"After centuries of conflict and hardship across the lands of Valoran, the Rune Wars have finally come to an end. Treaties have been signed, and the superpowers that once ravaged this land have turned to a new role. Realizing that there must be a better way to settle their differences, they created the Institute of War, a multinational governing body that would settle all disputes. Inside the Institute is the League of Legends-where powerful magic users and delegates from each of the realms vie with or against each other to rule the land."
Welcome to Troper's Rift! Thirty seconds until tropes spawn!
League of Legends is a free-to-play Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game and spiritual successor to the widely popular Warcraft 3 custom map, Defense Of The Ancients, and claims to be the most played game in the world. Yes, even more than the behemoth World of Warcraft.Like DotA, League of Legends gives you control of one champion, who has unique attacks and abilities, and sends you out against enemy Mooks and champions to earn experience points and gold. You then attempt to destroy the enemy's base while preventing them from doing the same to you. Behind all this is the surprisingly well-realized Play the Game, Skip the Story hook that "Summoners" do battle with each other by summoning champions and pitting them against one another in gladiatorial combat. Your Player Character is one of those summoners; it is persistent and gains experience with every battle, as opposed to champions who start every match at Level 1. This opens up various customization options which have a practical effect on gameplay: summoners can bring two Support Powers into battle, and have access to "Runes" and a "Mastery" skill-tree to directly improve a champion's stats during gameplay. There is actually a fair bit of back story being developed via the "Journal of Justice," a weekly magazine- or newsletter-type release by Riot Games.League of Legends, like all MOBA games stems from Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars, originally a Warcraft 3 custom map. LoL currently competes with several other games that originate from DotA, including it's own direct sequel, Dota 2. However, LoL has many distinct differences from DotA, most of which simplify the game to some extent. The creators of the game are also heavily pushing for it to become more involved in Professional Gaming, and it has long since eclipsed the original DotA's popularity. Like we said: most played game in the world.The game has three playable game types, each between two opposing teams of up to five players:
Classic: Players push different lanes of combat, destroying defensive towers that lead up to the enemy nexus. Destroying the opponent's nexus wins the game. The two maps available for this mode in regular play are Summoner's Rift, a 5v5 map in the same style of DotA's map, and Twisted Treeline, a smaller map for 3v3 matches.
Dominion: A capture-and-hold game mode with five control points. Nexuses are not attacked directly, instead being damaged over time by controlling more points than the enemy team. Champions start off at level 3 and gain gold and experience much faster for accelerated, action-packed matches. Crystal Scar is the only map available for this mode.
All Random: Originally considered a spin-off of Classic Mode, this community-driven mode was later spun off into its own mode. The mechanics of this mode are similar to Classic in that the goal is to destroy the enemy nexus. However, there's only one path, character selection is randomized, and shopping for items can only be done during death. It canonized the fan-made game mode "All-Random All-Mid," or ARAM into the Proving Grounds, which was later renovated into the Howling Abyss.
The Characters pages list every commercially-released champion, detailing tropes related to their backstory, appearance, and gameplay mechanics, and a few other characters to boot. The numerous memes spawned by the community can be found here. The numerous Shout Outs to other medias can be found here.
Tropes have spawned!
AFGNCAAP: Summoners are not "characters" in any traditional sense; you get to pick a screen name and a buddy icon, and that's all.
This is even more apparent in the Dominion game-mode, where the players are unable to directly attack the enemy Nexus, instead capturing and holding points to achieve the Instant-Win Condition... which still results in watching the enemy's giant Nexus-gem exploding after it's achieved.
Alpha Strike: Most mages and some physical damage champions focus on burst damage; that is, blowing up someone before they can retaliate. A fed Veigar can take this Up to Eleven and decimate even the tankiest of champions in a full combo. (The problem is getting there.)
This is also the name of one of Master Yi's abilities. Ironically, while Yi is normally a physical DPS champion, there is an Ability Power build for him based mainly around jacking the power of Alpha Strike up to ridiculous levels (due to its 100% AP/damage ratio), allowing him to put out incredible amounts of burst on multiple enemies with a single shot. Even more ironically, AP Yi has eclipsed AD Yi as the most viable way to play him.
Always Chaotic Evil: Noxus and Shadow Isles. Noxus gets doubly subverted in Riven's case. She used to be a proud Noxian soldier that still remained sympathetic and embodied the Noxian Social Darwinist creed in a realistic way (individuals with strength/merit should lead). Then she defected during the invasion of Ionia when she saw that her high command was willing to let Singed gas-bomb civilians, enemy troops, and her own indiscriminately. Darius does not share her sentiments, viewing the bombardment would have been a necessary sacrifice since it demoralise the enemy when his nation is used to their We Have Reserves strategy.
The Tank: Also known as "soaks", bulky champs who can get the enemy team's attention and keep it.
The Healer: Pretty much everybody who has a heal that can be used on allies, primarily support champions.
The Nuker: Mages. To a slight degree, everybody who has a nuke.
The DPSer: Fighters and carries.
The Debuffer: Trundle, along with certain supports.
The Buffer: A large number of supports have at least one such ability. Lulu stands out in this regard, thanks to 3 of her abilities having at least one potential ally buff effect (including her ultimate).
The Mezzer: Anybody with a crowd control capability, such as Fiddlesticks, Ashe, etc.
The Minion Master: Yorick and Elise in her spider form, to an extent.
The Petmaster: Annie, Malzahar, Heimerdinger, Mordekaiser, Shaco, Orianna, and Yorick.
The Trapper: Teemo, Shaco, Nidalee and Caitlyn.
Area of Effect: Many champions have this ability, several in the form of their "ultimate" attacks. Some champions like Karthus and Ziggs specialize in this.
The Jack: Actually almost everybody has more than one build that emphasizes a specific stat or play-style. And yes, we do mean almost everybody. At one point, the dominant build for Annie (high magic-damage nukes) was physical DPS. Hybrid-built characters, who rely on ability power as well as attack power can also be called Jacks. But remember — just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea.
An Axe to Grind: Darius, Dr. Mundo, Olaf, Draven and Sion all use axes as their Weapon of Choice. Other examples include the shop items Pickaxe, Tiamat and Ravenous Hydra.
Announcer Chatter: At the start of the game, when minions are spawned, whenever someone goes down, destruction of important buildings, and killing sprees. It helps that she sounds like she could be the Administrator's older, kinder sister even if she does revel in bloodshed.
Anti-Frustration Features: a number of the more technical or esoteric aspects of DotA are gone. Creep denial*
using Force-Attack to kill off your own Minions, which doesn't give you EXP or G but denies your opponent the same thing
is out, death no longer causes you to lose Gold, tower kills give Gold to the entire team instead of just the player who last-hit it*
both of these tilted the Unstable Equilibrium far in the victor's favor; the latter also caused Loot Drama from "kill stealing" and such
and, perhaps most notably, almost all RNG-related mechanics have been phased out, with Phage/Trinity Force/Entropy's 25% slow chance, Sion's passive and critical strike chance being the only luck-based mechanics left in the game.
Any disconnected player will automatically walk back to base. worst case their inability to react gets them killed, best case they disconnected in an empty lane. Against players it's not that helpful, as you're still stuck with a lower max number of players, but it can prevent a cheap kill from a champion standing there idle.
The 22 hour rest on the win of the day may seem odd, as opposed to 24, but it prevents the most common problem with daily reward systems that don't have a set time, which is that unless you have precise timing every day the reward will get later each time. the 22 hours gives you leeway in getting it every day.
Anti Poop Socking: The first match you win every 22 hours gets a set 150 IP boost, which nearly doubles the payout of a good match.
Arch-Enemy: The League is host to several of pairs of champions who would love to see each other dead.
Nasus and his brother Renekton were literally at each other's throats before they were summoned to the League. Their relationship hasn't improved much.
Jarvan IV and Swain are most likely this considering how often they've clashed. They are both among the highest ranking military leaders of their respective nations. Nations which are in the middle of a cold war, to put it mildly.
Malzahar and Kassadin both got their powers from the Void, but Malzahar works to bring its horrors to Runeterra while Kassadin works to stop them. They've battled each other outside of the League before and they both are reported to have large groups of followers. Kassadin probably has a lesser form of this going on with Cho'Gath, Kog'Maw, and Kha'Zix for similar reasons.
Lets not forget Garen and Katarina. In Garen's lore, it's mentioned that most of the reason Garen even wakes up in the morning is to confront her on the battlefield. His is more of a Blood Knight obsession with her and that he doesn't actually want to kill Katarina, but just enjoys the challenge of a good battle. Some other Demacian soldiers think there are other reasonsinvokedwhy he constantly seeks her out, though.
Morgana and Kayle are involved in an eternal war between two factions of immortal beings.
Graves' only reason for joining the League is to ruin Twisted Fate as payback for turning him in in exchange for magical abilities.
Sejuani joined the League to oppose Ashe for control of Freljord.
Zilean and Volibear hate each other as a joke because of Riot employees; Zilean was named after Zileas, who was against the idea of armored bears, while Volibear was named after Volibar, who wanted armored bears.
Jayce invented his weapon, the Mercury Hammer, after Viktor defeated him and stole an energy source, using his new powers to destroy Viktor's lab.
Diana and Leona are this without a doubt. Diana feels betrayed by the Solari, and Leona is their proudest member (and possibly their paragon).
Warwick needs to kill Soraka and consume her heart to stabilize his transformation so he doesn't become a wild beast. While he was still fully human, he gained her trust enough for her to give up her divine powers to save him, but he was unable to kill her before she drove him away with her magic.
Rengar and Kha'Zix both want to kill each other. Rengar sees Kha'Zix as the ultimate prize and has a special place for his head on his wall, and Kha'Zix sees Rengar as a prey of equal strength and wishes to consume him to become stronger still. This rivalry is unique in that it's the only one to actually have an impact on gameplay; if Rengar and Kha'Zix are on opposing teams, they may receive a quest after Rengar buys his Bonetooth Necklace item and Kha'Zix reaches level 16 and uses his third evolution point - they must be the first to kill or assist in killing the other. If Rengar succeeds, his Bonetooth Necklace item is replaced with Kha'Zix's head, granting the same stats as a fully stacked Necklace that cannot be lost. If Kha'Zix wins, he gets a fourth evolution in addition to his usual three.
Zed and his Order of the Shadow stand opposed to Shen and his Kinkou Order. Rivals since childhood, their animosity came to a climax when Zed murdered Shen's father (his old master) and drove Shen and his order out of their sacred temple, claiming it for his own.
Anti-Magic: Any champion with an ability that Silences enemies (incapable of using abilities, cancels currently channeling ones, etc.) can do this. No crowd control lasts for more than a couple of seconds, but casters are rendered nearly helpless for the duration, making it feel very very long indeed.
Armor Is Useless: At one point in season 3, new sources of armour penetration made building resistances relatively futile compared to just building health - this was fixed by buffs to the Blade of the Ruined King <which shreds health percentally and is countered by building armour>.
Armor Piercing Attack: Comes in two main forms. The first is armor/magic penetration, a stat each character has which allows them to ignore a target's armor/magic resist respectively. The second is true damage, which can't be mitigated by armor/magic resist, only complete immunity to damage.
Armor-Piercing Question: The whole point of the League's Champion Judgement process is to ask two: "Why do you want to join the League?" and "How does it feel, exposing your mind?"
Summoner's Rift got a big graphics update, complete with a new Yordle Shopkeeper and updated animations on the neutral monsters.
Some of the older champion artworks are being redone. Morgana above has a new portrait, as does Sivir, Veigar, Kayle, Tryndamere, and others. You can really see a difference between the old style of art and the new ones.
This has extended, with a few characters, into getting new character models as well as new art. One of the most thorough revamps was Ashe, one of the oldest champions in the game, as her character models for all of her skins getting a significant rework along with all of her skin portraits getting redrawn in the more realistic style. In Ashe's case, she had already had her main portrait redone once before to get away from her really awful original art.
The game's visuals reached a new level with Annie's remodel. Not only did it replace her horribly deformed old model with a properly proportioned one (which actually looks like a cute little girl rather than a noodle-limbed puppet with a football-sized head) but it's the first champion model with properly animated facial expressions and actual lip-sync whenever she speaks aloud (during her /laugh, /taunt and /joke emotes)!
