League of Legends: how should I use tier lists?

League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games.
League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games. /
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Snow Day Bard. League of Legends.
League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games. /

When we release our updated League of Legends tier lists after each patch, we get a lot of questions. Today, we’ll try to provide answers!

Tier lists serve a valuable purpose in League of Legends if you want to improve. They can tell you which champions to ban, which ones to pick up, and which ones to avoid. As guides, they are useful tools in getting a broad view of where the meta is at a given time and understanding whether and why a champion is too strong or weak, which is the context we always try to provide in our tier lists.

That being said, tier lists aren’t cut and dry. They’re influenced by biases, opinion, hidden algorithms based on Riot’s API, or even just the sites own methodologies. Our tier lists, although we try to be as transparent with our methodology as possible, are imperfect tools.

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The hope with our tier list is that, by evaluating multiple different sites on the internet and we can give a fairly objective picture of how each champion compares. Although we do our best to make the rankings as balanced as possible (by standardizing scores to each site and removing the highest and lowest scores) we and the sites are still prone to being wrong.

For instance, in just this patch, Nocturne has fallen to F tier in our jungle tier list. I don’t believe that he is actually that bad, given that he has 49.3% win rate with a 2.4% pick rate in Platinum and above. Although I called out this discrepancy in our breakdown, it wouldn’t be honest to alter his standing given F tier is where he was rated based on all the sites we looked at.

Therefore, it seems imperative to give some guidance as to how we at BlogofLegends view our tier list, what sorts of information is appropriate to take from our lists and answer some frequently asked questions.