Every Rework in League of Legends Explained

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]League of Legends has over 160 champions, and a shocking number of them have been completely rebuilt from the ground up. New abilities, new visuals, new voice lines, sometimes an entirely new identity. Riot calls these VGUs visual and gameplay updates, and they happen when a champion's kit is so outdated, it doesn't belong in the same game anymore. Today, I'm breaking down every major rework and what they actually changed. Starting with the gold standard, Scion. Before his rework, San was one of the most incoherent champions in the entire game. He was supposed to be this massive undead warrior, a reanimated war machine held together by dark magic and pure rage. And his kit was a pointand-click stun and an AP shield. He played like a generic stat check mage who happened to look like a zombie. Zero connection between his fantasy and his abilities. Then patch 418 happened and Riot turned him into one of the best design champions in League history. His passive, Glory and Death, is genuinely hilarious. When Scion dies, he doesn't die. He reanimates with extreme attack speed, 100% life steal, and bonus damage equal to 10% of the target's max health on every auto attack. His health rapidly decays, so it's a ticking clock, but the damage output is absurd. You kill Scion, celebrate for half a second, and then he stands back up and starts beating your entire team to death, which is, you know, not ideal. His Q, Decimating Smash, charges for up to two seconds.

[00:01:26]Hold the full duration and you land a 2.25 second stun that hits like a freight train. Telegraphed enough that opponents can react. Devastating enough that getting hit feels like a genuine mistake. That's clean design. Soul Furnace, his W, passively grants max health per minion kill with larger bonuses for champion takedowns. Can scales infinitely. A scan who farms efficiently for 40 minutes becomes a walking health bar that simply refuses to go away. The active pops a shield scaling with his max health. So the more you farm, the harder you are to kill.

[00:01:58]Terrifying at 50 minutes, but the crown jewel is unstoppable onslaught. Cion picks a direction and charges for up to 8 seconds, steering like a runaway semi-truck with no breaks. He crosses roughly half the map, gains speed the entire time, and when he collides with an enemy champion, the damage scales with distance traveled. Nothing in League looks or feels quite like a full channel barreling into a team fight from three screens away. The community reception was overwhelmingly positive.

[00:02:25]Clear counterplay, satisfying mechanics, and a fantasy that finally matched his kit. He's the benchmark every other rework gets measured against. But if science set the standard, the next rework proved it wasn't a fluke. Poppy, old Poppy was, and I say this with genuine respect, one of the worst designed champions in the history of the game. She was a tiny yortle with a massive hammer who functioned as a short-ranged burst assassin that either one-shot you with zero counterplay or did absolutely nothing. There was no in between. You were either 12 and zero or you were a slightly angry melee minion.

[00:02:58]Riot didn't just need to rework Poppy.

[00:03:00]They needed to perform a full identity transplant. And in 2015, that's exactly what they did. The rework completely changed her class. Old Poppy built full AP, deleted a single target, and made everyone in the game miserable. New Poppy is a tank. Her AP scaling got gutted and replaced with armor and magic resistance ratios that naturally pushed her toward tank itemization. Same tiny yortle, same oversized hammer.

[00:03:24]Completely different champion. Her passive, Iron Ambassador, throws her buckler at enemies every 18 seconds. If she walks over and picks it up, she gains a shield absorbing 15 to 20% of her max health. Simple concept, but it creates a constant positioning miniame where Poppy has to decide whether the shield is worth walking into danger to collect. You'd be surprised how many fights come down to whether she grabs that buckler or not. Her W, Steadfast Presence, is the ability that made her a genuine meta pick. Passively, it grants bonus armor and magic resistance that doubles when she drops below 40% health.

[00:03:56]But the active is the real star. When she pops it, she creates a zone around her that completely stops enemy dashes.

[00:04:02]Just cancels them midair. Done. This turned Poppy into the single hardest counter to mobility reliant champions in the entire game. Yasuo dashing through your minion wave. Not anymore. Lee Sin trying to ward hop into your backline.

[00:04:16]He's standing still now looking confused when mobility creep became one of the community's loudest complaints. Poppy suddenly had a purpose no other champion could fill. And then there's Keeper's Verdict, which is genuinely one of the funniest abilities Riot has ever made.