The Artifact: The League itself. As time has passed by, it has become more and more of an excuse for the champions to fight each other, and less and less of the complex and mysterious organization set to erase military conflict in Valoran who is gaining too much power and seems to have shady motives. Most champions' bios nowadays don't even state their reasons for joining the League.
Artificial Brilliance/Artificial Stupidity: The bots zig-zag between these two. The bots on Beginner are notoriously poor players, running into towers without minions and rarely going back for more health. The Intermediate bots, on the other hand, are a whole order of magnitude more difficult, ganking weak champions and making much better use of their abilities — and yet they still make stupid decisions like chasing "weakened" champions all across the map while their lane stays wide-open.
Gentleman Cho'Gath. French Maid Nidalee may or may not be related.
Amumu got an Emo Mummy skin. Emumu!
Corporate Mundo deals what he pleases.
If you type /joke three times when Swain is in his transformed state, he will say "Think logically for ONE SECON—CAWCAWCAWCAWCAW!!"
The 'Battle Training' has a tip to inform of being careful around the brush since an enemy champion maybe be hiding in it to ambush you... using images of Garen appearing out of the brush using his infamous Judgement. You can practically hear the "DEMACIAAAA!".
It's gotten to the point where two other champions refer to this in their jokes, Evil Counterpart Darius and fellow Demacian Quinn:
Darius: *looks around him then starts imitating Judgement* "NOXXUSSSSS- whoa, woah! Ugh, how does he do it?!"
Minor example: it's long been joked that the scythe-like magic attacks of Soraka's staff looked like bananas. Cue visual update with new lines added in, including "Yes, that was a banana. No one expects the banana."
The phrase "Get dunked" was made popular by the pro as heck guide to master yi. Vi uses this as one of her lines while using her ultimate.
Occasionally when one starts a match on the Howling Abyss, the announcer will enthusiastically announce 'Welcome to the Murder Bridge!', in reference to the popular fan nickname for the map type.
Killing enemy minions as hard as possible is a bad idea, at least early on. It brings you closer to the objective, but also closer to the enemy tower, leaving him with a trivial escape route while you have to run all the way back under a barrage of attacks when you inevitably get ganked. And because you only get gold for killing minions as opposed to damaging them, and your own minions are attacking theirs, auto attacking will often leave you with very little gold.
The trick is to 'last-hit', waiting until the last possible millisecond to hit them, thus minimizing minion advancement and maximizing revenue in early game.
The situation depends on the player though, because the game, in the end, is all about making it to the other team's nexus and destroying it.
Rule of thumb: If an enemy champion appears to be leading you into a trap, it's too late. And don't chase.
Works on the other side as well, if you feel you've got a strong lead on your enemy in lane such that one good fight would take them out, if they suddenly run straight for you instead of hiding it's a giveaway that you're about to get ganked.
Of course, some champions play this trope perfectly straight (at least when they get well-farmed) like Olaf and Tryndamere, capable of simply ripping into the enemy team and slaughtering everything within reach of their blades.
If you use sight/vision wards properly so you can see incoming ambushes from opposing lanes and bushes in advance its not only okay, but often a good idea to push a lane as hard as you can to the enemy turret because the turret will often finish off minions before the enemy champion is even capable of doing so. Depending on the enemy champ's loadout and skills this might also cause them to deplete their mana killing minions faster leaving them more vulnerable as well. This denies them gold and experience early game making them especially vulnerable transitioning into the mid game.
Awesome, but Impractical: "Snowballing" items that grant champions additional stats for each kill or assist like Mejai's Soulstealer and Sword of the Occult (and before it was removed, Leviathan). This makes them (cost-wise) useless at first but truly powerful once stacks are accumulated. The problem is that getting killed will lose 1/3 of current stacks, so players doing well might as well have a sign on them saying "focus me". Also, if one is accumulating 20 kills or assists in a row without dying in the first place, odds are the game could have been won building any other set of items, more practical ones included.
Awesome Yet Practical: Too many ultimate abilities to count that are both devastating to the enemy team AND incredibly awesome-looking and fun to use.
Everyone respawns after death for sometime. As it likely gave your enemies time and extra gold over you, it will eventually get to a point where a dead team's buildings and base should logically be razed by the other side before they can respawn.
The respawn timer increases as the game progresses.
The Guardian Angel item does the same thing, but there is a longer cooldown before it can be used again.
The Revive summoner spell also allows you to immediately respawn upon casting, but it has a nine-minute cooldown, and is widely considered the worst summoner spell ever: while all the other spells except maybe Rally find their consistent use in standard matches, Revive is useful only with various gimmicky, but occasionally effective, tactics. (This is subverted by the popular "Zombie Karthus" technique in Summoner's Rift, as well as generally in dominion, where one revive can win you the game by back-dooring a point.
As a rare plot example, the character Sion is quite literally back from the dead. After having been killed by Demacians, his corpse is rescued by Noxian General Katarina and is then revived with necromancy. Also, Karthus is an undead Lich. Urgot also underwent the same resurrection as Sion, although the mangled state of his body caused complications.
Both Yorick and his ultimate are examples of this. The character Yorick is quite literally back from hell to try and earn his family name remembrance, and apart from that, his ultimate allows himself or an allied champion to become a ghost after death.
Both Mordekaiser and Zilean have ultimate attacks that do this, in opposite effects. Mordekaiser enslaves an enemy champion's soul, making them serve him, whereas Zilean's ultimate revives a dead allied champion.
Badass Adorable: Yordles in general, but Teemo has this in spades. Especially since the dev team gave him an Easter Bunny skin -AND- an astronaut skin -AND- a superhero skin -AND a Panda skin.
Badass Boast: Several champions use these as their taunts.
Cho'gath: "Death is not the end for you. I have seen to it. For eternity. You. Are. MINE!"
Nasus: "Your legacy shall drift away, blown into eternity, like the sands of the desert." and "Life is a cycle; yours is over." Again, when you pick him. "The cycle of life and death continues. We will live. They will die."
Mordekaiser: "Death is too good for the likes of you!"
Malzahar: "Bow to the Void, or be CONSUMED by it!"
Nocturne has one as a joke: "Weather forecast for tonight? Dark with a chance of pain!"
Riven: "A broken blade is more than enough for the likes of you!"
Veigar: "Even Death trembles in my presence!" Said in an off-kilter, high-pitched voice. Also, when you select him: "Know, that if the tables were turned, I would show you no mercy!"
Annie: She has two adorable ones. "You smell like burning", a reference to the fact that she lights her opponents on fire, as well as the ever popular "Beaten by a little girl...HA!"
Badass Crew: The Commando-skin Demacians; Xin Zhao, Garen, Galio, Jarvan, and Lux.
Not to be outdone, Noxus has begun to reveal their Crimson Elite. Current known members include Talon and Riven.
Badass Furry: There are several excellent examples. Rengar, Volibear, and Alistar are just three that spring immediately to mind.
Badass Normal: While the majority of champions use magic or have magically-enhanced abilities, some just stick to melee weapons, guns, and barehanded fighting. Works perfectly fine.
Badass Pacifist: Many support champions do very little damage themselves, but make their allies much stronger.
Sona has three different auras, one stun and one damage spell. But her passive actually adds additional damage and effects to her next basic attack after a couple spellcasts.
Soraka has two heals, a silence and a mana refill and one damage spell.
Janna technically has several damage spells but they do little actual damage and are loaded with slows, knockups and knockbacks. Her most effective playstyle involves leaving every single minion kill to her allies, falling hopelessly behind in terms of levels and gold, but using her spells to set up enemies for her team, earning her team potentially a dozen kills while doing insignificant amounts of damage herself.
Zilean has only one ability that deals damage. One. The others are to reset his cooldowns, speed up or slow down champions, or revive allies if they die. It's possible for him to spike by putting a time bomb on someone, then rewinding the cooldown and putting another on, forcing the first bomb to explode.
Taric can actually do some decent damage himself, but his main job is supporting his team. He can heal his allies, passively boost their armor, stun enemies that would otherwise cause trouble, but his Ultimate is the real kicker. It does a decent amount of AoE burst damage, significantly boosts Taric's offensive stats, and gives nearby allies half that bonus for 10 seconds. It's absolutely fabulous for teamfights or tearing apart a tower.
Averted by Karma, whose abilities both make her allies stronger and deal significant damage themselves. This leaves her in a bit of a weird spot in the metagame.
While the orthodox setup (and the one most commonly seen in high-level/tournament games) for most of the supports above is to have them lane with an AD carry and give up all the minion kills and gold to said carry, effectively turning them into CC/ward/clairvoyance bots for the rest of the game, people sometimes choose to build them as damage dealers. Soraka and Janna both have damaging spells that scale well with AP, and Sona's short cooldowns allow her to throw out Sheen procs regularly, making AD a semi-viable build for her.
Jarvan IV is good friends with his fellow warriors of Demacia, Garen and Shyvana.
Battle Cry: Lux, Jarvan, and Garen all shout DEMACIA!
Hilariously parodied with the "Legendary" Brolaf skin for Olaf, who shouts "BROMACIA!" when he uses his ultimate.
Xin Zhao also has a skill called Battle Cry which greatly increases his attack speed, it also makes him heal himself for a set amount every fourth attack.
Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Contrary to Memetic Mutation, Garen does not shout "DEMACIA!" when using Judgement (his signature Spin Attack). That's a separate skill, Courage, but seeing as how players like to use their defensive self-buff at the same time as getting up close to an enemy, the two are linked together in everyone's heads.
The summoner spell Fortify places a hexagon-tiled invulnerability sphere around your towers for a few seconds.
Morgana's Black Shield and Udyr's Turtle Stance are some as well. Same graphic too.
Jarvan has a spell that summons an actual shield (as in the kite-shaped object) in a transparent hexagonal shape.
Poppy's ultimate puts a miniature barrier around her.
Berserk Button: Mistakenly calling Ahri a Naruto clone simply because she's a nine-tailed fox is a sure way to stir up chaos in forums, usually followed by a (relatively) short lesson on Asian mythology and how nine-tailed foxes came long before Naruto.
Even though her artwork shows her handling a spin ball similiar to one of Naruto's main attacks...
Even people who have never even heard of Naruto get in on the argument. Ahri is a gumiho (a creature from South Korean mythology), not a kitsune (a similar creature from Japanese mythology).
Better to Die than Be Killed: Because being killed by enemy towers or minions without the aid of enemy champions does not reward their team with gold, some players who have pushed too far down a lane and see a large gank approaching will intentionally rush towards the enemy nexus through multiple towers, hoping they will die to towers before the enemy team can reach them and thus avoid providing the enemy team with valuable gold and experience.
Beware the Nice Ones: All Yordles except Veigar, who is a megalomaniac, and Rumble, the Yordle equivalent of a mad scientist in a mech with tasers and flamethrowers.
Especially scary with Teemo. It's heavily implied that the constant use of his abilities for assassinations, as well as the isolation he suffers, is slowly driving him insane, which gives nightmare fuel when you look at the constant smile he always wears. He's starting to crack, and it won't be too long until he uses his poison outside of the League.
Also Lux, who is eternally smiling, but won't hesitate to trap you in light and MELT YOUR FACE OFF WITH A LASER!
A number of champions use this kind of weapon, especially Tryndamere, whose sword is so big he drags it on the ground behind him.
Slightly Subverted with Mordekaiser and Jarvan, who have a B.F.Mace and a B.F.Lance respectively.
A purchasable item in the game is actually called the B. F. Sword.
Bishonen Line: Played straight with the male, midriff-baring Varus. Compare his default skin to his Arclight skin.
Bizarre Alien Biology: Nasus the giant dog man and Renekton the giant crocodile man are brothers, and with no distinction made, it's inferred they're genetically brothers. Let that sink in.
Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Mild case with the Yordles. From the champions we're shown, female Yordles are always blue-skinned with white hair (Tristana, Poppy), while male Yordles vary from having tan skin (Corki), tan skin and blonde hair (Heimerdinger), to looking like anthropomorphic hamsters (Kennen, Teemo, Rumble). Likely caused by the fact that there were originally two different races, Meglings and Yordles, that were merged into one race by the designers.
Lulu breaks the white hair standard for Yordle females. Perhaps because she was designed as a Yordle and not a Megling, or perhaps because she's a bit... different.
Boring, but Practical: Wards. They provide no statistical bonus to your champion what so ever. They are one of the cheapest items in the game in terms of gold cost and also are considered to be some of the most important items by more experienced players since knowing where the enemy team is or isn't is very important.
