Champions Who Melt Tanks in LoL: 10 Picks That Ignore Health Bars

Four thousand health and a full page of resistances, and it bought him about two seconds.

Ten champions who treat a big health bar as a bigger target.

Champions Who Melt Tanks

10 Picks That Ignore Health Bars

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Four thousand health and a full page of resistances, and it bought him about two seconds.

Ten champions who treat a big health bar as a bigger target.

Most damage in League gets worse the more armor you're hitting. A few champions are built the other way around, dealing damage as a slice of what the target has rather than a flat number, or skipping resistances entirely (true damage). Against a squishy that's nothing special. Against something with four thousand health it's the reason the fight ended early, and it's why a draft with no answer to a front line loses games it looked fine in.

#10: Olaf

He's the cheap version, and cheap is fine. Olaf gets faster and hits harder the closer he is to dying, so the long grinding fight a tank wants is the exact fight he's best at. Nobody drafts him for this, weirdly, and he's very good at it.

#9: Twitch

Poison stacks don't care what you built.

The catch is that Twitch has to survive long enough to apply them (against an actual front line, that's the hard part). When it works, though, a tank dies from something that was already in him before the fight started, and there's no item that reads "less of that".

#8: Kayle

Late Kayle shreds resistances as a side effect of attacking (a brutal thing to do to a champion whose entire build is resistances). She does spend the first twenty-five minutes being useless, and then she makes the enemy tank's item choices retroactively wrong.

#7: Bel'Veth

Attack speed is the counter to health, and Bel'Veth has more of it than the game usually allows.

She's also a jungler, and that matters more than it sounds. The tank on the enemy team is usually the one contesting objectives, standing in the pit, soaking the first bit of everything, and Bel'Veth is the champion most likely to already be there with a reason to fight him one on one.

#6: Varus

Varus punishes health from further away than anything else on this list, and he does it before the fight has technically started. A tank who walks up to zone gets chipped for a percentage of a very large number, repeatedly, from a range where walking at him isn't an option. It's not dramatic. It's just that he's at sixty percent by the time anyone commits (on a four thousand health tank, that's 1,600 gone).

#5: Gwen

Gwen was designed for this job and has never really been asked to do another one.

Everything about her is aimed at a big durable thing in front of her: damage scaled off its health, a way to make herself unhittable while she works, and enough sustain to still be standing at the end of a fight nobody else wanted to start. Put her against a squishy and she's fine. Put her against a front line and she's the reason it isn't one.

#4: Darius

His execute scales off how much bleeding he's already done, and a tank is the target he gets to bleed the longest.

The armor does nothing about the finisher, and it's why big beefy top laners so often lose a one on one they should mathematically win: they survive the trade, they survive the follow-up, and then a number that was never subject to their resistances arrives and it's over. A tank beats Darius by not being in the same lane.

#3: Kog'Maw

Nothing in the game deletes a health bar faster, and nothing in the game is easier to kill.

Kog'Maw is the purest trade on this list. He gives up every scrap of safety and gets, in exchange, the ability to remove a fully built tank in about the time it takes that tank to reach him. Whether that's good depends entirely on whether anyone is standing between the two of them (a question about your team rather than about Kog'Maw).

#2: Fiora

Fiora walks around the health bar.

Hitting the marked side of a target does damage as a slice of their maximum health and heals her for doing it, so the bigger and slower the opponent, the more the whole system pays out. A tank is a large stationary object with four sides. That's a checklist.

It's also why she's so miserable to draft against. The usual answer to a duelist is to build enough to survive her, and against Fiora that's the same as handing her more damage (more maximum health means a bigger slice every time she hits a marked side).

#1: Vayne

Every third hit is true damage scaled off the target's maximum health. There's no interaction with armor at all. It's the single most direct answer in the game to the single most common way of being hard to kill.

She never falls off. Kog'Maw needs items, Kayle needs twenty-five minutes, Gwen needs to reach her target. Vayne has been shredding tanks since level three and gets better at it forever, and the counterplay has always been the same: kill her, quickly, because she can't survive being looked at.

If you're on the other side of this, the fix is building the resistances that actually apply to your threats, and our armor and magic resist guide covers where that math stops paying. The tier list is the faster way to find out who's worth drafting into a front line this patch.

Take the pattern into champion select even if you never play any of these. Percentage damage and true damage are the two things a health bar can't answer, and a team with neither is a team that loses to one big body no matter how the lanes went. Healing works the same way, which is what our anti-heal guide is for.

Who's your pick when the enemy front line won't die?

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