Creepiest Champions in LoL: 10 Designs That Get Under Your Skin

Ten champions who go past intimidating and land somewhere closer to unpleasant, ranked by how long they stay with you.

League has plenty of scary champions. These ten are something else, and they were built that way on purpose.

Creepiest Champions in LoL

10 Designs That Get Under Your Skin

Champion Design

Ten champions who go past intimidating and land somewhere closer to unpleasant, ranked by how long they stay with you.

League has plenty of scary champions. These ten are something else, and they were built that way on purpose.

Scary is a monster with big teeth. Creepy is harder to build, because it needs the design to be wrong in a way you can't immediately name. Everyone here manages it, and the ranking is about how well. Counting down.

#10: Kog'Maw

Kog'Maw is designed to be cute and it doesn't quite land (on purpose). He's got the proportions of something you'd want to pick up and the mouth of something that would take your arm off, and the game has him melting people with acid from most of a screen away.

The effect wears off, though. Play him for an hour and he's just a marksman with a big head. But the first time you see him at close range you understand that somebody made a very specific decision about those teeth.

#9: Rek'Sai

Rek'Sai has no eyes (which shouldn't matter, and completely does). There's nothing to read on her, no expression and nowhere to look, and she spends most of the game underground where you can't see her anyway.

What sells it is the sensory swap. She finds you by feeling the ground move, so hiding in a bush accomplishes nothing and standing still is the only thing that helps. That's a horror-movie rule attached to a jungler.

#8: Urgot

Urgot is a person who has been rebuilt into machinery, and the design never lets you forget which parts were original. He's enormous, he moves wrong, and the top half of him is clearly still someone.

Then there's the thing he does to people at low health (the most unpleasant finisher in the game), and it gets a whole animation to make sure you watch it. Very few champions go out of their way to be this uncomfortable to be killed by.

#7: Cho'Gath

Cho'Gath eats people and gets permanently larger for it, and the game shows you the score in the most direct way possible: he takes up more of the screen than he did ten minutes ago. Nothing else in League grows in front of you like that.

The creepy part is the mechanic being honest. He's not stacking an item or a counter, he's stacking the people he's eaten, and by the late game a fully grown one is standing there as a running total of the mistakes your team made.

#6: Shaco

The laugh does most of the work. Shaco is the only champion whose signature sound effect is him enjoying himself, and he uses it while invisible, in a bush, near a box you didn't know was there.

He also lies constantly. There are two of him, one of them isn't real, and you have about half a second to work out which one you're fighting. A champion built entirely on deceiving the person looking at the screen is a genuinely nasty thing to be up against.

#5: Thresh

Thresh collects souls off the ground and wears them as strength, and the game makes you watch him do it after every kill on the map. It's a small green light drifting toward a lantern, and it's the calmest, most casual piece of horror in the roster.

The chain does the rest. Everything about him is about taking away your ability to leave (a specific kind of unpleasant that most champions don't attempt). He doesn't kill you quickly. He arranges for you to be somewhere you can't get out of.

#4: Briar

Briar is the newest entry here and the one that commits hardest. She's built around not being in control of herself: she goes into a frenzy, and the champion stops taking instructions and starts chasing whoever is closest.

Playing against that is strange in a way that's hard to describe. Most champions are being aimed at you by a person. She's being aimed at you by an appetite, and the player is somewhere behind it doing their best. That's a genuinely upsetting design, and it works.

#3: Nocturne

Nocturne turns the lights off. Not the fog of war, the actual screen, everywhere on the map at once, and then arrives from a direction you have no way of checking. It's the single most invasive thing any champion does to the person on the other side.

And it isn't a metaphor. Most creepy designs are about how a champion looks or sounds. This one reaches out and takes away your ability to see, which is the oldest trick in the genre and still the most effective.

#2: Evelynn

Evelynn spends most of the game not existing as far as you're concerned, and the design leans all the way into the discomfort of that. She marks people, she stalks them, and the whole champion is framed as something she's enjoying rather than something she's doing for gold.

The worst of it is the moment before. There's a brief window where you know she's there and you can't do anything about it yet, and that gap is the most reliably horrible few seconds this game produces. Everything after it is just a death.

#1: Fiddlesticks

Nobody else is close. Fiddlesticks is a scarecrow that can stand perfectly still in the middle of your jungle, looking exactly like scenery, until five people walk past it. It's the only design in League that turns an empty piece of map into a threat.

The rework understood what it had. He leaves fake versions of himself lying around, so the ones that aren't him are still doing work, and eventually you stop trusting anything that isn't moving. Then he screams, and the fear takes your controls away for a second (the one thing a game can do that a film can't).

Plenty of champions look frightening. This is the only one that makes people jump.

Conclusions

The pattern across the top of this list is that none of the best ones rely on how the champion looks. Nocturne takes your vision, Evelynn takes the time before the fight, Fiddlesticks takes your trust in an empty screen. The art helps, but the thing that lands is always mechanical.

Which is why they hold up. A frightening splash gets replaced by a new skin eventually. A champion that changes how you walk through your own jungle stays creepy for as long as the map does.

If you'd rather laugh than flinch, we ranked the bot lane duos that shouldn't work and the five-man troll comps.

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