Formerly OP #15: Old Warwick

He could see you through the fog of war, he couldn't be kited, and his ultimate couldn't be dodged, cleansed or reduced.

Old Warwick's healing scaled off the enemy's health bar, which meant the tankier the target, the less killable he became.

Formerly OP

Old Warwick

Season 1 · Ended Patch 7.2

He could see you through the fog of war, he couldn't be kited, and his ultimate couldn't be dodged, cleansed or reduced.

Old Warwick's healing scaled off the enemy's health bar, which meant the tankier the target, the less killable he became.

Take a bad trade in lane in Season 1 and you didn't just lose health, you lit up on his screen. Warwick could see every enemy champion below half health from most of a screen away, through brush, through fog of war, from the other side of the river, and he moved faster the moment he could see you. There was no ward that helped. There was no path home he couldn't read. And when he arrived, he pressed R, and you were suppressed for the better part of two seconds while he ate through your health bar and healed off every point of it. Not stunned. Suppressed. Tenacity didn't shorten it, and unless somebody on your team was holding a cleanse, nothing on the map was going to interrupt it.

When, And For How Long

Warwick has been in League of Legends since the very beginning, present in the alpha and live from the game's earliest patch notes in early 2009. He was a defining jungler in Season 1, to the point that at the Season 1 World Championship final, Fnatic spent one of their three game-one bans on him.

Like old Udyr, his fall wasn't one patch. Riot spent years shaving his sustain and his percent health damage until, by the middle of the game's life, he was a low-elo pick who couldn't do anything after twenty minutes. The full relaunch finally landed in Patch 7.2 on January 25, 2017, which also changed his title from the Blood Hunter to the Uncaged Wrath of Zaun.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the archived art from the pre-relaunch kit. Four of these five abilities don't exist under those names anymore.

Passive: Eternal Thirst

Basic attacks dealt bonus magic damage and healed him for the same amount, stacking per target. Eternal Thirst [Passive] scaled with his level rather than with anything he bought, which meant free, item-independent lifesteal from level one. The stack cap started at eight, came down to five in May 2009, then to four later that year, and finally to three, and it was still enough that a jungling Warwick basically never had a health problem.

Q: Hungering Strike

A point-and-click bite that dealt the higher of a flat amount or a percentage of the target's maximum health, and healed him for 80% of the damage it dealt. Hungering Strike [Q]'s percentage climbed as high as 20% of the target's maximum health at rank five during 2009, and still sat at 16% by the end of the kit's life. Read that next to the healing clause and the problem is obvious: the beefier the enemy he bit, the more health he got back. His answer to a tank was to eat one.

W: Hunter's Call

A burst of attack speed for himself and half as much for nearby allies. Hunter's Call [W] is the quiet one, and it did two things at once: it turned his own sustain up, because Eternal Thirst [Passive] paid out per attack, and it handed a real teamfight buff to whoever he was standing next to. For a while the ally half of the buff went out to the whole team regardless of range.

E: Blood Scent

A toggle that revealed every enemy champion below half their maximum health inside a radius that reached 4700 units at max rank, and gave him bonus movement speed while it was revealing someone. Blood Scent [E] saw through brush and fog of war. It didn't see through stealth, which was the only hole in it. It also told you it was happening, which was arguably worse than not knowing.

R: Infinite Duress

A point-and-click blink onto a champion followed by a 1.8 second suppression, five hits of damage that each applied on-hit effects, and 30% lifesteal for the duration. Infinite Duress [R] had no projectile, no travel time and no cast direction, so there was nothing to sidestep. Suppression is the strongest form of crowd control in the game and tenacity doesn't reduce it. Each of those five hits carrying on-hit effects also meant that whatever he'd bought, he applied it five times inside the lock.

Why It Was OP

Warwick's kit was unusually simple even for 2009, and every piece of it removed a different kind of counterplay.

His sustain wasn't an item, so it couldn't be priced. Eternal Thirst [Passive] scaled with his level and cost nothing. Every other sustain jungler of the era had to buy into it, which meant a real gold cost and a real window early on where they were vulnerable. Warwick's window didn't exist, so he could take every camp, every trade and every skirmish and come out the other side full.

