Champions Still Playing Their Original Kit in LoL: 10 Riot Never Reworked

Riot has rebuilt more than fifty champions from the ground up. These ten are still pressing the same four buttons they launched with.

A kit that survives seventeen years without being replaced is rarer than a good rework, and it usually means the original design got something right the first time.

Champions Still Playing Their Original Kit

10 Riot Never Reworked

Champion Roster

Riot has rebuilt more than fifty champions from the ground up. These ten are still pressing the same four buttons they launched with.

A kit that survives seventeen years without being replaced is rarer than a good rework, and it usually means the original design got something right the first time.

Nobody here has been ignored. Every one of them has had numbers moved, visual updates, item reshuffles and the occasional new passive effect. What none of them has had is an ability taken away and a different ability put in its place (that's the line this list uses). If you want the other side of it, we keep a running series on the champions who were rebuilt into something else entirely.

#10: Corki

He's been a small pilot in a small plane since 2009, and every attempt to make him modern has been an item change or a number, never a new button. The package delivery is the only structural thing he's gained in seventeen years, and it was bolted on rather than swapped in.

#9: Rammus

Roll at people, turn on the spiky ball, taunt somebody, laugh. Rammus is arguably the least complicated champion in League and has needed exactly no help staying relevant, because a taunt and a wall of armor are never going to stop being useful. His voice lines are still four words long.

#8: Janna

She shields, she slows, she blows the enemy team off her marksman, and she's done all three for the entire history of the game.

The support role has been redesigned around her at least three times (through item overhauls and two different vision systems), and none of it required touching her. A shield and a knockback are load-bearing in every version of League there has ever been.

#7: Veigar

Hit things, get permanent ability power, eventually delete a person.

Infinite scaling is the sort of mechanic that usually gets designed out. Veigar has kept it since 2009 because it comes attached to the frailest champion on the roster. The trade has always been honest: he becomes unanswerable if you let him have forty minutes, and he's free food if you don't.

#6: Annie

Annie is the champion Riot hands to a new player and she has needed no modernization at all, which says something about how good the original design was. Four abilities (one of them is a bear) and a stun on a counter you can see above her head.

Every burst mage since has been a variation on her. She still works.

#5: Zilean

A bomb, a speed buff, and a button that undoes death.

The revive is the kind of effect a modern design team would agonize over, and it has sat on an old man in the game since 2009 with no rebuild. The counterplay was correct from the start: it's visible and on a long cooldown, and killing him first solves it.

#4: Karthus

The global execute from beyond the grave is as distinctive as anything in League and it has never been replaced, only balanced.

His wiki page technically has a Previous Abilities section (it turns out to hold nothing but a gallery of redrawn icons). The buttons are the buttons he launched with.

#3: Jax

A man with a lamppost who gets stronger the longer a fight goes and dodges everything you throw at him for two seconds.

Jax is the clearest case on this list of a kit that simply solved its problem. There's no era of League in which a scaling duelist with a defensive window has been irrelevant, and there's never been an obvious thing to fix.

#2: Nasus

Farm a stack, farm a stack, farm a stack, win.

Everybody has an opinion about whether a permanently stacking ability belongs in a competitive game, and Riot has clearly had that argument internally more than once, because Nasus has been nerfed and buffed in every direction without anyone ever taking the stacks away. Seventeen years of a champion whose entire plan is patience.

#1: Anivia

The egg.

Anivia dies and comes back as an egg, and if you can't finish the egg she's alive with full mana and you're now in a worse position than before you killed her. That's been true since 2009. It's a strange, hostile, brilliant mechanic that no other champion in the game has ever been given, and no rework has ever come for it.

Add a wall that splits the map in half and a slow that detonates for double damage, and you have a champion who was finished on arrival. Seventeen years later she's still one of the highest-skill picks in the game and still played exactly the way she was in beta.

What they have in common

Read the ten back to back and a pattern shows up. Almost every one of them is built around a single idea that's easy to state and hard to argue with: an egg, a stack, a taunt, a shield, a bomb. There's no second system bolted underneath (no resource to explain, no interaction that only makes sense if you know three other rules).

The champions Riot has had to rebuild tend to be the opposite. They're the ones where the fantasy and the buttons pulled in different directions, or where the power sat somewhere the enemy couldn't interact with. A simple idea with visible counterplay ages extremely well, which is a lesson the newer roster has clearly absorbed.

If you want the champions who've stayed relevant without staying the same, there's a companion list of the picks that never go out of style, and the current tier list for where any of them sit today.

Arguments welcome. There are a few names that only just missed, and at least one on the list that somebody is going to insist was reworked.

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