

#3: Kennen

Kennen needs nobody. He walks in, everything near him gets stunned, gets stunned again, and the fight is over before his team has finished jogging across. No follow-up, no setup, nobody standing behind him doing anything clever.

The counterplay is spacing, and nobody spaces, because spacing means giving up the objective all five of you are standing on. So he keeps winning fights that shouldn't have been taken in a clump, and every team takes fights in a clump.

#2: Wukong

Everything Diana does, plus a way back out.

He throws the entire enemy team into the air for an uncomfortably long time and then leaves the mess he made. The extra piece is that you can't trust what you're looking at. Fights against Wukong open with somebody on your side spending their most important cooldown on a decoy, and by the time the real one lands the thing is already tilted.

#1: Fiddlesticks

A bush is empty. Then it isn't.

Nothing else in the game ends a 5v5 from outside the fight. Fiddlesticks doesn't engage and doesn't get engaged on, and he needs no help from anybody. He waits somewhere nobody swept, and when five people finally group on an objective he shows up in the middle of them, everyone already running in a different direction and taking damage they can't walk out of.

The damage isn't even the worst part. It's what he does to the twenty seconds before it. Teams that know he's alive stop taking fights at all. They won't step into the pit, they won't push past the river, and they check the same three bushes twice, which is how a champion who isn't on the map wins a game he isn't in.

The honest answer to him is vision, and vision is expensive. Sweeping every bush around an objective costs time, gold and somebody's attention, and it only takes one gap.

Conclusions

There's a pattern running down this whole list, and it isn't damage. Every champion here decides where people are standing. Briar picks the direction you run, Jarvan picks the room, Zyra picks the ground, Fiddlesticks picks a group that had already picked itself. The damage is whoever else is on the team.

So the useful takeaway isn't a pick order, it's a habit. Before a fight, look at which of these is on the other side and ask what shape they want you standing in, then stand in a different one. It costs you an objective now and then, and it turns the fights you do take from coin flips into fights you chose.

The champions whose ultimates carry that same weight are in our best ultimates rankings, and the ways good teams pick their moment are in our guide to initiating fights.

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

Who decides the fight on your team? Let us know in the comments below.