Auto-attackers. That's the only way they deal damage, but if it isn't effective as hell.
The summoner spell "Clairvoyance" is another intel-gathering tool similar to wards. It is similarly boring and similarly practical.
To a similar extent, stat-increasing elixirs. They only last four minutes long, and don't provide any cool unique effects, but always provide more benefit in plain stats for its gold price while using it than if you had a permanent item instead.
The Oracle's Elixir allows a champion's line of sight to see invisible stuff until they die. Proper teamwork allows it to easily pay off against champions who utilize invisibility, as well as spot and kill enemy's wards, thus denying map awareness.
The Doran's items don't build into anything, but can be bought right when the game starts and give more sheer statistical benefits than any other item costing roughly equally at the time. Some players find it perfectly good to just buy them until they get enough gold to sell them for more expensive ones.
Summoner's Rift default laning/team composition: one carry, one tank, one offtank, one caster and one support; one jungler, solo top, solo mid, duo bot.
Many of the original champions count toward this as well. Ashe in particular has only two attack skills, one self buff, and one vision extender. However, her game-changing ultimates are devastating in the right place.
Some support champions can be played this way by focusing entirely on defense rather than offense. The only dedicated-healer support in the game is Soraka, who tends to slow down action significantly with all her heals. Riot has said that she's the only dedicated healer they will ever make, choosing to encourage other supports to focus on offense rather than defense.
Last-hitting. Harassing the enemy is fun. Getting kills early on is fun. Pushing hard and getting to their tower faster is fun. Farming? Not so much. Yet at the end of the day, farming creeps makes up the majority of a champion's income, often moreso than kills. A given player's creep score at a given point in time is a good metric for how good they are at laning.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Unlike the other login screen music accompanied with lyrics, Vi's basically includes singing about how a person would enjoy playing Vi and saying that she is finally released.
"You only need to click once, fool!"
Bribing Your Way to Victory: Despite there being plenty of things to spend money on, very much averted. While it's certainly faster to gain the unlockable champions by forking over cash, you can also gain them via "Influence Points", which are awarded along with EXP at the end of every match. While there are things you can only buy with money, they are either 1) purely cosmetic skins for your heroes, or 2) "Boosts" which double your EXP or IP gain for a set period of time. Also, the Runes which provide stat boosts to your champions? They can only be purchased with IP; no real money allowed. And they're the things more likely to have an effect on whether you win or not. Ten champions, rotated weekly, are free to play at any time. It's perfectly viable to do some playtesting and then purchase only the ones you like. (Or, for a Self-Imposed Challenge, play only whoever's available right now.) However, it must be pointed out that sets of Tier-3 Runes — which you want, because they'll help you win — cost almost as much IP as champions; maxing out a single Runepage involves playing dozens of games.
In a meta example, Riot Games themselves: "Hi, guys, there's a popularity contest for online games over there, the winner is decided by number of votes. Oh, and if we win, everybody will get a free rune page. Here's a vote link. No, we're not implying anything."
However you need the IP boosts if you want to quickly get IP at an early level. Once you get past level 10 you no longer have IP bonuses.
Can't Catch Up: True to being a MOBA, players can end up behind after getting killed a number of times. The vicious cycle is that the more kills that you give to an opponent, the more gold and EXP they get, so the next kill is easier, etc.
Cast from Hit Points: Currently four champions use health as their main resource: Vladamir, Mordekaiser, Dr. Mundo and Zac. Tryndamere used to use health, but he was changed to use the Fury system, making all of his abilities free to cast.
Cast of Snowflakes: In addition to each champion having a very different physical appearance, they each perform a very unique role in team compositions.
Catch Phrase: In nearly every champion spotlight since Yorick (as well as many times he shoutcasts games or in other League-related videos), Phreak makes it a point to use the phrase "tons of damage.". Failure to tends to result in at least one expression of disappointment on the official forums.
Chain Lightning: Volibear's ultimate ability causes lightning to shoot out whenever he attacks a target, bouncing to multiple nearby enemies. The Statikk Shiv item causes lightning to shoot out from the target every time it reaches full stacks (Which are gained by either attacking or moving.)
Chekhov's Gun: Many game elements were hinted at in the Journal far prior to their release, such as Lux appearance in the League and Wriggle's Lantern.
Renekton was added as a playable champion about a year and a half after being mentioned in Nasus' backstory.
Kog'Maw, as seen in the background of an early Malzahar screenshot.
Really, you could add a whole lot more examples if you take into account how the Journal of Justice and backstories mention certain characters that could easily become champions later.
Watch the League of Legends Mac commercial again. Confused as to what the green blob was that activated Caitlyn's Yordle Snap Trap the first time around? That's Zac, appearing before he was announced and he's trying to steal the cupcake inside!
Child Soldiers: The League has no age requirements for its champions.
Garen's younger sister, Luxanna "Lux" Crownguard, joined the Demacian military at the age of thirteen. It is unknown how common such a thing is within Demacia, or whether she even saw combat while around that age. Her League Judgement shows the induction was actually at the wishes of her parents.
Annie is a little girl. And a magical prodigy. With fireballs. And her teddy bear is a demon from hell that she ensorcelled.
Nunu looks like he can't be much older than Annie. Both Annie's profile page and Nunu's refer to how terrifying they'll be when they grow up, considering how nasty they are now.
Depends on the champion in question. Carries need expensive and specific items, casters and tanks are less reliant on them, supports are the least reliant. Janna, Alistar and Blitzcrank can be fine with just boots and lots of wards, as they mostly provide crowd control, which doesn't scale. This is in fact the reasoning behind a strategy for grouping a support in a laine with a carry. The carry gets as much gold as possible from the enemy minions in the lane to make use of their high potential, while the support remains a useful member of the team without that gold.
Combat Stilettos: Some female champions (Evelynn, Miss Fortune, Leona...) wear them. Somewhat inevitable considering the game's reputation of Fanservice.
The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: CPU Champions receive significant bonus gold above and beyond the kills and the minion farm they have, so even when far behind in the game, they can often match players item-wise. They also have reduced death timers and some other minor perks. Of course, all of this doesn't prevent humans from effortlessly curbstomping them; this is a compensation for the AI's deficiencies.
Some of the minor perks include:
Complete map awareness, with the most blatant example being them hitting the player inside a brush with targeted abilities, despite having nothing in said brush that would reveal what's inside. They can also do this with in a Fog of war area, launching a skillshot that they would, logically, have no reason to know a champion was there to be aimed at. Strangely, only some bots (Lux and Zilean especially) do this regularly and others (Ashe, Ezreal, Karthus) only with certain skills, making it inconsistent but frustrating.
Flawless coordination during teamfights. Bots rarely, if ever, waste their hard CC abilities by blowing them all on their primary target, instead managing to keep the hapless target locked down for quite a while. Bots will also always clutch heal their teammates or otherwise prevent you from killing them far better than any team of players could be expected to do.
Inhuman reaction time. Expect most bots to practically pull off the FPS-equivalent of a 180 degree no-scope when it comes to skill-shots the instant you're spotted. One example would be Blitzcrank stopping after you've stepped out of the brush behind him, immediately turning around and grabbing you. All within the span of one to two seconds, if not less. Combine this with bots having zero lag and you get situations where bots can do things that are completely impossible, such as Tristana getting knocked airborne and rocket jumping away while still in midair or Lux detonating Lucent Singularity before it arrives at its destination. Subverted with Jarvan Bot, who executes his flag dash combo seconds slower than the average player, rendering it almost useless.
The computer players also know that you're targeting them the very instant that you click on them, which makes for some infuriating lane dancing in the early game.
It's gotten to the point where one of the most common bots you see in AI games (namely Annie Bot) is in fact better than most ranked players of that selfsame champion. The League of Legends community is nearly unanimous that Annie Bot is a little bitch.
Conscription: Demacia requires at least three years of military service for all citizens, and Noxus has a mandatory service of six years, requiring being in active military reserves until too old, and a compulsory draft that may affect any citizen, regardless of age and sex, when the Noxian High Command sees it necessary.
Conservation of Ninjutsu: An actual in-game mechanic for Shen, Kennen and Akali: they each get -1 health for each other ninja on the team. It used to be -1 damage, but this actually made a huge difference over an entire game, so it was changed.
Conspicuously Selective Perception: A game mechanic — the minions in the lanes will attack enemy champions if said enemy champion(s) attacks one of their allied champions. But only if they attack, as in by the method of "autoattacking". So, using only the abilities of the champion that one is playing as that does not utilize their autoattack allows a player to damage the enemy champions while their allied minions won't care at all. Avoid autoattacking the enemy champion if there are many minions nearby, and make sure the times you do autoattack an enemy champion have a superior payoff from the damage you'll take from those minions.
Cool Sword: There is a mundane 'Longsword' item to buy, but the rest of the sword items in the game definitely qualify.
Corrupt Corporate Executive: An example in the 30th issue of the first volume in the Journal of Justice in CEO Dr. Priggs of Priggs Industries, reporting a Zaunian warehouse of theirs was found to be a makeshift prison for the purposes of blackmail against the company's competitors. One of the prisoners was there for at least three years. Priggs met his end at the hands of Graves, who had been locked up for conning him years before.
Crack Defeat: There have been matches where one team is dominating then after a few minutes starts getting sloppy and the other team wins.
Backdooring can be defined as that: a champion with high attack and movement speed will target unguarded towers, take them out, and then retreat.
Often happens with Dominion wherein a team can capture three or even every single node at the beginning of the game only to have the other team emerge from the shadows and take all of them.
Crippling Overspecialization: Stacking one stat in this game will generally just make you extremely vulnerable or easily countered. Only a very few amount of champions have a gameplay style that encourages getting only one stat until you might as well upgrade to other items that give more in addition to them.
It is possible to force the enemy team to overspecialize. Pick an assassin or nuker and have a good early game to the point where the enemy is forced to buy resistance items specifically to counter you. While this leaves you fairly useless, the entire enemy team is now hundreds of gold behind or you could single out the one person that didn't buy resistances yet.
This is a big balance issue with Malzahar, who is extremely reliant on his ultimate to suppress an enemy, allowing him to combo for a huge amount of damage to anyone he's able to suppress, even tanks. This suppression can be broken by an item, Quicksilver Sash, rendering Malz almost impotent against anyone who has it. However, if an entire team rushes Quicksilver Sash to avoid Malz killing them, the rest of the team has a much easier time killing them.
Some champions have passive abilities that boost a stat according to how high another stat is. This both nudges the player in a certain direction for building items and makes stacking one stat a bit more viable. Examples include Singed (+1 HP per 4 mana), Galio (ability power bonus equal to half his magic resist score) and Rammus (attack damage bonus equal to one quarter his armor). However, none of them are strong enough to encourage overspecialization to benefit more from the passive (The examples respectively would be have too much mana and nothing else, be vulnerable to physical damage, and be vulnerable to magic damage).
To a point also Malphite, whose most practical general-use attack scales its damage to his armor.
Critical Hit Class: In theory, you can build any of the champions this way. In practice however, it's not always the smartest thing to do, since abilities don't usually have the possibility to score a critical strike like autoattacks do. Gangplank's "Parrrley" does have this possibility, so he's one of the champions for whom this build is a valid option.
Pantheon is another fringe case, as his Heartseeker Strike grants a passive that gives 100% Critical chance on enemies under 15% health.
Crowning Moment of Awesome: As an in-game/in-universe meta-example, it should be noted that the game is designed to give the players this feeling. There's lot of ways to win a situation in ways that make you feel like an epic fantasy hero. Having the narrator announce to the world that you are "unstoppable" and "godlike" and all that kind of stuff doesn't hurt either. Never mind if your enemies get these moments ten times as often as you do.
Crutch Character: Any character that is said to not scale into "late game" is this. The trope isn't nearly as bad as it may seem, as each game has all champions start over from scratch at level 1. Using a early-game monster to kill and stop the enemy carry from becoming the late-game powerhouse that he will become is as valid a strategy as any other. Of course, if the enemy can hold out they will have a major killing machine in the game's crucial last moments while you are left with a below-average champions under your control. Part of the fun and strategy of the game is figuring out when such a strategy is viable and when it isn't.
Cute and Psycho: The database asserts that Teemo is slowly cracking under his prolonged isolation from others of his kind. He's doing a bit better now, though, now that he has Tristana as a friend.
