Formerly OP #18: Old Tryndamere

Old Tryndamere didn't get scarier when he was winning. He got scarier when he was dying.

Every other champion in Season 1 had a health bar. He had a countdown to the good part.

Formerly OP

Old Tryndamere

Season 1 · Reworked Patch 1.0.0.122

Old Tryndamere didn't get scarier when he was winning. He got scarier when he was dying.

Every other champion in Season 1 had a health bar. He had a countdown to the good part.

You know the shape of a normal comeback. Somebody burns everything, survives on a sliver, and limps home. Old Tryndamere skipped the limping. Chunk him to a quarter health and he started critting more often. Chunk him to a sliver and he critted almost every swing. Then, at the exact moment your team committed the kill, he pressed the button that made him unkillable, and now you were standing next to a man who couldn't die and couldn't miss. The health you'd spent four minutes taking off him was the thing arming him.

That's why the old version is remembered the way it is. What made him frustrating was that playing well against him made the fight worse.

When, And For How Long

The version people mean when they say "old Trynda" took shape in the December 2009 patch that rebuilt Battle Fury [Passive] around missing health, and it survived all the way to the rework in Patch 1.0.0.122, which shipped on July 26th, 2011. That's the whole of Season 1 plus the beta run-up to it (about nineteen months), and it's the entire span in which a low-health Tryndamere was a threat rather than a corpse.

This series has covered both kinds of ending, and his was a rework. New model, new resource, and a passive that no longer worked the way it had for a year and a half.

The Kit That Made It Happen

The icons below are the real archived originals, pulled from the era rather than reused from the buttons that replaced them.

Passive: Battle Fury

His critical strike chance scaled off the health he was missing. It needed no stacks and no resource, and he didn't have to attack first. Take damage and the number went up on its own. This is the piece everything else in the kit plugs into, and it's the piece that no longer exists in any form.

R: Undying Rage

For several seconds he simply couldn't die, and when it ran out he was left standing on a scrap of health rather than face down. Read that next to Battle Fury [Passive] and the problem writes itself. The ultimate didn't rescue a weakened Tryndamere. It manufactured the exact health total at which he was strongest, and then guaranteed he'd live long enough to use it.

Q: Bloodlust

A stacking buff he collected from kills and, crucially, from critical strikes, handing him attack damage and extra critical damage as it piled up. Casting it spent the stacks for a heal. So the low-health state that made him crit also fed the buff that made the crits hurt more, and then paid for the health bar he needed to go do it again.

E and W: Spinning Slash and Mocking Shout

Spinning Slash [E] refunded part of its own cooldown every time he landed a critical strike, so the champion who critted most had the dash back soonest. Mocking Shout [W] slowed anyone who turned their back on him and cut the attack damage of everyone nearby. One button stopped you leaving, the other stopped you trading, and both of them got better the closer he was to death.

Why It Was Actually Broken

Granted, plenty of champions have hit hard. What made this version a genuine problem was structural, and none of these three things are about damage.

He got a whole item slot for free. Critical strike chance is normally something you buy (buying it is how the game paces carries). Old Tryndamere generated his by being in a fight that was going badly, which meant his gold went into raw attack damage and lifesteal instead while he still critted like someone three items into a crit build. Two champions on equal gold weren't on equal footing.

Damage on him was ambiguous, and that broke decision making. Every fight in League runs on a simple read: hurt them, and they become less dangerous. He inverted it. Your team had to decide whether to commit onto a target who was getting stronger while you did, and there was no safe answer. Back off and he healed. Push in and you fed the passive. This is the part people still describe as unfair, and they're describing a real thing about how the kit worked.

He picked the fights, and could always leave them. Undying Rage [R] is an escape button that also happens to be an execute window, and Spinning Slash [E] came back faster the more he critted. He could dive a tower he had no business diving, live through it on a technicality, kill whoever was under it while at maximum crit, and dash out over the wall. Losing lane to him cost you a tower. Winning lane against him just meant he'd try it somewhere else.

The Fall

Patch 1.0.0.122 landed on July 26th, 2011, and it took the whole thing apart. Riot gave him Fury as a real resource (built up by attacking, critting and killing, and drained away when he wasn't fighting). Battle Fury [Passive] was rewired to read that meter instead of his health bar, with a hard ceiling on how much critical strike chance it could hand him. Bloodlust [Q] became a heal that spends the meter rather than a stack of combat trophies. He got a new model, a hitbox to match, and Spinning Slash [E] started dealing physical damage.

The mechanical change is easy to state and the effect is bigger than it sounds. Crit chance stopped being something the enemy team gave him and became something he had to earn by connecting with people. That's a completely different champion. It also means a Tryndamere caught out of combat is at his weakest (which was never true before).

Where He Stands Now

He's still a top laner built on the same two ideas, but the order of operations has flipped. These days he fights his way up to a full meter and then goes looking for someone, rather than getting hit until he's dangerous. Undying Rage [R] survived, and it's still one of the loudest buttons in the game to play against. It just reads as a big cooldown you bait out now, rather than a phase change. His job is split pushing: take a side lane, threaten a tower, make the enemy team send people, and win whatever fight shows up because they sent too few.

That's a champion with a plan you can play around. Catch him with an empty meter, or stop him reaching anyone worth hitting, and he's a melee fighter with one dash. The old version's defining trick, the one where hurting him was a mistake, is the part that isn't coming back.

Split pushing is the job, but it isn't the only one available. We took him into the jungle instead, where nobody gets to choose whether the fight happens.

Nominate The Next One

Old Tryndamere is the cleanest example this series has of a champion whose problem wasn't a number at all. Riot could have shaved the crit scaling every patch for years and the lane would have felt the same, because the feeling came from the shape of the kit.