Percent maximum health damage that also healed him inverted the whole rock-paper-scissors. Hungering Strike [Q] got stronger against exactly the champions who were supposed to beat him, and its healing scaled with that same damage. A tank walking at Warwick was making a mistake. So was a bruiser. The correct answer, it turns out, was a squishy target with a lot of burst, which isn't usually the correct answer to a fighter.

Blood Scent [E] deleted the fog of war as a defensive tool. Positioning, warding, backing off after a bad trade, walking home a different way: all of that is built on the assumption that the enemy doesn't know where you are. Anyone under half health was permanently visible to him from a very long way off, so the standard recovery play after losing a trade simply didn't work against this one champion.

Infinite Duress [R] had no counterplay input at all. There was nothing to dodge, because it was targeted. There was nothing to shorten, because tenacity doesn't touch suppression. There was nothing to interrupt it with, because he wasn't standing still in a spot you could displace him out of. Your only outs were a cleanse held specifically for it, a Quicksilver Sash bought specifically for it, or a teammate killing him inside 1.8 seconds.

He required nothing from the player. No combo, no skillshots, no resource management, no cooldown reduction breakpoints. Toggle Blood Scent [E], walk at the lit-up dot, press R, press Q, attack. A new player could learn it in one game. A mechanic that strong with a floor that low is a balance problem in a way the same mechanic on a harder champion wouldn't be.

The Fall

Riot started trimming him almost immediately and never really stopped. Eternal Thirst [Passive]'s stack cap went from eight to five in the May 29, 2009 patch, then to four later that year. Hungering Strike [Q] got rewritten repeatedly across 2009, cycling through several different versions of its percent health threshold and eventually being barred from hitting minions and monsters with it. Blood Scent [E]'s reveal threshold dropped from 66% of maximum health to 50%. Infinite Duress [R]'s suppression came down from 2.1 seconds to 1.8, and its number of hits went from six to five.

None of that was a single dramatic execution. It was fifteen small cuts over several years, and the cumulative effect was a champion who kept his oppressive early game and steadily lost any reason to still be on the map at thirty minutes. By the middle seasons he was a bottom-of-the-barrel pick who was still miserable to lane against in low elo and completely irrelevant everywhere else, which is the worst possible outcome for both groups.

Patch 7.2, on January 25, 2017, replaced him. Eternal Thirst [Passive] became Eternal Hunger [Passive], losing the stacking mechanic entirely and gaining much larger per-attack numbers, but only healing him below 50% health and tripling below 25%. Hungering Strike [Q] became Jaws of the Beast [Q], a dash with a lower percent health component, a lower heal, and the option to hold it and swing around behind the target. Hunter's Call [W] was deleted and its slot went to Blood Hunt [W], which folded the old Blood Scent [E] reveal into a chase buff. Blood Scent [E]'s slot got Primal Howl [E], a damage reduction that ends in a fear. And Infinite Duress [R] stopped being point-and-click, becoming a directional leap that suppresses the first champion it collides with.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Warwick is a perfectly healthy jungler who shows up whenever the meta wants a durable early-game bully with reliable single-target lockdown. He still hunts wounded targets. He still heals. He still suppresses.

The difference is that every one of those now has a condition attached. Eternal Hunger [Passive] only heals him when he's already in trouble, which turns his sustain into a comeback mechanic rather than a permanent state. Jaws of the Beast [Q] still reads maximum health but at a fraction of the old rate. And most importantly, Infinite Duress [R] is a skillshot. He can miss it. Old Warwick couldn't miss anything, which is a strange sentence to write about a champion whose kit was four buttons, and exactly why he stayed a problem for as long as he did.

Nominate The Next One

Warwick closes out this run of entries, and he's a good summary of what the series keeps finding. The champions people still remember with real dread weren't the ones with the highest damage. They were the ones who took an entire category of counterplay off the table: information, positioning, itemization, or in Warwick's case all three at once. Look through the rest of the series below and tell us who belongs in it next.