[00:04:29]Poppy charges her hammer and slams it into the ground, launching enemies back toward their fountain. A fully charged ultimate can send someone from mid lane back to their base. This tiny yortle just uppercutting a full-grown Darius into the stratosphere. I don't know what to tell you. It never stops being funny.

[00:04:45]Now, the rework did eliminate multiple build paths. You couldn't play AP Burst Poppy anymore. The mechanical flexibility was gone, but honestly, nobody missed it. Old Poppy was genuinely unfun to play against, and the new version had honest, readable power that both sides could interact with. The community accepted the trade almost immediately. But if you think Poppy's transformation was dramatic, wait until you see what Riot did to the simplest jungler in the game, Warwick. If you want to know what a perfect rework looks like, this is it. Old Warwick was the definition of a stat check champion. His passive dealt bonus magic damage on autos and healed him. His W gave attack speed to nearby allies. His E revealed lowhealth enemies through fog of war.

[00:05:25]And his ultimate was a point-and-click dash that suppressed you. That was the whole champion. You rightclicked someone and either your stats were higher than theirs or they weren't. Zero skill expression, zero decision-making, zero reason to ever think about what you were doing. New Warwick kept every single one of those ideas and made all of them interesting. His reworked passive, Eternal Hunger, still heals him on basic attacks. But when Warrick drops below 50% HP, he heals for 100% of the damage dealt by the passive. Drop below 25% and that healing jumps to 250% more. He literally becomes harder to kill the closer he gets to death. You think you're finishing him off and instead he's drain tanking your entire team while sitting at 200 HP like nothing's wrong, which is, you know, not ideal for the people trying to kill him. His Q, Jaws of the Beast, has a dual activation that sounds simple until you see it in action. Tap Q and Warick chomps for quick damage. Hold Q and he lunges through the target to the other side.

[00:06:21]Here's the kicker. If you hold Q while your target dashes, blinks, or flashes away, Warrick follows them through the dash, through the blink, through the flash. The first time you see a Warick ride in Ezreal's arcane shift across half the lane and still land on top of him, you'll think it's a bug. It's not.

[00:06:38]It's just brilliant design disguised as something that feels completely illegal.

[00:06:42]Blood Hunt, his W, took that old toggle reveal and turned it into a genuine predator tracking system. Warrick senses enemies below 50% HP from nearly anywhere on the map, gaining movement speed toward them. No other champion replicates this. You're limping back to base at half health, thinking you're safe. And somewhere across the map, a warrick just perked up like a dog hearing a can opener. His E, Primal Howl, grants damage reduction on the first cast, then fears nearby enemies when recast. But recasting early, shortens the fear duration while speeding up the cool down. Every fight becomes a micro decision about maximum survivability versus maximum crowd control. And his ultimate, infinite duress, went from a generic suppress into a massive targeted leap that doubles on hit effects and grants life steal during the suppression. The all-in potential is disgusting. Every ability kept the original fantasy. the healing, the tracking, the suppress, but now every single one requires decisions, reward skill, and creates moments that make highlight reels. That's the gold standard for a rework. But if Warick is the gold standard for keeping a champion's identity, the next one is what happens when you throw the entire identity out and build something better from scratch. Gallo, old Gallo, had one of the most polarizing passives in the entire game. runic skin converted 50% of his magic resistance into ability power, which sounds amazing until you realize what that actually means in practice.

[00:08:05]Against a team with three or four AP champions, Gallio was basically a god.

[00:08:09]He'd stack magic resist, get free damage from it, and become this unkillable mage tank hybrid that laughed at every spell thrown his way. But against a full AD composition, he was a giant stone statue that did literally nothing. You picked him in champ select and then prayed the enemy team cooperated with your build path, which is, you know, not ideal. The patch 7.6 rework had to solve one of the hardest design puzzles in the game. How do you keep the magic resistance identity without making a champion completely dependent on what the other team drafts? Turns out the answer was spreading that identity across his entire kit instead of dumping it all into one passive. The new colossal smash passive gives Galio's next auto attack bonus AoE magic damage that scales with both bonus AD and magic resistance. So the MR fantasy is still there. It just isn't the only thing keeping him alive as a champion. The cooldown drops every time his spells hit unique champions, meaning in a full team fight, Gallio is weaving empowered autos between every ability like a stone colossus playing whack-a-ole. His W shield of Durand passively regenerates a magic damage shield every 12 seconds out of combat, giving him built-in anti- mage durability without needing to itemize exclusively into resist. The active lets Gallio channel a defensive stance that reduces incoming damage with that reduction doubling against magic damage.

