Champions With No Escape in LoL: 10 Picks Who Have to Stand and Take It

Ten champions with nowhere to go when it goes wrong, ranked by how much that costs them.

Most of the roster gets a button that undoes a mistake. These ten don't.

Champions With No Escape in LoL

10 Picks Who Have to Stand and Take It

Champion Mobility

Ten champions with nowhere to go when it goes wrong, ranked by how much that costs them.

Most of the roster gets a button that undoes a mistake. These ten don't.

Mobility is the quietest power budget in League. A dash gets you to somebody. It also lets you be wrong about a fight and survive being wrong, and champions who have one get to play loose in a way the rest of the roster never can. The ten below all pay for something else with that budget, and the bill comes due the same way every game: somebody walks at them and they find out there's no second option.

Ranked by how badly the missing escape defines the way you have to play them.

#10: Sona

Sona is bottom of the list because she does get a partial answer. She hands out movement speed (the closest thing to an escape you can have without actually having one), and a support standing behind four other people is rarely the first thing anybody walks at.

It still shapes her whole game. She has to hold a position rather than take one, and the moment a fight collapses backward onto her she's just a very slow woman holding a harp. Sona players learn to leave a fight early, because leaving late isn't an option she has.

#9: Ashe

Ashe is the marksman everybody learns on, and the reason she's easy to learn is also the reason she stays hard to win with. She slows what she shoots at, which handles the champion in front of her and does nothing at all about the one arriving from the side.

Compare her to any of the marksmen with a dash and the difference comes down to forgiveness. They get to stand a step further forward because they can leave. Ashe has to pick a spot she'd be happy to still be standing in five seconds later, every single fight.

#8: Darius

Darius wins the fight he's already in and loses the one he has to walk to. He pulls you toward him, he out-trades almost anybody in a straight fight, and none of that helps when two people come down the river and he's standing past the halfway point of a lane.

That's why good Darius players look passive to a spectator. They're managing the one thing they can't fix (the walk home is long and there's no shortcut).

#7: Brand

Brand does enormous damage to a group of people and has no plan whatsoever for what happens next. Every part of his kit points forward. Nothing points backward, and the fight he's best at is exactly the fight where five people are close enough to walk to him.

The result is a champion who wins games from the back of a teamfight and loses them from the front of one, with no middle setting. If Brand is the closest member of his team to the enemy, that game is already going badly.

#6: Sett

Sett is a brawler with no gap closer, which sounds like a contradiction until you watch one play. Everything he has is about making you come to him or making sure you can't leave once you've arrived, and both of those work beautifully right up until the enemy team simply declines.

The missing escape costs him twice. He can't chase down the fight he wants, and he can't walk out of the fight he didn't want. A Sett who picks the wrong moment is just dead.

#5: Malzahar

Malzahar's compensation is famous and it's the wrong kind. He gets a shield that stops crowd control (so he can't be locked down), and he still can't actually go anywhere. Being un-stunnable while walking at normal speed away from an assassin buys you about a second and a half.

What makes him interesting is that the shield trains people badly. It feels like safety, so Malzahar players push further than they should, and then it breaks and there's nothing underneath it. He's a champion who is genuinely hard to kill in lane and trivially easy to kill everywhere else.

#4: Swain

Swain is built to stand in the middle of a fight and drain it, and standing in the middle of a fight is the single most dangerous place on the map for somebody who can't leave. His whole payoff requires him to be in range of everybody, which is also the definition of being focused.

Granted, he gets healing, and the healing is real, but healing and escaping aren't the same resource. Healing wins the fight you're winning. It does nothing for the fight where three people jumped on you at once (the fight Swain's positioning invites).

#3: Anivia

Anivia has the strangest version of this problem, because she has an answer that only works once. She comes back to life (the best consolation prize on this list), and between those revivals she is one of the slowest, most immobile champions in the game.

The wall is a real tool and good Anivia players build their entire escape plan around it, but a wall is only terrain. It stops one person from following, in one direction, if you place it perfectly under pressure. Everyone else walks around.

#2: Veigar

Veigar is the clearest trade in the game. He gets to grow forever, and in exchange he is a very small man with no legs to speak of who has to stand still to matter. The cage he drops is the only thing between him and every assassin who has ever loaded into a game, and it's aimed at the ground rather than at the person.

The punishment scales with the reward. The better a Veigar game is going, the more attention he draws, and he has exactly the same amount of escape at forty minutes with a thousand stacks as he had at level two. Nothing he buys fixes it.

#1: Karthus

Karthus doesn't have an escape because Karthus doesn't need one (the most League of Legends sentence ever written). He solved the problem by making dying part of the plan. Kill him and he keeps casting for several seconds anyway, which is less an escape than a refusal to accept the outcome.

Play him and you'll notice how completely that changes what you're doing. Every other champion on this list is trying not to die. Karthus is picking the most useful place to do it, which is a different game entirely and the reason people who like him really like him.

He tops the list because he's the only one who turned the weakness into the identity. Nobody's ever going to give Karthus a dash. Giving him one would ruin him.

Conclusions

Immobile champions are almost always overtuned somewhere else, because they have to be. Veigar's ceiling, Karthus's reach, Swain's sustain and Brand's damage are all the same design decision from different angles: you gave up the ability to correct a mistake, so the reward for not making one is enormous.

Which means the way to play them is the opposite of how they look. They look scary and play patient. And the way to play against them is duller than it sounds: stop trying to out-trade them and start arriving from a direction they weren't watching.

The other half of this problem is the champions who close that distance whether you like it or not, which we ranked in our list of champions you cannot run away from. If you'd rather just lock in something that can't be punished for it, our safest first picks by role is the other end of the same idea.

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

Which one do you refuse to play? Let us know in the comments below.