Formerly OP #19: Old Shaco

Old Shaco never cheated. The rules just kept making exceptions for him.

Roots held everyone but him. Spells killed every trap but his. Death was permanent for everything except his clone.

Formerly OP

Old Shaco

Beta to Season 1 · Nerfed Patch 1.0.0.99

Old Shaco never cheated. The rules just kept making exceptions for him.

Roots held everyone but him. Spells killed every trap but his. Death was permanent for everything except his clone.

Most overpowered champions are overpowered in a way you can point at. A number is too big, a cooldown is too short, and everybody can agree on the problem while it takes them apart. Old Shaco wasn't like that. His numbers were never the story. The story was that the game had rules, and he had a stack of signed permission slips. You'd land the root you'd been saving all fight and watch him vanish out of it anyway. You'd clear a bush with spells the way you'd been taught and the box in it wouldn't even take damage. You'd finally kill him, and the corpse would giggle, because it wasn't him.

That's the version this series is here to remember: the champion his era's players trusted least. Nobody ever felt safe around old Shaco, and the awful thing is that they were right.

When, And For How Long

Shaco shipped in October 2009, deep in the game's beta era, and he arrived overtuned in ways Riot started sanding down almost immediately. His boxes lost their magic immunity and a slice of their fear radius within his first month. What survived that first pass stayed terrifying for the better part of a year: through the rest of the beta, through the launch of ranked play, and into the opening months of Season 1.

The end was a campaign. Between July 27th and September 8th of 2010, three consecutive patches went through the kit and revoked the permission slips one at a time, with Patch 1.0.0.99 (August 24th) as the centerpiece. What's unusual, for this series, is that the kit's skeleton survived its own fall: the five buttons kept their names and their jobs for six more years, until the assassin update in Patch 6.22 rebuilt them into the modern version at the end of 2016.

The Kit That Made It Happen

The icons below are the real originals from the era (the art that replaced them arrived in 2016).

Q and Passive: Deceive and Backstab

Deceive [Q] teleported him, stealthed him, and loaded his next attack with a guaranteed critical strike, which Backstab [Passive] then sweetened further if he hit you from behind. He was always behind you. That's the ambush everyone remembers, but the exemption is the part that made it hopeless: for his first year (right up to Patch 1.0.0.100), Deceive [Q] could be cast while rooted. The whole class of "you can't escape" tools, the snares and cages other champions feared, read as a suggestion to him. You didn't outplay old Shaco by catching him. Catching him was the thing that didn't work.

W: Jack in the Box

A stealthed turret that feared everything near it when it sprang, and it lasted a full ninety seconds. That duration is the ability. Ninety seconds means you're furnishing the map: stack three or four in a bush and that bush now wins a 1v1 on your behalf even when you're on the other side of the map. At release the boxes were immune to magic damage outright, so the obvious answer, sweeping the bush with a spell, did exactly nothing.

E: Two-Shiv Poison

The active was a point-and-click dagger with a slow, which was already a complete tool: damage you couldn't dodge attached to the button that kept you in Backstab [Passive] range. But the passive is the exemption people forget. His basic attacks poisoned you, and the poison gave your attacks a chance to miss. A fighter who committed to swinging back at him whiffed through the fight at random. Champions got out from under the blind in 2010. Jungle monsters kept missing him for five more years, which meant camps hit the real junglers harder than they ever hit Shaco.

R: Hallucinate

The clone lasted half a minute, which is long enough to stop being a mind game and start being a second Shaco. It laned, it pushed, it tanked tower shots, it stood in bushes being a threat. And it had the era's single greatest exemption written into it: Guardian Angel would somehow revive the clone. An item whose entire identity was "you get one extra life" handed that life to a creature that was never alive. Somewhere out there is a player who burned everything to kill a fake Shaco twice.

Why It Was Actually Broken

None of the pieces above needed big numbers to be a problem, and the problems compound when you put them next to each other.

He was the only champion who didn't have to be somewhere to threaten it. Everyone else in 2010 projected power by standing in places. Old Shaco mailed it in. Ninety-second boxes meant his jungle cleared itself while he was elsewhere, his buffs defended themselves during an invade, and the bush your carry had to walk through was dangerous hours after he'd left it. He famously needed no leash at all: stack boxes at the first buff, let the camp beat itself to death against a wall of fears, and walk out of the second buff barely two minutes into the game at nearly full health, while every other jungler was still begging their mid laner for help.

The answers the game sold you didn't apply. This is the exemptions problem in its purest form. Lock him down and Deceive [Q] ignored the root. Sweep the bush with spells and the boxes shrugged them off. Force the 1v1 and Two-Shiv Poison [E] made your own basic attacks unreliable. Kill the thing attacking you and it turned out to be Hallucinate [R], possibly for the second time, courtesy of an item. Counterplay existed on paper for every single piece, and every single piece had a clause voiding it.

He charged rent on your attention, everywhere, all game. Stealth, a clone, and invisible traps is a kit built entirely out of unknowns. Every bush was a coin flip, every Shaco on your screen was a maybe, and every step past the river was a decision you had to actually make rather than just take. He didn't need to win those coin flips. Ten players' worth of caution, hesitation, and wasted wards flowed out of a single pick, and he collected it just by existing somewhere in the fog.

The Fall

Riot never reworked this version. They audited it. Patch 1.0.0.97 on July 27th, 2010 made Deceive [Q] rarer and the clone easier to kill. Patch 1.0.0.99 on August 24th did the real demolition: the blind came off Two-Shiv Poison [E] against champions, Backstab [Passive] got shaved, Deceive [Q] got shorter and slower, placing a box now broke his stealth, and Hallucinate [R] lost nearly half its duration (the clone had lasted half a minute), took a longer cooldown, and, yes, lost the Guardian Angel revive. Two weeks later (September 8th), Patch 1.0.0.100 closed the file with a single line: Deceive [Q] could no longer be cast while rooted.

Read those three patches together and the pattern is unmistakable. Almost nothing in them is a number. They're rule corrections: the root exemption, the blind, the item interaction, the free stealth. The kit kept its shape and its fantasy, and the champion stayed playable for years. What died in the summer of 2010 was the version of Shaco the game's own systems couldn't answer, and that's exactly the version people mean when they shudder about him.

Where He Stands Now

Still here, still in the jungle, and still the closest thing League has to a horror movie. The Patch 6.22 rebuild gave the kit its modern grammar: Deceive [Q] grants true invisibility, Jack in the Box [W] boxes are proper traps that sweepers reveal, Two-Shiv Poison [E] executes wounded targets, and Hallucinate [R] scatters mini-boxes when the clone dies, so killing the fake is now a trap in itself. He splits into two personalities these days, an attack damage assassin who lives on Deceive [Q] crits and an ability power menace who turns bushes into minefields, and both of them still run the same core business: making you play scared.

To be fair to him, modern Shaco earns the fear inside the rules. His boxes die, his stealth has answers, his clone stays dead. He's a fair champion with an unfair reputation, and the reputation is the old version's ghost. Sixteen years later, people still ban him like it's 2010.

Boxes work in a bush anywhere on the map, which is why support Shaco is one of the few off-meta picks people genuinely dread running into.

Nominate The Next One

Old Shaco is this series' best argument that "overpowered" was never really about damage. Every one of his problems was a rule that bent for him and nobody else, and Riot fixed him by making the rulebook apply. So here's the question for the comments: which champion do you remember getting away with something the game flatly forbade everyone else? Name them below, and tell us which of old Shaco's exemptions you'd have revoked first.