[00:09:32]The longer you charge it, the bigger the taunt area and the longer the taunt lasts. Every team fight becomes this psychological standoff where both teams are watching Gallio charge his W, trying to calculate exactly when to commit.

[00:09:44]Beautiful. Justice Punch replaced his old mobility with something deliberately clunky in the best way possible. Gallio does a little backpedal windup before charging forward with a knockup. That windup is a giant neon sign that says, "I am about to charge at you," giving opponents a clear window to sideep.

[00:10:01]telegraphed counterplay that still feels powerful when it lands. But the crown jewel is hero's entrance. Gallio designates an allies position as his landing zone, grants them damage reduction while he's in the air, then leaps across a massive range before slamming down and knocking up everyone on impact. This single ability turned Gallio into a proplay staple overnight.

[00:10:20]Teams drafted entire compositions around the threat of a crossmap Gallo alt.

[00:10:24]Because the moment your engaged champion goes in, a 40 ton stone guardian is about to fall out of the sky on top of you. The best part of this rework is the flexibility. You can still build full magic resist and become the ultimate anti- mage specialist, but now AP focused builds that leverage his passive ratios work just as well. Two completely different play styles from one champion.

[00:10:45]Old Gallo had exactly one dimension. New Gallo has at least two, and both of them actually work. But if Gallio's rework solved the problem of a champion being too niche, the next one had to solve something arguably harder. making a champion that everyone actively hated playing against into something people respected. Argot. Original Erggo was supposed to be a terrifying Zhan Cyborg, a mechanical monstrosity that drags you into the meat grinder. What you actually got was a ranged top laner who spammed poke abilities and occasionally made someone mildly uncomfortable. Zero interactive depth, zero skill expression, and absolutely zero connection to the fantasy of being a walking war crime from ZH's underbelly.

[00:11:24]He was boring. Like genuinely aggressively boring. the kind of champion where you'd lock him in and your own teammates would sigh. Then the rework happened and Urgot became one of the most mechanically satisfying champions in the entire game. Let's start with the passage. Zon touched bolt augment makes it so his basic attacks and acid hunter reduce the targets damage dealt by 15% for 2.5 seconds.

[00:11:47]That sounds simple, but it creates this defensive utility layer where you're not just hitting people, you're choosing who to hit. Slapping that debuff onto the enemy carry before a team fight changes the entire damage calculation for your team. It rewards target selection in a way old Urgot never even thought about.

[00:12:02]His E noxion corrosive charge launches a projectile that reduces affected targets armor by 12 to 20% of their total armor for the full duration. Here's the thing.

[00:12:12]That reduction dynamically adjusts in real time as the targets armor changes through items or buffs. So if someone pops a gargoyle stone plate while tagged by your E, the shred scales up with them, you can't just outstat the corrosion, which is, you know, not ideal for anyone standing in it. But the real star of the show is his ultimate hyperkinetic position reverser channels for 1 second, granting Urgot 30 to 50% damage reduction during the channel, then suppresses the target champion before both champions blink to each other's original positions. A complete location swap. You are now where Urgot was. Urgot is now where you were.

[00:12:48]Congratulations, you're in the meat grinder. The Baron pit scenarios alone made this ability legendary. Picture this. Your team is doing Baron. Enemy jungler walks up to contest. Urgot ults them from inside the pit, swaps positions, and suddenly the jungler is standing in the middle of five people while Urggo is safely on the other side of the wall. Welcome to the pit. We've been expecting you. That one ability turned positioning mistakes into gameending punishments, and the highlight reels from it still look absolutely insane. But Orgo didn't become oppressive despite all this power. And that's the design genius. He became mechanically demanding. Precise positioning matters because your ultimate literally puts you where the enemy was standing. Mana management through Q refund mechanics means you can't just mindlessly spam. And the timing requirements on his R are brutal.

[00:13:33]Channel too early, get interrupted.

[00:13:35]Channel too late, the moment's gone.

[00:13:36]Every tool in his kit rewards execution over autopilot. He went from one of the most forgettable champions in League to one of the most satisfying to master.

