Champions You Cannot Gank in LoL: 10 Picks Junglers Learn to Skip

You did everything right. You came from behind, you had the health, you had the levels. They're already gone.

Ten champions whose lanes junglers quietly stop visiting.

Champions You Cannot Gank

10 Picks Junglers Learn to Skip

Jungle Pathing

You did everything right. You came from behind, you had the health, you had the levels. They're already gone.

Ten champions whose lanes junglers quietly stop visiting.

Junglers don't gank lanes, they gank people. A gank is a bet that somebody won't have an answer, and against these ten the answer is already in their kit before you've finished walking into the bush. A failed play also costs you thirty seconds and the camps that kept ticking, while the enemy jungler spent that same half minute doing something that worked.

#10: Quinn

She scouts. Most of this list escapes ganks; Quinn just knows about them first, which is cheaper and considerably more annoying. By the time you're in position she's been watching the bush you're standing in for four seconds and has already backed off to the safe half of the lane.

#9: Poppy

Poppy doesn't run from ganks. She collects them.

Everything she owns is designed to punish somebody arriving. You come in with a dash and she cancels it. You commit next to a wall and you're pinned to it. What was meant to be a two on one becomes a fight where the extra person is a liability, and top laners who play her count on this happening, because the games where the enemy jungler visits three times are the games she wins.

#8: Zed

The shadow he dropped forty seconds ago (behind his tower) that you didn't notice and weren't tracking. He doesn't escape the gank so much as decline to have been there.

#7: Vladimir

Untargetable, on demand, for free.

No mana, no cooldown worth respecting once he's a few levels in, and no counterplay beyond waiting it out somewhere you're now standing in the open. Granted, junglers get one honest attempt at him (at level two or three) before the button comes online.

After that the only ganks that work on Vladimir are the ones with hard crowd control that lands first, and if your team drafted none, his lane is simply not on your map any more. He'll farm to twenty minutes and become somebody else's problem.

#6: Camille

Top lane is a corridor with walls on both sides, which is supposed to be what makes it gankable. Camille treats those walls as exits. She leaves through terrain that has no path through it, lands somewhere your pathing has to go around, and is halfway home before you've re-routed.

#5: Talon

Camille needs a wall in the right place. Talon needs a wall.

He goes over all of them, repeatedly, on a cooldown short enough that chasing him is a decision you make once and never again. Gank him in the mid lane and he's in the jungle. Follow him into the jungle and he's in the river. The champion is built so that terrain (the thing your entire job depends on) works for him instead.

#4: Tristana

Her jump refreshes when she kills something.

Read that again with a jungler's eyes, because it means the escape tool comes back at exactly the moment a gank goes wrong for you. She burns it to get away, your support dies to a tower dive gone sideways, and now she has it again. She's also the rare marksman who can win the fight you started rather than survive it, so a failed gank on Tristana usually costs somebody a life.

#3: Ezreal

A blink, at will, on a cooldown that's basically nothing. There's no clever counterplay to write here and no timing to learn. You either catch him before he presses it or you don't, and most of the time you don't.

#2: Fizz

Fizz goes untargetable whenever he likes, and unlike everyone above him, he doesn't even have to go anywhere to do it.

That's the part that breaks ganks specifically. Every other escape on this list moves the target (which at least gives you information and a direction to chase). Fizz stays exactly where he is, waits out your crowd control, your smite, your everything, and then continues the fight from the same square of grass. Junglers who gank him early learn to stop, and mid laners who play into him learn to stop asking.

#1: Kassadin

Nobody else on this list is unkillable by design. Kassadin is.

The blink is short, which sounds like a weakness until you see it has no real limit. Each one makes the next one cost more, so a Kassadin who wants to be somewhere else will simply be somewhere else (four times in a row, through walls) while you watch. There is no window. There's no cooldown to bait out. You can gank him up to level five, and once he hits six and has the blink you're done for the game.

Which is exactly why he's a problem long before he's strong. Every jungler knows the clock is running on that lane and that there's nothing they can do about it, and that helplessness is worth more to a Kassadin player than the late game everyone talks about. If you want the opposite experience, our list of champions you cannot run away from covers the picks on the other side of this, and the tier list is the page to check before you commit a jungler to a lane that was never going to answer.

The useful habit here is asking, before you walk into a lane, what the person in it is going to press, and whether you brought an answer to it. A gank that was never going to work is worse than no gank at all, because you paid for it in camps and the enemy jungler didn't. Our jungle mistakes list has more of these.

Who's on your personal do-not-visit list?

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