Ever wonder why it seems like certain skins have an advantage in-game, or why a skin is disabled in professional play? Today I will be covering the advantages you can gain with specific skins, what to look out for, and which skins are disabled from Pro Play. Let’s get started!
Skins can be used as a fun, interactive, and cosmetic way to customize your champions. There are some that are extremely rare, common, or from a specific skin series that you may enjoy using. Although skins' purposes in-game are for a fun aesthetic or visually pleasing skin design, there are in fact some skins that have advantages over others. While skins don’t give you an outright advantage because it would be unethical to charge for that, there are some visual aspects to skins that make it difficult as the enemy to view certain abilities. This gives these kinds of skins a perceived advantage. Within this article, I will be covering why it seems certain skins have advantages, what to look out for, and which skins are “banned” from Pro Play.
Although the hitboxes don’t change from skin to skin, they can visually appear like they do which can throw off the enemy player. Depending on the particle effects of the skin, there can be some advantages to skins. The types of advantages that I’m discussing are in scenarios when the enemy has trouble viewing and reacting to the skin. A well-known example is the Steel Legion Lux skin.
The particles for the skin’s Q and E abilities, and even on the W ability, all throw out similar particles which makes it difficult to tell which ability the Lux is going to use. The abilities on this skin are quite bright and can be distracting not just for other players, but in Pro Play for the audience and spectators.
Some other skins with particle effects that are difficult to see are Elementalist Lux, Astronaut Veigar, Mecha Aatrox, Justicar Syndra, Underworld Twisted Fate, iBlitzcrank, Arclight Varus, Pulsefire Twisted Fate, Pulsefire Ezreal, Arcade Sona, and Blackfrost Anivia.
When it comes to skins such as these, some specific abilities that are used by champions with these skins, either have particles that are extremely bright or difficult to see when they are placed down on the ground. Such as with Astronaut Veigar’s E ability Event Horizon, the skin shows a very small visual hitbox that isn’t easy to see and makes it appear as though the E ability appears very rapidly. Here is a link to a video that has a comparison between all Veigar skins in which you can see how with the Astronaut Veigar skin, the small line that appears when you send out his E ability could be hard to see if you were in a teamfight or if you weren’t looking closely enough. This is one of the more frustrating advantages a skin has for me personally because it feels as though this particular skin requires a much faster reaction time, even if it technically doesn’t.
Especially recently with the Porcelain series skins, there are some skins that have been found to be really “noisy” in-game. These kinds of loud skins may be distracting to the other players not just on your team but on the enemy team as well giving a perceived advantage to the team using it. Some other skins that are known to be “noisy” and quite possibly distracting are Pulsefire Twisted Fate, and Dark Star Karma’s sound effects which have been noted to be slightly softer in volume making it hard to decipher which ability she will use her Ult with. The style of these specific skins can make it difficult to differentiate their sounds from pings and other in-game sounds. So although there is not an innate advantage to using these skins outright, they can be quite loud (or too soft) at times for spectators, the enemy team, and your teammates.
Although not as relevant anymore when Riot Games creates new champions, there are some older secret passives that don’t give you large enough of an advantage to be meaningful, but they are quite fun to learn about so I figured I would mention one of them here. With Leona, any champion going against her that is using a skin that wears sunglasses will be dealt one less damage from Leona’s passive. Skins that this easter egg applies to are Commando Jarvan IV, Commando Lux, Commando Galio, Commando Xin Zhao, and a few other skins. These don’t bear any real importance in-game, but it’s a fun little easter egg to be aware of.
When playing against specific skins that have sometimes hard to see their abilities, there are a few things you can do to make the game easier on yourself. A lot of the counter-strategies to these skins involve practice against them and working on being vigilant of what exactly the abilities look like for some of these more advantageous skins. For example, understanding the particle effects for Steel Legion Lux’s Q and E abilities and the seemingly smaller hitbox for Astronaut Veigar’s E ability, will better prepare you to be able to use the Summoner Spells Flash or Hexflash to get out of tricky situations.
Another strategy to use against skins that may sound particularly loud and distracting like with the Porcelain skin series, it can be useful to either adjust your settings and potentially turn down the sound effects of champions in-game. Or you can also adjust your other volume settings louder so that you can still hear the pings and other in-game noises so you’re not at too much of a disadvantage.
Although there is not an official list that Riot Games has produced when it comes to “banned” skins, there is some information available online that shows some skins that are not used in Pro Play. The main reason skins may be banned from Pro Play is, as noted by this post by Janook, is because of spectator readability concerns and skins that are particularly noisy or very different from the base model. Novelty skins such as Silver Kayle, Human Ryze, PAX Twisted Fate, PAX Sivir, and skins with hard to see visuals such as some that I have already listed such as Justicar Sydra, Steel Legion Lux, and others, are also found to be disabled from Pro Play as noted by this article.
Whether you are fighting against an enemy using an advantageous skin with deceiving hitboxes, or distracting particle effects or noise level, one of the biggest ways to prepare and be better equipped to fight against skins that have some advantages in-game, is to practice playing against them as well as become familiar and comfortable with what they look like in-game. It may even benefit you to use these skins yourself to see how people react and to reap some of the benefits that these types of skins can potentially have in-game.
As always, good luck and have fun on the Rift!
