Riot on Simple Champions: Which Ones Hold Up in High Elo

Riot's lead gameplay designer wants some easy champions to stay strong all the way up to pro play. Plenty of players think that's exactly what's wrong with the game right now. We read his full post (it's a long one) and then checked Patch 26.18's ranked games to see which simple champions really do hold up as you climb.

The Simple Champions Debate

Easy Picks, High Elo

Patch 26.18

Riot's lead gameplay designer wants some easy champions to stay strong all the way up to pro play. Plenty of players think that's exactly what's wrong with the game right now. We read his full post (it's a long one) and then checked Patch 26.18's ranked games to see which simple champions really do hold up as you climb.

The short version

• On September 12, Matt Leung-Harrison wrote that simple champions need a path to mastery at elite and pro level. Some of them, at least.
• Hard champions get paid in agency, he says, and most of the people playing them never get far up the mastery curve.
• His Patch 26.19 preview on September 15 trims Nasus slightly and leaves Viktor alone.
• In our Emerald+ games on 26.18, Master Yi tops the jungle and Viktor is second in mid. Nasus still leads top lane.
• Nocturne slips as the ranks rise. Yone outranks Yasuo in both of the lanes they share.

Riot wants some easy champions in pro play

The post went up on a Saturday night with Nasus and Viktor on everyone's mind, and to be fair, it didn't dodge either one. Nasus could still come down further. Viktor is being watched, though Riot doesn't treat "frustrating to play against" as enough reason to nerf a champion who isn't also too strong.

Nerfing simple champions until complex champions are always better again is not a healthier state.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

Simple champions need to be strong at all skill brackets: They shouldn’t just be onboarding champions that become useless at higher skill levels. Simple champions need to have an aspirational path to mastery even in Elite and Pro play. Not all of them, but at least some.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

His example was Nocturne. If you learned the game on him, watching the best players in the world pick him is part of why you keep playing. Being told you've outgrown your favorite champion is the failure he wants to avoid.

He also marked where it stops. K'Sante is the line.

If Kiin mastering Nasus produced more value than mastering K’Sante, despite K’Sante having more options and mastery expression, the incentives would be wrong, but we don’t think that’s where it’s at today.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

Players say easy champions get buffed into Masters

The biggest complaint is about who gets tuned for whom. Players see easy champions buffed until they work in Master tier, and they can't think of a hard champion that got buffed until a Bronze player could win on it. They want to know why the favor only runs one way.

Yasuo and Yone come up again and again (they always do). The frustration there is that a Yasuo has to play far better than a Yone to get a fraction of the result out of the same game.

Player perspectives paraphrased from various Reddit threads.

Riot's answer is agency and the mastery curve

Difficult champions are often paid in agency: They have more ways to control a situation; choosing engagements, escaping ganks, pressuring risklessly, etc.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

A Nasus who walks into the wrong bush pretty much just dies. Give a hard champion the same mistake and there's usually a way out. Riot counts that as a real cost on the simple side (and argues the skill over there is hard to spot from the other end of the lane).

Mechanically simple doesn’t mean simple to play well: Champs like Nasus, Viktor and Master Yi put more mastery into knowledge and strategy; matchups, wave states, jungle tracking, spacing, power spikes and commitment timing.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

Time is his other point.

If high-level success is only reserved for difficult champions, League becomes increasingly hardcore and less welcoming over time, especially with work, school, kids, etc.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

The 26.19 preview trims Nasus and spares Viktor

Three days later he put that into practice (in the Patch 26.19 preview, posted overnight on September 15). Viktor stays put. Riot sees him as strong in lane but easy to gank and weak in early skirmishes, and it's happy with that trade.

However, if a champion is frustrating and simple, but not overpowered, if it doesn't have an unintended design flaw, we're likely to leave it as it is (eg. Viktor)

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 15, 2026on X

Nasus doesn't get the same pass. When he can stack freely in a good matchup, only his lane opponent ever had a real chance to stop him, and the rest of the enemy team is left with a problem it never got to play against.

So while we think this shape of Nasus is broadly correct, it does warrant sitting at a slightly lower resting power level due to these considerations

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 15, 2026on X

The Nasus numbers are already on the PBE

Every buff and nerf headed for Patch 26.19, with the values.

See the PBE changes

Which simple champions hold up in high elo

Riot named four simple champions across the two posts: Nasus, Viktor, Master Yi and Nocturne. The table sets them against K'Sante, Yasuo and Yone. Emerald and above is roughly one ranked player in six, and it's where an onboarding pick would start to fall away.

Champion	Role	Silver+	Emerald+
Master Yi	Jungle	Tier 1, 6th of 63	God Tier, 1st of 62
Viktor	Mid	Tier 1, 6th of 56	God Tier, 2nd of 57
Nasus	Top	God Tier, 1st of 58	God Tier, 1st of 59
Nasus	Mid	God Tier, 1st of 56	Tier 1, 4th of 57
Nocturne	Jungle	God Tier, 2nd of 63	Tier 1, 12th of 62
K'Sante	Top	Tier 4, 51st of 58	Tier 3, 33rd of 59
Yone	Top	Tier 1, 5th of 58	Tier 1, 6th of 59
Yasuo	Top	Tier 2, 20th of 58	Tier 3, 35th of 59
Yone	Mid	Tier 1, 7th of 56	Tier 1, 9th of 57
Yasuo	Mid	Tier 1, 10th of 56	Tier 2, 17th of 57

Patch 26.18 ranked games collected by Nerfplz: 425,124 matches at Silver+, with the Emerald+ cut taken from the same pool. Ranks are within role.

Master Yi gets better the higher you go

He's the one that surprised us. Master Yi is sixth in the jungle across Silver+ and first at Emerald+, which is the reverse of what the "onboarding pick" label would predict.

Viktor climbs too

Sixth in mid across Silver+, second at Emerald+. He's fourth in bot lane at that level as well (yes, bot lane). If he's the one wrecking your lane, our Viktor counters guide covers the matchups that beat him.

Nasus is first in top lane at every level we checked

He's banned in 43% of Emerald+ games. That's the frustration Riot described, showing up in champion select before the game even starts.

Mid Nasus holds up as well, fourth at Emerald+. The 26.19 trim is Riot's response to all of it.

Nocturne fades

Second in the jungle across Silver+, twelfth at Emerald+. Still Tier 1, granted, just a long way off the top.

K'Sante is where our numbers part ways with Riot. He does climb, from 51st in top lane across Silver+ to 33rd at Emerald+, and that's the direction a hard champion should move. But at Emerald+ Nasus is first and K'Sante is 33rd. Riot's own example was pro play, which is a bit of a different animal from solo queue. In Emerald+ solo queue, though, the simple champion is still producing far more than the hard one.

Does Yasuo really work harder than Yone?

Turns out the players have a point here. At Emerald+, Yone is sixth in top lane and ninth in mid. Yasuo is 35th and 17th in those same two roles, and the gap widens as the games get better.

With Yasuo, Riven, Qiyana, Azir, etc., most players aren’t extracting anything close to the champion’s full power. Even a main with thousands of games often isn’t that far up the mastery curve because these champions are so difficult and the curves are so long.

Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, LeagueSeptember 12, 2026on X

That's Riot's explanation for why Yasuo looks weaker than he is. His bot lane is weirdly good, though, and there's no clean explanation for it. At Emerald+ he's sixth of 41 there (a Tier 1 spot), which is better than he manages in mid.

If you'd rather play something that pays you back for the hours, Which Champions are Strongest When Mastered? is built for that. For the full Patch 26.18 board, the League of Legends tier list has every role.

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