This is also what drove Veigar insane.
Cutscene Power to the Max: Used to an extent in the Season One CG trailer, but just as often averted — Ryze gets to do a lot of cool stuff that isn't possible in the game, but most of the characters use their actual ingame abilities (and in Ryze's case, his summoner uses the Ghost spell to let him run through the wreckage of the collapsing tower).
Lampshaded in the League of Legends Season 1 Commentary, with Phreak treating the trailer like a real "600 ELO" match (which is very, very low on the ranked ladder).
Death Is Cheap: When you die, you can't participate in the game for up to a minute and a half. You miss out on some gold and experience, you give your buffs if you have any to your enemy (not counting Baron buff which you just lose), you waste some valuable time of battle Elixirs and instantly lose Oracle's Elixir. You will still inevitably die in pretty much every game, and your number of deaths is only very weakly correlated to whether you win or not.
LoL is actually quite notable for death being cheaper than in other games in the genre, such as the original Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars and Heroes of Newerth as champions do not lose gold when they die. Some consider this a flaw as they feel it makes the game less "hardcore" than these other games, but most generally agree that it's an improvement as it helps reduce the effect of Unstable Equilibrium.
Death or Glory Attack: Knockback abilities tend to work like this. Successful uses put the enemy in places they really don't want to be in. Failed uses can save the enemy or possibly even makes it easier for them to kill your allies.
Terrain-formation abilities do this too. You can block off your enemies from escaping... or do the same to your own allies. There is simply the possibility you use just waste them unlike knockback abilities though.
Disaster Dominoes: Perhaps not the most unforgiving game in the MOBA genre, but even small mistakes in the beginning can set off a chain reaction. For instance, say the middle lane champion on your team doesn't ward and gets ganked a couple times. His opponent now has a gold and experience advantage and is buying items faster than him now and become more powerful. Now he's forced to stay under his tower, so the enemy is free to roam around and gank other lanes. Soon enough bot lane is fed too, your towers go down, the enemy team gains map control and freely pillages your jungle... it can snowball out of hand pretty fast.
Defeat Equals Explosion: Every game ends with the enemy Nexus blowing up, even in the game mode Dominion where players can't directly attack the enemy Nexus.
Deflector Shields: Numerous champions have those. Apart from that, there used to be an item called Rose's Pride, but it was never implemented and is instead replaced by Zhonya's Hourglass, which puts you in stasis for several seconds.
Determinator: Some players are determined to finish a match even when they've lost most of their base... and sometimes they win.
Some ingame examples would be Tryndamere, Olaf and Dr. Mundo, who get stronger as they near zero health, and especially Karma who gains ability power at low health and has an assortment of heals and shields. Being a support (though also a fairly strong attacker for a support), Karma most likely won't win a 1v1 battle but she can draw it out for an impossibly long time while her team closes in on the attacker.
Tryndamere takes it Up to Eleven in his ultimate's lore. According to the ability, Tryndamere survives at 1 hp for several seconds because he REFUSES TO DIE. He's so determined to kill the enemy that he literally ignores fatal wounds completely in his rage.
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Bots in Co-Op Vs. AI mode will occasionally comment at the beginning of the game, saying something generic based on their lore and personality. If one of the players is playing a champion that has lore with one of the bots (such as Kayle and Morgana), there's a chance that bot will instead call their rival out by name with a different line.
Difficult, But Awesome: Several characters, especially those reliant on skillshots, qualify for this. Special note goes to Lee Sin, who can save enemy characters with a poorly placed kick, and otherwise be useless in the hands of an inexperienced player. Those who know how to play him well and use his combos and tricks, however, are an absolute menace.
Similar to this is Alistar, who doesn't do that much damage, whose ultimate technique is used primarily for escaping, and whose Headbutt has saved many an enemy champ by knocking them away from a team fight. However, used correctly, he can sustain even the squishiest of carries by constantly healing, and a headbutt used to knock an enemy champion into friendly carry or turret range is a powerful strategy.
Being a carry in general is this at high levels of play. Early on they suffer from a severe case of Magikarp Power and have the distinct possibility of being shut down before they can acquire their necessary items. Later, assuming that they've been properly farmed and fed, they become the number one priority of the enemy team and face no end of hell simply trying to survive in teamfights. However, if they can outplay their opponents and their team can peel enemies off of him/her and allow for some breathing room, it becomes apparent that there is a very, very good reason for targeting them in the first place. The distinction between bad carries and good ones often lies in who knows how to survive teamfights, inflict their high damage, and carry games and who just crumples up and dies.
Orianna. She has access to only one autotarget, which is a shield, her offensive capabilities are all skillshots aside from her autoattack. Done poorly you're bumbling to get kills and only have the most basic offensive abilities, even if it isn't detrimental to the team, but done well you can have near complete control over an area that forces the targets to risk a retreat or try to get you. Her unique style of play is easy to fumble, but done well you can keep pressure and damage on an enemy while staying at a safe range and make being in the general area of her ball a nightmare.
Diminishing Returns for Balance: Why it's a bad idea to stack too many of a any role on a single 5 man team. Too many carries results in less gold and EXP for all of them and a squishy team, while an overly-tanky team cannot dish out damage fast enough, etc. Like any unconventional strategy, it can still work, it will just probably be harder.
Armor and Magic Resistance plays with this. After a certain point the percentage of protection both offer to Attack and Magic Damage, respectively, will increase more and more slowly, but higher percentages extend a champion's effective health at an almost quadratic rate.
Miss Fortune has abilities named "Make It Rain" (a shower of bullets from the sky), "Double Up" (a bullet that bounces and hits two enemies), "Impure Shots" (Rhymes with "thoughts" which goes pretty well with the fanservice)... to say nothing of her name.
Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: NO. If you leave during a game, even for a few minutes to take a bathroom break, you will cripple your team by being underleveled at best and singlehandedly turn the tide of battle in favour of your enemies at worst. If you're gone long enough, you could end up reported for being a "leaver", which results in the banhammer if it happens enough.
Dynamic Entry: Any champion with a dash or a blink really.
Jarvan can jump on a target and trap them within a crater created by the force of his impact.
Amumu does this the best. Not only does he fling himself into the entire enemy team, they'll most likely shit their pants, because despite being small, Amumu's "dynamic entry" usually is followed by his legendary ultimate, which is one of the best in the game, disabling their entire team.
Blitzcrank has the opposite of this. He has a pull, which can force an enemy champion to dynamic entry to YOUR team, giving your team a chance to eliminate them.
Shen's Stand United. Not only does your ally get a shield, it's one of the few global ults remaining in game. And for that matter, Shadow Dash is also a dynamic entry. AND HE'S A FLIPPIN NINJA TO BOOT!
Twisted Fate's Gate reaches almost anywhere the whole map; great for picking off straggling enemies and acting as surprise reinforcements in a fight.
Shyvana can leap towards the enemy and turn herself into a dragon mid-jump, pulling all enemies in her path with her on her wings.
Poppy does this as part of her standard strategy. She charges an enemy and moves them a set distance... or into the wall, stunning them in the process.
When Fiddlesticks ults, he teleports a short distance and is suddenly surrounded by crows furiously CAW CAW CAW-ing. Even better with the Surprise Party Fiddlesticks skin, where he suddenly appears among your enemies to this sound.
Rammus does this by curling up into a ball and ramming you, possibly at ridiculous speeds if he's been rolling long enough. The buzzsaw sound helps. Flash helps even more, because a wheel that knocks you up in the air is only improved by having that wheel suddenly teleport from a few meters away to right on top of you.
Drop the Hammer: The item Phage, which can be later upgraded to the bigger hammers Frozen Mallet or Entropy.
Taric, Poppy, and Jayce all use hammers, as does Sion while using his Hextech Sion skin.
Eldritch Abomination: There are a few here and there. Cho'Gath, Kog'Maw, and Kha'Zix are monsters from the Void (which is apparently filled with such creatures), Fiddlesticks is an extraplanar horror who killed the guy who was stupid enough to summon him, and Nocturne is a dream-born monster who hunted and killed Summoners in their sleep until he was dragged into this world. Xerath also borders on this, considering that he's become entirely inhuman in almost every way, including personality, and is absurdly powerful even by the standards of the League. Brand is an Elemental Embodiment of raging fire formerly trapped in magical prison of unmelting ice, now possessing the body of some poor schmuck of a viking, who exists solely to burn down the entire world.
Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Completely averted. Instead players need to take advantage of whether their targets are focusing on physical or magic resistance.
Elite Mook: Destroying an enemy Inhibitor allows your base to spawn elite minions for a while. The inhibitors are near a base's nexus, so their destruction usually means the game is going to wrap up in short order. These can also be deployed onto the battlefield at any time in the game by using the Banner of Command item on a siege minion and prior to the item's introduction the summoner spell Promote had the same purpose.
Entitled Bastard: A necessary evil. This is a MOBA game — Unless you manage to get on a private server with only a fraction of the fanbase, you WILL run into players who demand you ward the map and gank them without thanking you or doing it when you need help.
A special form exists regarding the tribunal. There are players who sabotage games, grief games, and are overall just an insufferable Jerkass. They are then reported, and the tribunal members tell Riot they think they should be punished. They then go onto the forums and complain that they were the ones who were trolled.
More on the Tribunal, some people believe they shouldn't receive bans because they support the company, and in their mind being a paying customer grants you special treatment, like being able to act like a complete Jerkass with no repercussions.
Everything Trying to Kill You: You can be promised from the start of the game that only your team will have disconnects, only your team will have a support that doesn't know how important wards are, and only your team will have the Jax that does bad. It's positive that THEIR team will have the Akali that gets 12 kills by 10 minutes, their team will know how to communicate, and their team will always have the better jungler.
Being an AD/AP Carry is this later on if the enemy team has half a brain. A core part of most teams' strategies is to protect their squishiest/most valuable members while simultaneously killing the enemy's as fast as possible.
Piltover and Zaun is a more straightforward example. They serve as technological and educational centers for their city states (Demacia and Noxus respectively; although a few yordles do establish an academic field in Piltover) and focusing on hextech technology. How the use the hextech technology are for different reasons. Zaun uses their hextech technology as means of polluting, greedy, selfish, and warfare purposes; while Piltover uses their hextech technology for peaceful, environmental friendly, and productive means for society. Also, a good number of evil Mad Scientists that Noxus hires for warfare purposes are from Zaun.
Garen is the king of this trope. If you walk into a brush and there is a Garen on the enemy team, expect it.
Hilariously parodied with Wukong's ultimate. He spins and knocks up enemies, but the kicker is that in the code for the game, the trigger for Wukong's ultimate is actually called "spintowin"
Parodied again with Darius, who attempts to perform Garen's trademark spin, only to get dizzy and comment "How does he do that?"
Although, the world is still whole, most of the "Excuse" part is starting to creep in and comes in with the absurd number of champions they have out, needing a backstory for each one no matter what. An example would be "Zac", who is a a fairly unique and fun character, but they still need to fit a sentient blob of goo into the backstory. You can see where the conflict comes in between having to maintain hundreds of characters that are all one of a kind while putting them into what already exists.
Fake Difficulty: All tank characters face the problem that their toughness is not very useful if the enemy simply ignores them and kills them last. Some tanks have taunt abilities to force enemies to attack them. Others do high amounts of damage or have powerful disabling spells. Cho'Gath eats minions to grow incredibly large and simply walks in front of the enemy's mouse cursor so they physically cannot click on the vulnerable damage dealers.
Fake Longevity: The average IP cost for new champions has gotten rather high. Where some champions may cost 450 or 1350 IP, the rest that have been released now cost around 6300, with occasional 3150's. Riot's official explanation is that they feel the newer champions have been designed with different mechanics and playstyle reflected by their higher prices, though a number of players think they're just trying to encourage buying the champions with real money or are attempting to make use of this trope.
Recently they've implemented a policy wherein they lower the price of one 6300 champion to 4800 every time a new champion is released, and every three releases they lower the price of another champion lower on the tier scale.
They also still have older characters on the high prices range (such as Miss Fortune), so they aren't exclusively making new champions more expensive.
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Rakkor are definitely meant to invoke the idea of the Spartans, right down to their armor and weapons. The tribe's name was originally Stanpar, an anagram of the word Spartan, but this was Retconned when Leona was added to the game.
