Formerly OP #21: Old Skarner

Guardian of the Sands Skarner splash art

There was nothing to dodge, nothing to cleanse and nothing to press.

Old Skarner clicked on you. That's what everybody remembers. He clicked, and then you were somewhere else, in the middle of four people, watching your health bar go away while your keyboard did nothing.

Formerly OP

Old Skarner

Season 2 · Relaunched Patch 14.7

There was nothing to dodge, nothing to cleanse and nothing to press.

Plenty of champions in this series were frightening because of how much damage they did. Skarner barely did any. He was frightening because of the sequence: he caught you, he kept you caught, and then he chose where you died. Every part of that was point and click. The scorpion who ended your game never had to land a single skillshot to do it.

When He Ruled, And What Ended It

Skarner arrived in August 2011 and spent Season 2 as a deeply respected jungler (the polite way of saying nobody wanted to draft into him). He didn't get a rework at the end of it. He got a cooldown.

Patch 1.0.0.132 pushed his ultimate's cooldown up by twenty seconds at every rank and trimmed the slow on his spammable attack. That was the entire counterplay patch. Then Riot left him completely alone. He received no balance change at all across the whole of Season 3, while the game grew mobility, tenacity and escape tools around him. He got quietly outrun.

The kit itself outlived the era by more than a decade (the relaunch came thirteen years after he arrived). The full relaunch that finally replaced it didn't land until Patch 14.7 in 2024, and by then almost nobody could remember why the champion had ever been scary.

The Sequence

His kit wasn't complicated, and it doesn't need to be walked through button by button. What mattered was that its three pieces solved three different halves of the same problem, and they solved them without asking anything of the person playing him.

Impale [R]

Targeted suppression. Not a skillshot, not a channel you could break, not a stun with a duration you could tenacity your way out of. He selected you, and for the next second and three quarters (1.75 seconds, if you're counting) you were his to carry, wherever he wanted to walk. Suppression bypasses almost everything the game gives you to argue with crowd control, and the drag ignored displacement immunity on top of that. Every other terrifying ultimate in this series can be answered by doing something. This one could be answered by having a teammate who happened to own Quicksilver.

Crystal Slash [Q]

An area attack on a cooldown measured in single digits that his own basic attacks then cut down further, and in that era the empowered version slowed. So he pressed it, you slowed, he pressed it again before the slow expired, and the two of you moved across the map at his pace for as long as he felt like it. Riot pulled the slow off it in Patch 4.2, which tells you exactly how long they'd been looking at it.

Crystalline Exoskeleton [W]

A shield with movement speed attached (ordinary, until you put it next to the slow). He sped up and you slowed down at the same moment. Playing better didn't get you away from Skarner. The distance between you shrank every second regardless of what either of you did, until he was close enough for the ultimate.

Why It Was Broken

Crowd control in a game like this has a rough contract behind it. Big effects come with a cost: a skillshot to land, a channel to interrupt, a long cooldown, a wind up you can see coming. Old Skarner's ultimate had almost none of that. It cost mana, it had a cooldown, and it hit whoever he pointed at.

Granted, alone that would have been a strong ultimate on a mediocre champion. The problem was everything in front of it. Getting into range is normally the hard part of playing a melee champion who wants a specific target. Skarner didn't have a hard part. The slow and the speed meant he closed the gap on anybody without a dash, and the moment he was in range the fight was already decided.

So the counterplay collapsed into two options. Buy Quicksilver Sash on somebody (it cleanses the suppression), or don't get picked. Neither of those is gameplay. That's why he was a professional draft problem for a whole season while sitting at unremarkable damage numbers.

The Fall

His decline is the strangest one in this series, because Riot barely participated in it. There's no execution patch to point at. Impale [R] took its cooldown nerf in Season 2 and then the champion just sat there.

What killed him was everything else the game did. Dashes and blinks spread across the roster, so closing distance stopped being a given. Tenacity and cleanse effects got easier to reach. Vision improved, and a melee champion who has to walk at you is a lot less scary once you can see him walking. The Season 5 gameplay update bolted a zone control system onto him (an attempt to give him something to do), and for some reason that never really worked either.

By the time the 2024 relaunch arrived, Skarner had spent years as a champion nobody played and nobody feared. Riot rebuilt him from scratch: a new passive, a new area attack, a new shield, a new dash, and an ultimate that scoops up multiple champions and carries them rather than picking one and executing them. Exactly one ability name survived the whole process, and it's the one everybody used to complain about (Impale [R])

Where He Stands Now

Modern Skarner is a big, slow, terrain smashing juggernaut who plays around zones he creates and fights he starts on purpose. He's a real champion with real decisions in him, and when he's strong, he's strong for reasons you can see and react to. Ganks come from somewhere. His ultimate can miss.

The version of this champion that scared people was scary precisely because nothing about him could miss. Riot spent thirteen years working out how to keep the fantasy of getting picked up by a giant scorpion while giving the person being picked up something to do about it, and the answer was a completely different champion wearing the same name.

Nominate The Next One

Skarner is the entry where Riot did the least and the era still ended. Sometimes a champion just stops being the fastest thing on the map. Look through the rest of the series below.