Formerly OP #17: Old Yorick

You didn't get killed by old Yorick. You got outlasted, and then buried.

For five seasons, the worst top lane in League was the one you couldn't leave.

Formerly OP

Old Yorick

Season 1 to Season 6 · Ended Patch 6.18

You didn't get killed by old Yorick. You got outlasted, and then buried.

For five seasons, the worst top lane in League was the one you couldn't leave.

Think about what losing a lane normally looks like. Somebody kills you, you learn something, you play the next twenty minutes differently. Old Yorick didn't do that. He stood in the middle of the wave with three small dead things chewing on you, healed off every one of them, and never once put himself in range of a punish. You couldn't kill him, you couldn't push past him, you couldn't recall without giving up the wave, and you couldn't ask your jungler for help because there was nothing to gank. He wasn't overextended. He was just standing there, winning, forever. Players didn't hate the damage. They hated that the lane had no exit.

When, And For How Long

Yorick arrived in June 2011 (Season 1) as the Gravedigger, and he was awkward from day one in a way Riot never managed to fix. His lane pattern was almost impossible for Riot to tune: make him weak and nobody touched him, make him playable and he became unbeatable in a straight matchup. Riot spent five years trying to find the middle and never got there. The era closed with a full relaunch in Patch 6.18 (September 2016, so Season 6).

The nerf trail in between shows Riot chipping away at exactly one thing over and over. His ghouls stopped blocking enemy pathing. They stopped being immune to slows. His passive stopped reducing true damage. His heal stopped working off damage dealt to champions. Every one of those is an attempt to make him beatable in lane without touching what he actually was, and none of them worked, because the problem wasn't a number.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the real archived originals from the old kit.

Passive: Unholy Covenant

Every basic ability he cast spat out a Ghoul, and every Ghoul currently alive made him hit harder and take less damage (up to four stacks). That's the engine. He didn't have a button for going even in a trade. He had a button for making the next trade worse for you than the last one.

Q: Omen of War

An empowered attack with extra range that reset his attack timer, summoned a Ghoul with bonus attack damage, and let him walk through units while it was alive. Down to a five second cooldown at max rank (in a long lane he simply had it).

W: Omen of Pestilence

Ground-targeted damage and a slow, and the Ghoul it left behind kept reapplying that slow to anyone standing near it. Disengaging from a fight meant disengaging from a thing that followed you and slowed you while you tried.

E: Omen of Famine

A click on a target that damaged them and healed him for a chunk of it, plus a Ghoul whose basic attacks healed him too, at double rate when it was hitting a champion. This is the one that decided the lane. It was point and click, it had no windup, and it paid him for touching you.

R: Omen of Death

He conjured a controllable copy of an allied champion (or of himself). If that champion died while the copy was still up, the copy sacrificed itself and brought them back at full health for another ten seconds. Yes, on your carry. Yes, in the middle of a fight you had already won.

Why It Was OP

None of the individual pieces look outrageous written down. Put them together and you get a champion whose worst case in lane is "nothing happens", and that's the strongest floor in the game.

He traded with something that wasn't him. Every duel in League is a question of who's exposed while the damage happens. Old Yorick answered it by sending a disposable minion instead. Ghouls did the chip damage and tanked the return fire while he stood behind the wave collecting the passive stacks. There was no moment where he stepped forward and you got to hit back.

The heal came off you. Omen of Famine [E] meant his sustain scaled with how much he was allowed to poke (in a losing lane, constantly). You couldn't starve it out by buying armor, and you couldn't out-sustain it with a potion budget. Every time he pressed one button he was topping himself up and pushing you down at once.

Getting ahead of him didn't do anything. This is the part that made people genuinely angry. Beat a normal lane bully and you get a tower and the tempo to roam. Beat old Yorick and you got a Yorick who kept farming and healing while free Ghouls shoved the wave into your tower. His kit had almost no way to fall behind, because he never had to take a risk to earn his gold in the first place.

His ultimate deleted the reward for winning a fight. Killing the enemy carry is supposed to be the moment a fight turns. Omen of Death [R] made that provisional. You spent everything you had, the carry went down, and then the carry stood back up at full health with your cooldowns gone. It's a rare kind of frustrating, because it doesn't feel like you got outplayed. It feels like the result got taken back.

The Fall

Patch 6.18, September 2016, was a full relaunch, and Riot was unusually blunt about why: they'd concluded the old kit couldn't be balanced into something enjoyable to play against, so they stopped trying. New title, from the Gravedigger to the Shepherd of Lost Souls. New voice, new lore, new art on every skin, and a passive plus four abilities all replaced.

What Changed

Shepherd of Souls [Passive] kept the idea of an army and gave it structure. Enemies who die near him leave graves, and he can only hold four Mist Walkers at once (they fall apart if they wander too far from him). The old version handed him pets for pressing buttons. This one makes him earn each one and stay near them.

Last Rites [Q] is a single empowered attack that heals him a little and digs a grave when it kills something, with Awakening [Q] as the follow-up that raises the Mist Walkers out of those graves. Dark Procession [W] throws up a destructible wall of corpses, which is the first real trapping tool he ever had. Mourning Mist [E] marks a target and speeds him and his Mist Walkers toward it, so his army finally has aim. Eulogy of the Isles [R] summons the Maiden of the Mist, a large independent pet who fights on her own and makes his attacks on her target hurt more.

The reanimation is gone entirely, the sustain that made lane unloseable is gone, and the pets are now a resource he has to manage instead of a byproduct of playing normally.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Yorick is a split pusher, and a well-defined one. He takes a side lane, builds a small army, and turns towers into a problem the enemy team has to send people to solve (a real and reasonable job on Summoner's Rift). Send one person and he kills them with the Maiden. Send two and the map opens up somewhere else. That's a champion with a plan, and with counterplay attached to it: catch him without his ultimate, or take the fight away from his Mist Walkers, and he's a slow melee fighter with a wall.

Granted, he's still not a comfortable lane to play against, and that's fine. What he no longer does is win by refusing to interact. The old version's defining quality was that your inputs didn't matter, and that's the part Riot took away.

Split pushing isn't the only place a wall and a Maiden go. If you want the odd one, here's Yorick taken to the mid lane on purpose.

Nominate The Next One

Old Yorick is the clearest case this series has covered of a champion Riot gave up on rather than tuned down. Five years of small nerfs (none of which touched the actual problem), then a rebuild. Which other champion do you think got shelved instead of fixed? Tell us in the comments, and if you've still got a grudge about a kit that doesn't exist any more, we want to hear which one.