Flash Step: The Flash summmoner spell lets you do this with any champion.
Ezreal and Katarina have this built-in as an ability. Bonus points for Katarina's ability actually being called Shunpo
Fluffy the Terrible: Annie's teddy bear Tibbers wants to play with you! Tibbers is smart and knows lots of tricks! Look, he transforms into a giant grizzly bear that's on fire!
Fog of War: You can only see areas within the immediate vision of your team's units. There are special Sight Wards that allow you to lift the fog over a certain area for a few minutes, as well as a Summoner Spell that allows you to take a peek at any section of the map you want for a few seconds.
Akali is The Spock who was raised to "...do that which must be done." and her background implies rigorous indoctrination to the rules of the position of the Fist of Shadow by mother, fitting the superego.
Kennen is moral-center of the group as The McCoy, and was notably not raised to his position of the Coursing the Sun from birth as a Tykebomb like the others, fitting the id.
Shen is The Kirk, though he's a slight variant in that his position as the Eye of Twilight is supposed to make him as logical as any Spock could hope to be - regardless, like the spirit of the trope, he balances the others' weightings while he makes the final say. While raised rigorously like Akali, Shen's training of dispassion arguably lets him fit the ego since he must consider the logic of decisions independently from what his society may have taught him.
Friendly Fire Proof: Justified. You cannot hurt your allies with autoattacks or abilities (though some abilities can hurt your own champion) since a type of summoner magic specifically exists to prevent it. This is because some champions on the same side would love to tear each other apart otherwise (see Arch-Enemy).
Fun with Acronyms: Do you honestly think it was an accident that a name was chosen that could be shortened to "LOL"?
Game-Breaking Bug: Whatever you do, do not disconnect from the internet mid-match. Lagging out is fine, but actually losing modem connectivity will screw you up. For instance, if an enemy champion was respawning at the time, your client will insist that champion is still dead and cannot be interacted with. His client is under no such compunctions. Congratulations: you've just made an enemy invincible.
Though rare, there is a bug where Nocturne can slow your FPS to a crawl. Understandable, since he is somewhat resource intensive.
Yorick's Ultimate ability (a "ghost-form"/temporary resurrection on himself or another champion) has caused several such bugs, to the point where the damage was so bad that he was temporarily removed from the game so they could fix it.
At first, if the Ability was up at the time of the player's death, but the player also has Ignite on them, the Ignite ticked away the sliver of health that remains prior to the ability's triggering, thus negating the temporary resurrection effect.
Under some rare situations, a resurrected player would continue to die even after they've respawned, giving the enemy who originally killed them even more kills.
Finally, there was a bug that caused champions to get a kill point for killing the resurrected ghost, meaning that a single kill could be turned into a double kill. This was the bug that required Yorick to be briefly removed from play.
And then there was the Karma Relaunch Day, where not only was karma's Focused Resolve glitched so that it would proc Muramana (Effectively one-hit-killing anything she used it on), but also Leona and Thresh had to be temporarily removed from play because somehow hitting Leona's Zenith Blade or Thresh's Death Sentence on an opponent which was both Untargetable and Invulnerable would cause the game to crash for all ten players present in the match.
Gameplay and Story Integration: The melee champions armed with spears or staffs have 25-50 more attack range over other melee champions.
The Journal of Justice describes the in-game experience and level system as the summoner and champion becoming accustomed to the mental link over time, like going through a three-legged race.
Story-wise the League of Legends exists to allow international disputes to be settled without resorting to open war. One noteworthy case was the Ionia vs. Noxus rematch, a point in the lore that was decided by an actual game played by top-level summoners whose champion pool was limited by which side they were representing (champions from the faction or allying themselves with it). The Ionian side won and as a result a new item was implemented in its honor, The Ionian Boots of Lucidity. Fans have taken this and run with it, setting up faction matches between Demacia, Noxus, Ionia, Piltover, and Frejlord with the premise that they are contesting something in-universe. For a non-canonical event being run by fans, it is well-writen and executed and the story continues to update in each arc.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: Flying champions are equal to walking champions, champions benefit from weapons despite having a Weapon of Choice, et cetera, for versatility. Abilities that really shouldn't affect certain champions do regardless- plenty of players have pointed out some nonsensical things like "How can Teemo blind Lee Sin?" or "How can Cassiopeia turn Malphite into stone?"
The Gameplay And Trailer Segregation gets lampshaded mercilessly by Phreak HERE (along with Cutscene Power to the Max). The Season 1 CGI trailer is treated as a commentary of a real 600 ELO match since the champions do things that would make zero sense in-game.
Gargle Blaster: There is a contest in Bilgewater called the GrugMug Grog Slog where half of the contest is creating an actually caustic drink. As in, the winner's has burned through the mug, the table and the floor. The other half is drinking the most of that winner before requiring medical attention.
Gladiator Games: The League is basically one. Noxus also has one called 'The Fleshing'. This is what Xin Zhao survived.
Glass Cannon: Some champions (unofficially known as "nukes") are designed to deal tons of damage very very quickly. Their defensive stats and abilities are usually quite low. An interesting case is Karthus who, thanks to his passive that lets him continue casting spells for seven seconds after he's killed and his ultimate that damages every player on the enemy team, actually has the potential to deal more damage once he's killed, allowing him to focus entirely on offense and ignore defense for the most part.
Glowing Eyes: Common for a number of champion's portraits for the English version of game. A Doylist explanation is that eyes are very hard to draw.
Good Colors, Evil Colors: The champions of Demacia tend to have blue, white and gold as predominant colors for their outfit. The champions of their city-state's sworn enemies, the Noxians, use their colours less uniformly amongst themselves, but all use distinctly "evil" colors for their color scheme, ranging from crimson, sickly green, black, and purple. This is demonstrated most distinctly on Garen the Might of Demacia◊ and his Evil CounterpartDarius the Hand of Noxus◊, two heavily-armoured Shoulders of Doom-wearing soldiers with Spin Attacks and Finishing Move ultimates - Garen uses the aforementioned blue, white and gold while Darius wears crimson, black, and a dark grey.
Go Karting with Bowser: If Ziggs' Pool Party skin is anything to go by, not only do champions of both Noxus and Demacia hang out at the pool together, but Leona and Diana are able to set aside their differences in the name of relaxation.
A Good Name for a Rock Band: "Pentakill" (the Announcer Chatter when one player kills 5 enemies in a very short space of time). It's been officially recognized, with Sona (on keyboard), Yorick (on bass guitar/shovel), and Mordekaiser (on guitar/axe), Karthus (lead singer), and Olaf (drums) getting Pentakill skins.
Good Republic, Evil Empire: Zigzagged with Demacia and Noxus. On the one hand, Demacia's dedication to honor seems to stand hard and opposed to the Noxian belief that only the strong are worthy to lead (especially considering the atrocities Noxus committed in their attack on Ionia). On the other hand, Demacia is ridiculously strict when it comes to law enforcement and military conduct, and individual Noxians aren't necessarily despicable people, just kind of ruthless.
Griefer: This is an online game — where the GIFT is in effect and there are shittons of players who leave or stay in the corner of the field for the entire game. The fairly long average length of matches increases the painfulness of it.
Other types of griefers include those that intentionally die to feed the enemy team gold and experience, though changes to how much gold is received on kills has made this much less effective than before. Then there's just plain old trolls, who will intentionally abuse any ability that can make your team's game hell. See the section on Stop Helping Me! then imagine someone doing it on purpose. The trouble is, even if reported, it's sometimes (from the Tribunal's point of view) difficult to tell who's a griefer and who's just bad at the game.
Not to mention, there is a special form of GIFT in play. Because the game is free of charge and no subscription fees are required, it is possible for someone to have a dummy account with only free champions and sabotage games since after all, you'll never see these guys again, and you won't lose anything if a dummy account is banned - just as long as your main account with the champions you worked so hard for is untouched.
Nowadays, even the "main" account will be discovered and banned too, as evidenced by the recent ban of some professional players with "highly reported" dummy accounts.
Guide Dang It: If you have never played a game like this, you'll probably need to ask for help from more experienced players to get your head around it.
Needless to say, due to the negative effect of just one single newbie on your team, if you actually ask for help during a match you are more likely to get bombarded with insults and reported for intentionally helping the enemy than to receive advice.
Slightly averted with a fairly in-depth tutorial, which (with the introduction of Battle Training) now leads new players through the common arena of Summoner's Rift. It doesn't teach you about wards, jungling, laning and teamfight phases, what items scale best with what champions, what champions scale better, many statistics are hidden and lots of things require you to try them to understand them, team compositions... but it's better than nothing!
To a lesser extent, this can apply to veteran players who step away from the game for a seemingly short time. With champions and patches coming out every two weeks or so, not playing for a few months means having to learn the dynamics of several new champions and the results of many small but significant changes all over.
There are some effects champions get when fighting specific champions or even skin types that are hidden until the situation comes up. Graves and Nocturne's interactions are cosmetic, and mostly harmless. Leona's damage reduction against champion skins with sunglasses and the ninjas losing 1 health for every other ninja could possibly affect the game, but only extraordinarily rarely. But Rengar and Kha'Zix have very blatant, possibly table-turning interactions for killing one another.
Tristana, though it is more of a cannon than a gun.
Gangplank's Parrrley has him shoot a target with a flintlock pistol. Shooting enemies is also part of his regular, melee-range attack animation.
Miss Fortune shoots two enormous pistols.
Caitlyn has her trusty rifle.
Graves the Outlaw uses a customized double-barreled shotgun.
Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Though there are exceptions the majority of male human characters are melee (tanks, fighters, or melee carries), and the majority of the female human characters are ranged (support, mages, or ranged damage dealers).
Hammerspace: You can carry up to six items, which can be breastplates, katanas, axes... none of them are even shown being held by your character or appear on their person. Some of them cause your character to have specific auras to let the enemy team know you have the effect up, but you never see the items themselves.
Possibly hand waved with the idea that the champions themselves don't get the item, but the summoner backing them does and merely channels the artifact's power to increase their champion's abilities.
Tryndamere's Undying Rage. For the duration of the buff, his HP cannot be reduced below one, allowing him to tank the combined attack of an entire team and laugh in their faces.
Alistar's Unbreakable Will lets him break out of crowd control effects and severely decreases the damage he takes.
Olaf's Ragnarok gives him a big defense boosts and makes him completely immune to all crowd control effects.
Poppy's Diplomatic immunity. The text states that she focuses so intently on her target that the rest of the enemies attacks and abilities do nothing to her.
Homing Boulders: All ranged autoattacks will track you. This is most obvious from caster minions, whose projectiles are fairly slow. Some abilities do this as well, most of which are magical in nature.
Reaches silly levels when you include the fact that some projectiles will hunt you down no matter where you go. For example: getting close to an enemy tower (which shoots energy blasts), then teleporting away with the summoner spell. If there was a tower shot coming for you when you teleported, it will follow you across the entire map and execute tight turns to get you, resulting in a hit out of pretty much nowhere several seconds later. Works with caster shots too. Stories of players escaping a battle with <5 HP, only to see a slow floaty orb of inevitable doom following them abound.
Hotter and Sexier: Compared to other MOBA games, League of Legends is known for lots of fanservice.
Hypercompetent Sidekick: The ideal support is this during the laning phase compared to their carry partner as they have more utility and are often stronger/tougher at the early levels. Their job of "babysitting" the ADC while he farms covers quite a bit: warding the lane, harassing the enemy, healing, buffing, zoning, engaging in fights that will score your lane kills, and holding the lane when your ally goes back to base, all while preventing the enemy support form doing the same. Done correctly, all the effort goes to making a powerhouse by way of Magikarp Power that then surpasses the support.
I Call It Vera: Sion's Chopper, Poppy's Whomper, Miss Fortune's Shock and Awe, Graves' Destiny.
There are a lot more now after the Songs of the Summoned contest.
Improbable Aiming Skills: Homing Boulders aside, Ashe's Enchanted Crystal Arrow and Ezreal's Trueshot Barrage can be aimed across the whole map. Interestingly, truly impossible shots are the player'sImprobable Aiming Skills (or, more likely, blind luck).
Incendiary Exponent: The Sunfire Cape item basically appears to put the wearer on fire.
Ineffectual Loner: enforced. Your champion may be a One-Man Army, but your opponents are too. In general, if you ever get into a fight where you're outnumbered by the enemy, you're about to die.