[00:13:44]The fantasy of a mechanical monstrosity physically dragging you into his position is genuinely terrifying. And the rework delivered on that promise completely. But if Urgot's rework nailed the fantasy of a monster you can see coming, the next one nailed the fantasy of a monster you never see at all.

[00:13:59]Evelyn. Evelyn's rework is the one that forces you to ask an uncomfortable question about game design. What do you do when a champion's core identity is the problem? Here's the thing. Original Evelyn had permanent invisibility starting, not conditional invisibility.

[00:14:14]Not after you do X, you get stealth for Y second. Just permanent, always on, walking around the map invisible from the first minute stealth. And if you're thinking that sounds completely impossible to balance, congratulations.

[00:14:26]You've already figured out what took Riot years to admit. The issue wasn't her damage or her clear speed. It was the fact that from the moment the game started, every single lane had to play as if Evelyn was standing right next to them, because she literally could be.

[00:14:39]She didn't need setup. She didn't need conditions. If you just walked into a lane invisible and started hitting people, you either bought a pink ward every time you left base and prayed or you died to a champion you never saw coming, which is, you know, not ideal.

[00:14:53]The 2017 rework made one change that mattered more than everything else combined. Stealth now only activates at level six. That single decision gutted her entire early game identity and rebuilt her as a scaling assassin.

[00:15:05]Pre-level six, Evelyn became one of the weakest junglers in the game. She can't gank effectively. She can't contest scuttle crabs and any competent enemy jungler can walk into her camps and take whatever they want. She's basically a very sad purple woman farming raptors and hoping nobody notices her for 10 minutes. But once she hits level six, the game changes completely. The stealth activates and suddenly every lane has to respect the fact that an invisible burst assassin exists on the map. You can approach from angles other junglers physically cannot apply massive AP burst damage and delete carries before they even register what happened. Riot also stripped every single attack damage ratio from her kit. Everyone. Old Evelyn could build AD, AP, hybrid, on hit, whatever she felt like that Tuesday. New Evelyn builds ability power or she builds nothing. Hey, can I build AD Evelyn? No. Trinity Force, absolutely not. Go by Arabons and stop asking questions. The community reaction was fascinating because most people agreed the rework was necessary. Even the Evelyn mains who lost their favorite play style. permanent level one stealth created a binary design problem with zero middle ground. Either her numbers were high enough to make the stealth threatening, in which case she was oppressive for literally everyone on the enemy team, or her numbers were low enough to feel fair, in which case, why even have the stealth. There was no sweet spot. There was no balanced Evelyn with permanent early stealth. It didn't exist. So Riot made a choice. They sacrificed one player's fun to improve the game for nine others. That's not a popular decision, but it might be the most honest one on this entire list.

[00:16:38]Evelyn Mains lost their early game Predator fantasy. And in return, the entire player base got a champion that actually has counterplay windows, clear power spikes, and a stealth mechanic that feels earned rather than inherited.

[00:16:51]But if you think Evelyn's rework was controversial for changing a champion's identity, wait until you hear about the one that deleted a champion entirely and replaced him with someone new. Atrox.

[00:17:01]Old Atrox was a champion designed to kill himself. That's not an exaggeration. His abilities literally consumed his own health to cast. Every button press cost you blood, your own blood, filling a resource called the blood well. Fill it enough and you'd get a revive plus bonus attack speed. Don't fill it enough and you just die, which happened a lot. The entire kit was built around this self-destructive loop where you had to constantly drain your own HP to stay relevant, creating feast or famine gameplay so extreme that Riot couldn't touch him. Buff his numbers and he becomes unkillable. Nerf them and he evaporates before the first team fight.

[00:17:36]Zero middle ground. Atrox mains loved the fantasy of the drain tank demon warrior, but the actual execution felt like playing a champion allergic to his own abilities. Patch 813 threw the entire thing in the trash and started over. New Atrox got a completely rebuilt kit, and honestly, the mechanical design is excellent. His passive deathbringer stance periodically empowers his next auto attack to deal bonus magic damage based on the target's max health while healing him. Before you even get to his actual abilities, he's already making your laning phase miserable. His Q, the Darken Blade, is where the real skill expression lives. It's recastable up to two times with each cast dealing increased damage. But here's the thing.

[00:18:16]Each cast has a sweet spot on the blade's edge. Hit someone with the edge and they get knocked up plus bonus damage. Miss it and you're just swinging a big sword at reduced effectiveness.

