There are many reasons why players need to stop searching the tier lists for each patch and immediately take them as gospel. In this guide, we will start by highlighting the problems with tier lists by patch, using them to create your champion pool, and how it can be taken advantage of by better players.

Then we will look at how you can start taking advantage of these metas that bloom with each patch and how you can even start predicting the meta that will develop before the patch starts to start taking advantage of the meta right from the start!

The Problem with Tier Lists

Depending on the type of tier list you reference, there are a wide array of issues you can encounter in your pursuit for finding the best Champion to play. The two main types of tier lists are those based on individual opinion, and those based on algorithmic functions that determine ‘tier’ based on multivariable analysis of available game data from the given patch.

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Starting off with the individual, opinionated tier list, of course the main point of concern is that it is just one’s opinion. Of course many will only care to listen to the few opinions of those that have reached the highest levels of play in the game such as professional players or coaches, but even in that upper echelon of game knowledge, there is still a large disparity in opinion of the majority of Champions that exist in regards to where they fall in the tiers.

For the average League of Legends players that are familiar with drama between players and coaches, most of these disagreements stem from these differences in opinion. Suffice to say, there is no single opinionated tier list that should be taken as truth.

A common example would be for professional players debating whether Renekton is a good top laner. Many claim that the Champion is terrible and not worth drafting. However, Renekton is still played all the time in professional matches! This is because there are so many factors to the game that is League of Legends, and chances are, that’s exactly why you play it! It helps keep the game fresh and feel all the more exciting when you invest the time to learn something new! There will always be something for you to learn or master and unique situations to find yourself in, and it’s that culmination of experiences that develops your opinion on the power of a pick!

Of course, there are certain things in the game that are statistically verifiable that matter to what’s considered a ‘better’ option, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a guarantee that choosing the ‘better’ option is going to provide more value to you all the time! This concept applies to tier lists well because they often over-simplify features of the game in order to quantify them and display them in a digestible manner.

The problem with statistically generated tier lists is that they oversimplify the conclusions about each Champion. These oversimplifications will be caused by various variables throughout the patch. The easiest to understand is the sample size early on in a patch that might suggest Kog’Maw bot lane is incredibly strong, however the sample size is only a few hundred matches out of the otherwise, tens of thousands of matches in existence already. Of course, this would result from the pick rate of a Champion like Kog’Maw so as long as the pick rate is low, the sample size will be proportionally low to the overall population. However, the problem that’s apparent in League of Legends is that the statistics related to these rarely picked Champions are often skewed positively because the few players that play them, play them a lot, and are good at them!

Nearly all Champions have a skill expression that results in the more games you play on them, the higher your win rate will be naturally (because you learn the Champion). Of course, this is not a linear relation and follows more along an ‘S-curve’ as it flattens at a certain point, but nevertheless, the few players that play these Champions a lot, tend to be on the higher end of that S-curve, and therefore disproportionately influence the overall win rate and their eventual placement on a tier list!

Don’t Use Tiers to Make Your Champion Pool

It’s never going to be a good idea to use a tier list to create your Champion pool. Tier lists change with every patch, and oftentimes multiple times within a patch! There is so much variability from one day to the next, that following any tier list when developing a Champion pool will surely result in overdiversification and prevent you from effectively managing your time!

It’s much more important for you to know what other Champions do to the Champion you are playing specifically, than for you to know what your Champion does to other Champions. To simplify, you may think it’s important to know what all of the Support Champions’ abilities do.

While this is important, it’s not as important as knowing what each of those abilities do to your Champion specifically! For example, consider if it affects your Champion in a way that is unique to others, or if it’s possible for it to not even affect your Champion at all!

Here’s an in-game example. What does Blitzcrank’s Rocket Grab do? Well, Blitzcrank fires his arm in a skillshot that deals magic damage to the first enemy hit and pulls them to him. Of course, this is important to know, but you don’t need to play Blitzcrank to learn this, and in fact, when learning an ability by playing against it, you’ll instead learn how it impacts you. Now consider, what does Blitzcrank’s Rocket Grab do to Nautilus? Well, it does the same thing! It deals magic damage and pulls him to Blitzcrank. Okay, but is there something that Nautilus can do about this? Yes! He can buffer the displacement of the Rocket Grab! Nautilus can use Dredge Line to pull himself to terrain to effectively cancel out the pulling effect of Blitzcrank, rendering it useless! This is critical to understand because it is much easier to learn something like that when you are playing Nautilus than when you are playing Blitzcrank.

The more time you give yourself to experience a variety of scenarios with as many variables fixed, the easier you’ll find you can understand the outcome, and eventually start predicting it. This is exactly how you can start taking advantage of others who do not understand these interactions!

How Others Take Advantage of You Using a Tier List

To start, let’s remember that if you want to play well and consistently, you should always assume that your enemy is competent. Disrespecting them will result in inconsistency in your own performance simply because you are either correct in assuming you know more, or you are incorrect and don’t know more. This is commonly referred to as “skill-testing” your opponent.