There is one circumstance when lone-wolfing it can be effective: if you're going to "jungle". The jungler, instead of laning, goes through the forested areas in the middle of Summoner's Rift, leveling by fighting the neutral creeps that live there. In addition to freeing up his (meant-to-be) lane partner to gain his share of G and EXP, he also gets to create ambushes with his (in-lane) teammates. (Perhaps appropriately, Warwick the werewolf is one of the classic junglers.) Note, however, that while the jungler spends lots of time alone, he never engages unless he already has numerical superiority—his job is to provide numerical superiority!
Infinity+1 Sword: Averted. Although several items are very powerful in the right hands, there is no one strongest item in the game.
Infinity Edge, with its huge damage boost, high crit chance, and increase in critical damage done is probably as close as you can get for DPS champions. Of course on most spellcasters, it is next to useless.
Rabbadon's Deathcap is the caster version. Single biggest AP boost of any item, and raises the effective AP of every other source you have.
Instant-Win Condition: Knock down their Nexus and that team loses. Even if they have twice as many kills as you, you have a Nexus and they don't, so they lose.
Item Amplifier: The game has this in the form of the Rabadon's Deathcap and Wooglet's Witchcap. They're a bit of a mix between this and Amplifier Artifact though, since they improve the ability power gained from any source, be they items or the character's innate ability power.
Item Crafting: A derivation of Defense of the Ancients' recipe system. Items are bought using gold and have useful effects in and of themselves, but once you have the right combination of them, you click a button, pay some more gold, and turn them into a new item. The reason the interface is awesome is that it shows and allows you to purchase not only your current item's ingredients, but displays what items it goes into as well.
Joke Character: Urf the manatee, who attacks with a spatula. There was some debate as to if he'd actually be in the game since he was launched as an April Fool's joke, deleted, then brought back, and deleted yet again. Now lives on in spirit as a skin for Warwick and Corki and as a ghost that sometimes shows up on the map. Oh, I get it, "in spirit."
For April Fool's 2012, Fizz was given a skin where his ultimate had Urf coming out of the "water".
Lee Sin was this at first. A cancelled character from the very beginning of the game's Beta, the April Fools of 2011 showcased him with a joke Champion spotlight that featured him doing things like killing the Baron Nashor by looking at it and dive-bombing the entire enemy team from across the map. Two days later he was released for real, with an actual champion spotlight.
Katanas Are Just Better: Youmuu's Ghostblade, whose icon is a katana inside purple ripples with some cherry blossoms floating around it, is a Legendary item to buy that provides attack damage, increased critical chance, armor penetration, cooldown reduction, and has an activatable ability that gives faster attacking and moving for up to 8 seconds. The item is also a Shout Out to Touhou.
The character Shen uses two shorter katanas.
Master Yi's blade is as close to a katana as you could get without actually being one. He actaully does use a katana in his Samurai Skin.
Killer Rabbit: Most of the Yordle champions are kind of cute to some extent. That doesn't make any of them less deadly.
Invoked with the Yordle Teemo's Easter bunny outfit. Extremely fluffy, extremely deadly.
Killer Teddy Bear: Annie's teddy bear Tibbers. He's a real grizzly, turned into a teddy bear, turned into a burning abomination.
Just racking up a killstreak without dying will cause the announcer to declare after 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8+ kills respectively: killing spree, rampage, unstoppable, dominating, godlike and legendary. A variation is that it does not give anything for the player, but rather gives nice gold bonus to whoever dealed a killing blow on the player, bringing his kill streak down. Thus, those with a long streak become primary targets and hunted by all.
Getting a bunch of kills one after another, with no more than 10 sec gap between each kill, has her announce double kill, triple kill, quadra kill and penta kill. Pentakills are considered quite a feat amongst players, and those who got one receive Bragging Rights Reward. It is even possible to kill past that if a newly dead player uses the Revive summoner spell to run back into the fight to get killed again, giving a very, very rare legendary kill (kills in quick succession over 5 are just 'legendary kill').
King Mook: Baron Nashor and Vilemaw, the two biggest creeps on Summoner's Rift and Twisted Treeline respectively. They have about the same amount of HP as an entire team of champions, give you a very powerful buff if you kill them, can kill champions if you engage them wrong, and are living Schmuck Bait: if the other team realizes you're fighting them, they will attack from behind while you're otherwise engaged and try to kill the mook, you, or both.
Knight Templar: The city-state of Demacia in general. A more specific case is Kayle "The Judicator," a literal angel of justice.
An interesting distinction though as Kayle, although superficially an ally of Demacia (as her dark sisterMorgana is allied with their rivals Noxus), appears to place her final allegiance with the League as the arbiter of law on Valoran (placing her on the "Law Before Good" end of the Lawful Good scale). Demacia on the other hand acts out of an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness in opposing the "evil" of Noxus — a column by a Demacian writer in the Journal of Justice argued, not that Demacia was not responsible for breaking the cease-fire with Noxus or that they had been framed, but that they were justified in attacking the Noxians in Kalamanda, citing their moral superiority and quoting a section of Demacian Creed that is honestly rather scary:
"In our eternal forward march, we must stomp out evil all across Valoran wherever it may grow. Leave no stone unturned: the roots of one ignored weed will inevitably corrupt the whole of the garden."
Know When to Fold 'Em: Teams can vote to forfeit a game with the Surrender option, provided that all (or all but one) team members agree to do so. Since there is no downside to surrendering apart from losing, teams will often do this when a match is no longer considered worth fighting so that they can move on (perhaps to start another game).
Lampshade Hanging: Katarina used the British pronunciation of the word 'Macabre' (Muh-cahb-RUH) in the earlier stages of the game. When her voice actor was changed, she was given a new joke that subtly called attention to this.
Alistar the Minotaur from those he knows. As a species; it's implied there are other minotaurs.
Skarner the Crystal Vanguard fits this to a T. One of his quotes; "I miss my kind." However in case you couldn't tell from his name he isn't the last, he is just the first of his kind to wake up.
Technically, Twitch the Plague Rat is the first of his kind, as are Blitzcrank the Steam Golem and Rammus the Armordillo.
Large Ham: Some champions fall in this category, most notably Demacian ones. The way they scream "DEMACIA!" has reached Ascended Meme status.
Draven, so very much.
Not Draven, Draaaaaaven.
Jayce as well, which fits his pulp super hero aesthetic nicely.
Lead The Target: Unless your opponents are standing still, you must get good at this to effectively use any skillshot-dependent champions. Taken to its logical extreme by Ezreal, Ashe, and Draven, whose ultimate abilities can fly across the map to doom an enemy champion... but the shot requires large amounts of this.
All champions talk to their summoner in the game. Since the players act as summoners, this can lead to some playing with this trope as some champions remark about things that don't always make sense in-universe.
Mordekaiser: You only need to click once, fool.
Akali: So many noobs. Will matchmaking ever find true balance?
The 7th issue of the Journal of Justice has an interview of Mundo, in which he says he has opened a business, amongst other things. "Corporate businessman one of the many skins Mundo wear. Mundo also bodybuilder." Those sentences are interpretable literally, since those are skins you can buy to use for him.
Skin and champion sale announcements on the official forums are done by the champions themselves using one of their skins as inspiration for their persona.
Unless you are a tank, in which case plowing straight into the enemy team may cause them to panic and unload their most powerful abilities on your indestructible shell. Even if they kill you in the process, you just soaked up a lot of damage for your team (assuming they are actually on the ball and following behind you) and you are well on your way to winning the teamfight. Bonus points if you get hit with five ultimates at once and survive.
Also, unless you are Karthus. His passive procs when he dies, allowing him to cast spells with no mana cost and no interruptions for seven seconds before he actually dies for good. His ultimate is a spell that channels for three seconds and then does damage to everyone on the enemy team. Needless to say, in a team fight he's probably more useful dead than alive.
Figuratively, this happens unintentionally every once in a while. Being a competitive game, there are no deliberately bad or overpowered champions, but most players are well aware of which champions, items and summoner spells are weak. Every once in a while a new strategy emerges that employs one of those "useless" features to devastating effect. Just ask any veterans about Evelynn.
Most examples involve radically different builds for champions who are usually only built one way. AD Carry Lux (normally played as an AP nuker) is one, thanks to her passive damage marks, long range autoattack, and slow/snare spells.
Level Grinding: The start of every match involves this, but to a lesser extent than DotA, which (in general) took twice as long to complete a match in as this game. Solo-laners will probably reach the level cap of 18 in just about 20 minutes.
You have to grind for gold to buy items, also. Learning to get the final blow on enemy minions is really vital.
Forced Level Grinding: Not as much as one would think, as players can group up and heavily damage towers at all levels with minion assistance. Towers can fall in less than 10 minutes. It is far easier at higher levels and with better items, though, and they will still have to watch out for the enemy team.
Lightning Bruiser: Many, many melee champions are capable of becoming this. Those that aren't meant to be are usually Glass Cannons with tanky builds or Mighty Glaciers that add speed through abilities or items.
Warwick combines both speed and power with the ability to detect enemies with low health and move faster when they're nearby.
Akali has an ultimate that lets her leap to an enemy up to three times, ensuring that she'll almost always be next to you. That, combined with the fact that she heals off of every attack, makes her difficult to get away from.
Even better, Udyr the Animal Spirit. His Bear Stance gives him a speed boost and causes his attacks to stun enemies briefly, allowing him to switch to his Tiger Stance and deal massive amounts of damage to his next target. Udyr started off a series of lengthy champion designs that have now come to be known as "Bruisers" by Riot dev team and "tanky-DPS" amongst fans. Some characters like Dr. Mundo were retroactively fitted into this category. Generally consisting of great defenses, offenses, and a distance-closing ability they were the dominant archetype for a long time in early 2011.
If Jax gets to you, you're in trouble. With his Leap Strike, that can happen a lot.
Wukong is a very fast and tricky character, with his decoy and leap (Nimbus Strike) being a very easy way to gain an advantage. He also becomes a very hard hitter later as well.
Renekton's playstyle involves bumrushing enemies and constantly spamming his abilities; having a double dash fits right in with this.
Skarner pulls this off because one of his spells gives him a temporary shield and boosts his movement speed. With the right items he's a very scary jungler.
Irelia fills this role well, with her refreshable dash, natural crowd control reduction, high damage and stun/slow.
Rammus will roll out of nowhere at high speed, crash into you while you hide under a tower and destroy you with his combo of status effects, huge armour buffs from key items and abilities as well as a mountain of Ao E/Aura/Returned/Bonus damage. Just to make matters worse he'll have close to 77%-81% physical damage reduction and high health at the time so pray someone with a stun is close by to save you because he'll be shrugging off those tower hits. God help you if your Flash is on cooldown and he has the Exhaust and Ignite summoner spells.
Pantheon moves quickly, but his attack speed isn't usually built especially high. Instead, he slowly stabs until he decides that you need to die. At that point his standard burst is to lob a spear at you, leap on you with a stun, stab you three times in rapid succession, and then hurl another spear at you. Then maybe set you on fire. If he's using his ult you can replace the first spear with falling out of the sky, spear first, from a quarter of the map away, then leaping on you with the stun before he's even targetable.
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Zigzagged. Both mages and fighters scale with items. A caster with average scaling will have around the same damage output as a fighter with equally expensive builds, although mages' damage is delivered in short bursts, while fighters' is constant. Played straight with mages with good scaling, inverted with hard carries.
While all characters are different, this is generally inverted for the DPS classes. Casters tend to have very powerful base damage for their spells, but become less useful later in the game due items that give resistance to magical damage, or outright negate spells. Meanwhile physical damage characters like Tryndamere can become unstoppable simply if the game lasts long enough for them to get a full item build.
It depends. DotA tradition indicates that mages are very powerful early on and weapon users become very powerful in the end game. This is true for traditional mages (Annie) and carries respectively. However, there are also weapon users that dominate the early game but scale poorly, like most bruisers (tanky dps); assassins are heavily based around the early game; and there are even some mage carries (notably Veigar) that are expected to farm the first 30 minutes and then rock the house. Of course this delicate balance is offset by the efforts of the developers to reduce average game length and time spent farming, so a few balance changes will be needed.
Technically, the trope is inverted - casters scale on only one stat, ability power, while physical damage characters scale on damage, attack speed and crit chance, all of which apply multiplicatively. In practice, this is balanced fairly well and only in extremely long games where champions reach their perfect final build do physical damage champions noticeably outstrip casters who scale well.