[00:18:26]Genuinely one of the most satisfying mechanics Riot has ever designed. His W infernal chains smashes the ground, dealing damage and slowing enemies in a zone. Champions caught inside get 1.5 seconds to walk out. If they don't leave in time, they get dragged back to the center for additional damage. You can see it coming. you can escape, but if you don't, that's on you. And then there's World Ender. Atrox pops his ultimate, grows wings, gains bonus AD and movement speed, and massively increases his healing. The old revive mechanic was gone, replaced with raw, I will simply outhal everything you do to me energy, which is somehow even more annoying to play against. Here's where it gets complicated. The mechanical design was genuinely great. The numbers were not. Atrox launched so undertuned that Riot had to hotfix buff him almost immediately. His damage wasn't matching the difficulty of landing his kit, and the healing that was supposed to define him felt negligible in actual fights.

[00:19:20]Skill expression doesn't matter much when the ceiling barely reaches other champions floor. After the buffs landed and players figured out his kit, things swung hard in the other direction. Atrox became a staple in professional play and high elo solo Q. Damage, sustain, crowd control, and team fight presence all on one champion. Riot had created a mechanically excellent rework, launched it too weak, buffed it into relevance, and then watched it take over the game.

[00:19:43]The classic Riot cycle. But if you think Atrox broke things once players figured him out, wait until you hear about what Morichiser did to the entire concept of a fair fight. More Morichiser's rework is the single most ambitious ability design Riot has ever attempted, and it immediately proved why nobody else had tried it before. The original Morichiser had one of the most degenerate snowball mechanics in the game. Kill an enemy champion. Summon a spectral ghost of that champion that fought alongside you.

[00:20:11]Win one early fight. Get a ghost. Win the next fight with your ghost helping.

[00:20:15]Get another ghost. The advantage compounded with zero counterplay. You either shut him down early or watched him accumulate an army of your dead teammates. It was miserable. Patch 912 rebuilt him from the ground up. And the new kit is genuinely one of the most overloaded things Riot has ever shipped.

[00:20:30]His passive, darkness rise, triggers after three spells or basic attacks against a champion, dealing persistent area damage to everyone nearby while granting bonus movement speed. The longer you fight him, the worse it gets.

[00:20:43]His W, indestructible, absorbs 25% of all damage he takes and deals, storing it as a shield he can convert into health. Playing aggressively literally fuels his survivability. It's a self-reinforcing power loop that rewards him for doing the thing he already wants to do, which is hitting you in the face repeatedly. Death's Grasp, his E, passively grants 25% magic penetration on a basic ability. Built-in penetration on a non-ultimate ability is exceptionally rare in League, meaning every point of AP he builds hits harder than it should. The active component drags enemies toward him because apparently he needed more ways to guarantee you can't escape. But here's where it gets genuinely insane. His ultimate, Realm of Death, banishes a single enemy champion into an alternate dimension for a 1v one lasting 7 seconds. While trapped, Morichiser steals a percentage of your core stats.

[00:21:36]If he kills you inside, he keeps partial stat bonuses until you respawn. A literal you and me right now, nobody else button, and it broke absolutely everything. Death Realm trivialized split pushing because he could guarantee 1v ones against anyone. It destroyed team fights because he could remove the enemy's most important champion entirely. Hey, nice fed ADC you've got there. Would be a shame if they disappeared for 7 seconds during the dragon fight. The only counterplay was surviving the 7 seconds. Not outplaying him, not dodging a skill shot, just not dying, which is, you know, not ideal as a design philosophy. And here's the irony that makes Morichiser the perfect ending to this video. Riot created something genuinely unprecedented. A mechanic so creative it deserved to be celebrated. And it immediately proved exactly why no one had ever tried it.

[00:22:23]Because an ultimate that removes a player from the game is either the single most powerful ability in League of Legends or it's completely useless.

[00:22:30]There is almost no middle ground. You either delete the right target and win the fight by default or you the wrong person and waste 7 seconds accomplishing nothing. Morichiser's rework is simultaneously the most creative and the most broken thing Riot has ever done.

[00:22:44]They reached for something nobody thought was possible, grabbed it, and then spent the next 6 months trying to figure out how to make it fair. They're still working on it. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more, click the video on the screen