Instead, if you assume the other player knows at least as much as you, then they will have the upper hand if it’s not evenly matched. Now consider this in a lane matchup. If you rely on drafting your Champion based on tier lists and the best counter for the lane opponent’s drafted Champion, then you know what despite the quantitative advantage given to you (in terms of a counterpick), you fall behind in the knowledge category if they are picking a Champion they have played dozens, potentially even hundreds of times! You could counterpick the best one-trick for any Champion and you’ll lose. This is why comfort and an array of knowledge are more important than trying to put yourself in the position to have a larger advantage if you assume you are equally matched. Eventually, you’ll end up finding that sometimes the best all-round counters are also relatively easy to learn and play, like Malzahar!

A sport analogy for this would be a golf match against a professional. You could buy the best golf clubs in the world that could cost thousands of dollars and give the professional children’s golf clubs and they would likely still beat you. Instead, if you prioritize playing your own game, and then considering what you can do to optimize your chances of winning within those constraints, you’ll have a much better chance. The same applies for matchups in League of Legends.

The players you will play against will take advantage of you if they see that you’re inexperienced on the Champion you are playing. They will easily be able to identify that you’re simply playing something good in the meta or a common counterpick to their Champion and it won’t matter.

Simplify your process, and optimize it until you can’t anymore, and only then consider adding on something else to improve your overall play. This could be as simple as reducing your Champion pool to one Champion and try to climb as high as possible, and then only once you start plateauing, start learning another Champion in Normals and then add it to your repertoire. If your play doesn’t improve, you haven’t learned the Champion enough, and you’ll need to keep practicing and shouldn’t consider adding something new.

How to Take Advantage of the Meta

The best way to take advantage of the meta is to reduce your Champion pool to simple Champions by design and learn them as best as you can. It sounds too easy, and it’s because it really is. If you start there, you can learn HOW you need to play into popular picks, and only then you can start to explore how other Champions might do the same job better. The best way to do this is to review pro players playing the same matchup and taking notes about how they approach the game in the given matchup.

For example, the Champion that is considered the easiest for the mid lane is Annie. What is the most common mid laner picked right now? Viktor. Now search for any recent VODs of pro players playing Annie into Viktor. Learn how to play this matchup and copy it. It’s a bit of an agonizing process, but the point is to build up an arsenal of procedures to deal with meta picks.

Eventually, you’ll be comfortable on a handful of Champions and can start to draft proactively into metas, and even enhance your team’s win conditions and counter the meta with a well thought out Champion draft!

How to Predict the Meta and Counter It

First, you need to know what is deemed ‘good’! What is meta! Well, for that you’ll pretty much want to just review the stats of the most played Champions. In doing so, you should see themes of the type of Champions that are popular. Are they assassins? Full clearing junglers? Ardent Censor Supports? Once you establish what these themes are, you need to determine what actually makes those themes popular and ‘meta’. Is Lethality good, or did AD assassins just get buffed? Perhaps tanks just got nerfed!

Establishing these baselines will help you keep track of where the meta originated from so that when the next patch notes come out, you can notice when things are changing before they do. Instead of opening the patch notes to see what Champions are getting nerfs and buffs, you’ll start to notice the direction the balance team is trying to take the game. You’ll start to notice them buffing engage Supports or nerfing the gold efficiency of certain early game items, and then be able to predict what these changes can affect.

To use this to your benefit, make sure you take advantage of the Practice Tool! This is the best way to learn new things and experiment with the game. Do the recent changes to Soraka’s healing actually impact how much she will be able to heal teammates during a teamfight? Well, don’t just look at how much one heal does, but also consider how often she can use her heal and compare the before and after numbers! You’ll notice that some ‘nerfs’ aren’t actually nerfs at all, and might just be an adjustment that will actually make the Champion stronger if you just adapt your playstyle!

With your arsenal of strategies of playstyle and a handful of Champions, regardless of the meta you find yourself in, you should be able to find something up your sleeve that will keep you from needing to grind hundreds of hours to stay up to date with the meta.

For proof, pick any top players on any Solo Queue ladder. If you check their accounts, you’ll probably see something consistently across them. Of all the unique Champions they have played so far this Season, 20% (roughly) will have around 80% of the players' games played. This is not guaranteed of course, but you’ll certainly notice it is much closer than most random players you’ll find in solo queue. So, despite their expertise in the game, you’ll still notice they dedicate the majority of their time to a select few Champions in a given year and you shouldn’t try anything different! By changing what you play and how you play with every patch, you’re only making the game more complicated than it already is and just doing yourself a disservice!

Conclusion

Overall, the process isn’t as simple as picking the best counter for the most played Champions on the current patch. Instead, you should look at what makes those Champions good on the patch and consider your arsenal of playstyles and Champions to craft combinations that will inhibit what makes those Champions good. Whether it’s learning to play against full clearing junglers or learning to aggressively punish late-game hypercarry bot laners in lane! It doesn’t matter what you pick unless you know how to play it!