You can have something of a "step-function tank" using Atma's Impaler, an item which converts HP into attack damage - buying one of these on a champion stacking HP can take them from low attack damage to something pretty substantial.
Of course, any way you slice it LoL handles this trope better than most other MOBA games because of its most significant innovation in the genre- Ability Power. In most of its rivals, mages ability damage generally cannot scale at all, causing their late game drop-off to be FAR more extreme than in LoL, but LoL actually manages to have "AP carries" such as Cassiopeia, Ahri, Ryze, Karthus and Brand thanks to AP scaling.
The Load: Anybody who's a "feeder" — that is, getting killed by the enemy without scoring any kills or assists in return. An alternate definition from the forums: getting killed more often than one's combined total of kills and assists-in-other-people's-kills.
This is a common insult for anyone that does not appear to be getting much kills, even if they are playing a support or tank character and intentionally holding back to let the carry have the kills and/or unable to do enough damage fast enough to get kills even if they tried.
Loads and Loads of Characters: The game launched with 40 champions, and is going on strong. The current pattern is a patch and a new character every month or so. There are over a hundred characters now.
Loads and Loads of Loading: You download the downloader that downloads the installer, the installer installs the game, then you run the launcher that downloads patches and launches the client that launches the game. If you want to play on EU with an US client and vice versa, though, you can also grab a fan made client launcher launcher launcher.
In almost every game there's that one guy that takes roughly five minutes to load the game so everyone has to wait and mentally sling curse words at the slowpoke. In the worst case, it takes so long that he disconnects from the game, leaving his team a man short. For obvious reasons this only happens to your team.
Part of the reason for this is actually because the game, like Sins of a Solar Empire, was designed to have low system requirements, so it was able to be played on most computers available on the market.
Loners Are Freaks: Exaggerated Trope for yordles - they require far more social interaction with their own kind than humans do, and so are generally kind and benevolent. If they are isolated from their own kind too long, they risk becoming sullen. If they already have a tendency toward immorality, they will become sadists; Veigar providing an extreme example of this (well, sorta).
Loot Drama: Only the person scoring the last hit gets "kill" credit and the gold reward, everyone else shares a lesser pool of gold for assisting. Predictably this causes accusations of "kill-stealing", even in hectic fights where it's less obvious who was just dealing damage like everyone else and who came in and purposefully sniped it.
Lord British Postulate: "Poros" are small furry creatures which appear on the Howling Abyss map that are cannot be selectable as targets and cannot be attacked by players by any means... but they'll move away from you if you approach them, and the lazer beam of death protecting a side's summoner platform can kill them when they end up within its range.
Luck-Based Mission: For most public matches, you don't get to choose who your teammates are.
Aside from players, chance manipulation is made key in-game through every champ having a chance to critical attacks. (Which can be increased) Dodge used to be part of the game but was removed because it was too random; and one character (Jax) was too overly-dependent on it.
Gangplank's ultimate ability used to cause cannonballs to strike randomly in a target area, damaging and slowing anything hit by the cannonballs. The area used to be so large that every cannonball could miss hitting anything entirely (which is when YOU used it), or have every cannonball smash your face into the dirt. (Which was typically when you were playing against Gangplank.) It was changed to be much more reliable with a smaller ability area that the cannonballs drop on, and having the slow being applied constantly from standing in the ability's area rather than happening from being hit by a cannonball.
Mundo is so mad he ended up creating the monstrosity you see as a champion now from experimenting on himself.
Viktor is a truly brilliant roboticist... who became so obsessed with retaining credit for his work after it was stolen from him that he replaced parts of his own body with mechanical enhancements.
The "prevailing scholar" of Zaun, Professor Stanwick Pididly, who enabled Urgot to come back as an undead warrior, by essentially building him a new body with mechanical crab legs, a plasma cannon and pneumatic claw for hands.
Mage Killer: You have your usual assortment of traditional casters that are fielded in the middle lane. Then you have some champions whose kits make them excellent at shutting down mages in general (whether they are mages themselves or not).
Kassadin was designed specifially for this role, having a long-range silence, a spammable teleport, and an in-built magic damage dampener. He excels at very quickly silencing and closing the gap between him and his opponent, inflicting damage, then teleporting out. Oddly enough, though he is melee and was intended to have versatile builds, one of his most prominent is being a mage himself.
Talon is an AD assassin who too has a silence and a blink in a single move, removing both advantages a caster has on him, to which he is free to use his combo to heavily burst then a cloaking ultimate to escape from retaliation. It helps that most casters plan to build Magic Resistance instead of Armor, forcing them to either change items or be vulnerable.
Galio is a tank who is often fielded in the middle lane for this purpose. His passive converts half his Magic Resist stat into AP, so players often abuse this by stacking MR in order to negate a large portion of an enemy mage's burst and still do high amounts of damage in return. As if this wasn't enough, one of his abilities greatly increases his Armor and Magic Resist for a few seconds on top of healing him each time he takes damage. Highly useful for surviving a full burst combo with minimal health loss.
Veigar fulfills this role despite being a straight caster himself. His ultimate ability is a single-target nuke that scales off of both his AP *and* his opponent's. While it'll barely dent a tank and do moderate amounts of damage to an AD-heavy champion, it stands a good chance of obliterating half of a rival mage's life or more.
Magikarp Power: any champion described as a "carry," and especially a "hypercarry," falls into this category. The point of a "carry" is to, well, carry their team to victory, and they have above-average stat growth to aid this; to compensate, their starting stats are crappy. The result is a Difficult, But AwesomeFuture Badass. (Most champions that work on exponential growth curves this way, but carries really embrace it.)
The Dangerously Genre Savvy player would probably advocate filling an entire team with carries. This is less of a good idea than it sounds. A carry is hideously vulnerable to interference during the early game, and requires at least one ally to Meat Shield for him while he level-grinds in peace. Additionally, the other team is just as Genre Savvy and will target him—even the bots do this—because they know that they can force him to be The Load instead. See also Crutch Character above.
Nasus and Veigar recieve special note here. Most carries scale into the late game by getting better items. Veigar and Nasus, however, can scale without items. Veigar's basic low-cooldown damage ability will give him extra ability power whenever he kills an enemy with it, including minions. Nasus' basic low-cooldown damage ability does more damage for each target it has killed. While fairly weak early game, a well-farmed Veigar or Nasus is capable of absurd amounts of damage late-game, as their power scales off of more than just items or levels.
The Magnificent: Each champion has a title that applies to them examples of such:
Garen, the Might of Demacia.
Katarina, the Sinister Blade
Irelia, the Will of Blades
Twisted Fate's legendary skin is actually called The Magnificent Twisted Fate.
Mana Meter: Most champions use mana when they cast abilties. Both their total mana reserve and the rate at which it replenishes itself increase with champion level and items. There are some exceptions and variations on the theme:
Akali, Shen, Kennen, Lee Sin, and Zed use Energy, which has a fixed cap and regeneration rate. The cap is low, but the regeneration is high, putting a limit on how many abilities they can cast if they don't space them out. This is somewhat alleviated by how they all have effects from using their abilities which help them restore energy faster - also usually tied to spacing their abilities out to be able to best benefit from it.
Tryndamere, Renekton, and Shyvana all use the Fury resource very differently. About the only consistent features are that it generates when they attack an enemy and they can expend it in a way to enhance at least one of their abilities.
Rengar has Ferocity which is similar to Fury, but increases from using abilities, caps out much more quickly, and his empowered abilities have a cooldown independent from his basic abilities, allowing him to use an ability twice in quick succession with Ferocity-use.
Instead of draining mana, Rumble gains Heat whenever he uses one of his abilities and his abilities get a boost if he has enough. If he maxes out, though, he overheats and is briefly silenced, giving his attacks a little extra punch until he cools down.
Garen, Katarina, and Riven don't use any resources and are completely reliant on cooldowns to cast their abilities. Riven also has a mini-resource in her passive, which is given from casting her abilities and are expended on autoattacks to do extra damage - but the passive is only expended once per autoattack and its charges only stacks up to three times while casting every one of her abilities in total grants the passive seven times, encouraging the player to autoattack in between casting their abilities rather than using everything at once and waste a lot of potential damage.
Master Swordsman: Garen, Yi, Irelia... to keep this list short, if a champion uses X weapon, they sure as hell are a master of it.
Cranked Up to Eleven with Jax, who is such a master of everything, that he was undefeatable. To make him equal to others, he was saddled with special restrictions to fight under. In protest, he tossed aside his arms and began using a brass lamppost as a weapon, and still kicked ass with it. Even when the restriction was lifted, he continued using the lamppost as a self imposed handicap.
That being mostly Chuck Norris type meme going in the league as multiple skins (one having a battleaxe other a mace/morningstar) show him with real weapons and most items being some kind.
Metagame: Changes all the time with new patches and characters. They're seperate between the servers' regions, even. Champions can be considered useless on one of the servers and overpowered on the other.
Mirror Match: Possible in Blind Pick matches, moreso if a certain champion is popular at the moment (just released, flavor of the month, etc.). Averted by Draft Pick (normals) and ranked games which use a different selection system that only allows one team to have a given champion.
Min-Maxing: This is what Runepages (and, to a lesser extent, Masteries) are for.
Mook Chivalry: Sort of. When playing against bots, if a player disconnects, one of the bots will cease activity and stay at their spawn point.
Morality Kitchen Sink: Very close to Grey and Gray Morality. Demacia, Noxus and Zaun are all neutral. Demacia is a fascist state, Noxus is a meritocracy whose people believe power goes to the ones who do what it takes to get it, and Zaun of insane mages, chemists, and bureaucrats. Zaun's total lack of lawful regulation may have turned the city into an industrial hellhole, but its respect for the freedom of all sentient creatures led it to grant Blitzcrank autonomy when golems were still considered mere property everywhere else. And in Noxus, where all are protected under the law note Some, admittedly, significantly so more than others, the sort of rhetoric common to Imperialist Europe is used to justify invading and "civilizing" other nations. Demacia is a citystate that, despite being militaristic and nationalistic, is really supposed to be trying to extol and display the values of justice and benevolence to the people of Valoran. Bandle City, Ionia, Freljord are either neutral or good with Piltover being one of completely pure intentions, and there are also unaffiliated purely evil creatures from the Void, and purely good creatures, like Soraka and Kayle.
More Dakka: Tristana's rapid fire quickly approaches this.
Heimerdinger can also do this with both of his turrets.
So is Corki's Gatling Gun.
Twitch's Spray and Pray used to be a poisonous-crossbow example of this.
Miss Fortune is all over this trope, especially in her Make It Rain and Bullet Time.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena: Trope Namer. The term MOBA was coined by Riot Games for League of Legends as a marketing term specifically because everybody referred to the genre as "DotA clones" and they didn't want their game always being compared to DotA.
One very particular reversal of this trope: if one of the humans doesn't manage to connect to the server, a bot will obligingly stay at home, turning the match into a 4v4. Human opponents, whose rules do not include this kind of chivalry, will happily use the edge in numbers to their advantage.
In bot games, it can cross over with The Looine, who uses builds for characters that aren't even what the metagame would come up with. A good example is an orianna (An area control mage who's dependent on her pet) taking items that only take advantage of her clockwork windup (effective turning her into a ranged autoattacker Glass Cannon).
Non-Indicative Name: The "First Win Of The Day" bonus, which doesn't calculate by calendar date but rather by how long it's been since your last win. It's not a day bonus either: as of the 10 May 2010 update, it refreshes every 22 hours!
Damage dealers that are strong early game but fade late are referred to as 'Tanky DPS' characters. While most of them are indeed tough, the name is still applied to characters like Kayle or Riven that skew towards being a Glass Cannon.
In general, many players agree the Riot's application of their tags toward champion categories... isn't very good. For instance, most players would be surprised to find out that Blitzcrank and Leona (widely considered to be ideal aggressive supports) are in fact classified as fighters.
Odd Name Out: The attack damage basic items have a Long Sword item as the cheapest, a B.F. Sword as the most expensive... and a Pickaxe in between the two.
Off Screen Teleportation: literally, with the Teleport summoner spell. More subtly in that stealth characters that have gone missing while cloaked could be anywhere. Maybe that Evelynn just beelined across the map towards you. Maybe she's standing right behind you waiting for you to make one wrong move. Or maybe, while you are cowering at your tower so she can't kill you, she's merrily farming the dragon or even in town.
This is actually an Averted Trope comparing the champions together. Even champions who could later kill the entire enemy team alone if they all just used auto-attack require help from other champions because there's a lot more to the game then just those statistics. Players who think they can win the game alone just end up feeding and eventually losing.
Our Elves Are Different: Runeterra has all sorts of supernatural creatures, monsters and gnomes, but what it does not have is elves. The two pointy-eared characters are explicitly not elves.
Over Drive: Blitzcrank has a move called this. It allows him to run at high speed and significantly boosts his attack speed while it's active.
It used to inflict a speed reduction for a short duration after Overdrive ran out... called Underdrive.
Parental Abandonment: You could probably count on one hand the number of champions that have a surviving parent. Then again, most parents probably wouldn't want their kids to grow up and enter a League where all you do is kill and get killed over and over again.
Also most champions are older. So there is either they took a while to get the skills they needed (presumably Lee Sin would be in such a situation) got their skills at an early age because of living without parents (Talon) or their parents were related to politics (The DeCouteau family is noticeably missing the father.)
Perpetual Beta: Sort of. The game is in its official release, but it's patched roughly every two weeks. This will probably only end if the game's plug was pulled entirely. Being a PC-multiplayer game (As well as Riot's sole product), along with the Loads and Loads of Characters that are always being re-balanced against each other to prevent a Game Breaker, this was probably expected.
Pigeonholed Voice Actor: Some of the lesser known voice actors often voice champions with very common playstyles. Most famous is Adam Harrington who voices Mage focused champions and J.S Gilbert (most well known as Needles Kane) voices dumb muscle with devasting attacks. Then there is Karen Strassman and her cooldown based champions who is the unofficial Half-Human Hybrid voice actress of the League.
Play Every Day: You get an extra 150 IP from winning once every 22 hours.
Poor Communication Kills: One of the most avoidable ways lose a match is to fail to communicate with your team. Your lane opponent went missing? Let everyone know. About to initiate a fight? Ping your target so everyone can follow up. An unguarded tower is being sieged? Speak up!
Riot has taken note of how cumbersome it is to type some important messages (particularly if one is already under attack) so they implemented "smartpings" so calling "missing", asking for help, etc. can be done much faster.
Power of the Void: There are two champions who draw their power from this, and there are three who are FROM there. And you had better fear them, too; all of them have relatively high difficulty ratings, and all, except one, are relatively fragile, but beware them in the hands of a good player.
A good Malzahar will harass and farm from outside the range of most champions, and will also be able to bring a player from full to death in less than three seconds.
A good Kassadin is nigh-impossible to catch thanks to his blink ultimate on one of the lowest cooldowns in the game.
A good Kha'zix will appear out of nowhere, slice you apart, and then dissapear back to whence he came.
A good Cho'gath will be nigh-unkillable and incredibly disruptive, not to mention fill up a good portion of your screen.
And finally a good Kog'maw will be like a living minigun with the range of artillery that you won't ever get to thanks to his slows.
Power Trio: The three ninjas of the Kinkou are one.
Practical Taunt: Rammus, Shen, and Galio have useful taunt abilities that force enemies to attack them for a few seconds. Tryndamere is a special case in that his Mocking Shout reduces nearby enemy champions' attack damage and slows them if their backs are turned, letting him more easily catch up with you.
Precision-Guided Boomerang: Sivir's main gimmick. She has a blade similar to that of the Huntresses from Warcraft 3, and she can gain the ability to both toss it a long distance and have it return, dealing damage along the way, as well as the ability to make it bounce off of enemies she targets onto other, nearby enemies when she uses a normal attack.
Lux can throw her wand like a boomerang, casting a shield on herself and every allied player it touches.
Draven's axes can fly across the entire map and return to him after they hit the map's wall or another champion.
The players themselves need to maintain vigilance at all times. When an enemy hero is visible, their icon shows up on the minimap... but there's Fog of War to consider. Ever since the meta-game pretty much mandated a jungler on every team, there's an ever-present fear of being ganked at any time during the laning phase (unless the enemy jungler is visible and likely attacking someone else).
Some champions have Invisibility Cloaks, like Teemo, Evelynn, Shaco and Twitch: they are always missing, and you have no idea why. Some players get annoyed if you spam them with numerous warnings; others get annoyed if you don't.
When there is a Fiddlesticks in the game, and he just hit level 6 and walked into a patch of tall grass, you may want to call mia and keep your distCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAW
Even worse, Nocturne, whose ultimate (aptly named "Paranoia") decreases all opponents' sight radius and removes shared vision, so that nobody knows who's getting ambushed until the announcer pipes up. He then has a homing teleport he can use on any character in range he sees. The range for lower levels of the ultimate is fairly small, but at level 3 he can hop across about 1/4th the map to get to you.
Most players won't even try to engage Baron Nashor (a huge, strong, neutral monster that gives multiple buffs when defeated) unless at least a couple of the enemy's players are dead. It generally only takes one time for players to get ganked while at Baron for them to never make that mistake again.
Proud Warrior Race Guy: Many of the champions, but especially Tryndamere the Barbarian King.
Pantheon, for sure: "They disgrace the art of war!"
Red Oni, Blue Oni: The warmongering Noxus is Red, Ionia and Demacia are Blue with spiritual enlightenment and pursuit of justice, respectively.
Red Shirt Army: The minions, which spawn and die in droves. "Stay behind the minions" is one of the elementary rules of strategy, since one of their primary purposes is to draw turret fire away from the champions.
Originally Yordles and Meglings were seperate races — the tiny Yordles varied from somewhat animalistic little critters like Teemo to gnome-looking fellows like Heimerdinger and Corki, while Meglings were equally tiny, blue-skinned and white-haired, but otherwise humanoid. This was eventually retconned to make Tristana and Poppy Yordles as well, with "Megling" becoming the name of the Yordle commando unit that Tristana belonged to. Word Of God is that this change was made because players would be confused by two species of tiny humanoids at once.
The lore entries of many champions have changed over the years, some in slight details, others in major character overhauls.
The name of the tribe of warrior mountain-dwellers to which champions Pantheon and Leona changed from the Stanpar to the Rakkor, most likely to make the parallels to the Greek Spartans a little less obvious.
Required Secondary Powers: Heavily skill shot related champions you can not lag while playing as, and if you're playing against someone like Morgana, Cassiopeia, Ahri and Karthus, you better not lag, and if you are, better hope they are lagging or terrible at their abilities.
Poros◊ appear on the Howling Abyss map, who are tiny furry ball-shaped animals with goat-like features huge tongues that they frequently stick out like a dog. They were added to the map because playtesters thought the map was just a bit too dark and serious.
Trinity force. it costs (rounded down) 3000 gold to buy it without the ingredients, has 3 ingredients directly in its construction, raises 3 stats mainly (attack damage, speed, and crit chance), and if you have all components it costs 3 gold, it's description is three words: "Lots of damage".
Rule 34: Compared to every MOBA Game out there, League Of Legends is well known for it's rule 34 and a doujin dedicated to it...god help us when Japan properly gets League of Legends with their own seiyuus voicing the game.
Schizo Tech: Despite being a fairly magic heavy fantasy world, the Lore journals reveal that Runeterra is actually pretty technologically advanced above and beyond their magical capabilities. For instance, the Journal of Justice reveals that there have been dirigible races for the last 16 years with ships, at the smallest, being 27 meters. Such ships are worked on by both mages and engineers as one ship was modified by a chrono mage to be faster.
Schmuck Bait: Walking into brushes, or "face-checking" is considered a very bad idea when an enemy champion is missing but nearby. As a rule, by the time you realize it might be a trap, it's too late.
Chasing Singed when he's at low health is exactly what he wants you to do. Teemo too.
Some players have made Schmuck Bait into an art form. For instance, if you see an enemy recall in a conspicuous and vulnerable position, either you are playing against inexperienced people, or he's baiting you into a trap.
Ship Tease: Lyte, the Northern shopkeeper on the Howling Abyss and Ezreal's uncle, will sometimes ask Ezreal about his relationship with Lux. This picture posted on the official forums of Ezreal's desk has a sketch of what appears to be Ezreal and Lux in the lower left corner, but it was moved when readers started asking about it.
Series Mascot: Most promotional art and advertising features the "classic" champions but Ryze and Katarina tend to take front-and-center focus.
Sex Sells: A common complaint on the forum is that any new, upcoming female champ with questionable choices in clothing means that Riot is concentrating way too much on Fanservice. This became less prevalent later in the game's history, to the point where any given female champion is just as likely to be dressed sensibly as skimpily.
Shaped Like Itself: Somewhat amusingly, League of Legends didn't actually have, you know, leagues until February 2013. The competitive scene got a revamp by placing summoners in leagues, within which exist tiers (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, and challenger) of players with similar skill level. This was to replace the old ELO system of matchmaking.
As for the Legend part, players achieving up to 10 consecutive kills in a game without dying are announced as being "Legendary!". The game also tends to make individuals who have a Crowning Moment of Awesome feel like they are legends too.
Shoot the Medic First: Why you don't see many people playing healing-focused supports. More common are supports that are either tanky (Taric, Leona, Thresh) or can also deal damage or carry (Teemo, Lux) than the actual medics (Soraka, Sona).
This is more true in the laning phase when killing the support makes the enemy carry much more vulnerable, since he/she isn't strong enough to do much about it yet. It probably won't work by the late-game if the ranged carries are farmed up though and the teams are well-positioned, since spending your time and abilities to target the people which don't do much damage while ones that do a lot hit you with impunity is likely suicidal.
Small Girl, Big Gun: Tristana is almost more gun than Megling Gunner. If you count the ammo she carts around, she probably carries more in weaponry than she weighs.
Miss Fortune's pistol barrels are thicker than her arms.
The Smurfette Principle: Highly averted, in comparison to other games in the genre — at least a third of the roster is female. This is exceptional compared to its competitors. Although notably, although there are female champions with heavy survivability, none of the female characters was a dedicated tank (until Leona, anyways). There also wasn't a melee female carry until Fiora.
Sock Puppet: A special form exists in this game. There are people who not only make accounts to keep at a permanently low level so they can beat newbies very easily, but also to sabotage other games because they won't lose anything if they get banned.
Anyone doing this still beware. The Tribunal will find their actual accounts and ban those too.
Songs In The Keyof Panic: In Dominion, the music slowly intensifies as a team's nexus drops below certain levels of health. There's even a special section that only plays if both nexuses are at 25% health.
The Howling Abyss also features this; as towers fall, the music gains pace and more instruments start playing.
Spin Attack: Katarina's Death Lotus. Rammus' Powerball. Renekton's Cull the Meek. Tryndamere's Spinning Slash. Wukong's Cyclone. Now who could I be forgetting...
A number of individual champions are also Spiritual Successors to their Dot A predecessors; Ashe to Drow Ranger, Blitzcrank to Pudge, Twitch to Clinkz, Hecarim to Spirit Breaker, Varus to Windrunner, Shyvana to Dragon Knight, Twisted Fate to Nature's Prophet, Karthus to Zeus, Nidalee to Enchantress, Nocturne to Spectre, Corki to Gyrocopter, and so forth.
Squishy Wizard: Many of the mages, particularly Annie and Veigar. An aversion are the "Battle Casters", which are hybrid melee and spell-slingers and good at everything but Master of None. Even more averted by the ones who can heal others, including themselves. A careful player who can heal may rarely have to return to base aside from buying items.
Slow: Two different slows (one ice-based, the other for all other types)
The less standard ones include Snare/Immobilize (which holds you in place but you can still attack), Knockback (enemy is effectively stunned but also forced to move in a certain direction by the dictates of the ability. This is a rather dramatic effect), Knockup (like stun, but cannot be removed or reduced by anything - as a drawback, they generally do not have durations much higher than one second and tend to have significantly higher cooldowns than stuns), and Suppression (which is effectively Stun, but is unable to be removed by anything other than Quicksilver Sash).
Step Into The Blinding Fight: Nocturne's ultimate "Paranoia" turns the whole map dark blocking the enemy team's sight of their enemies and each other for 4 seconds. During this time Nocturne can choose one of the enemies and launch himself at him/her, attacking from the darkness.
Stop Helping Me!: Several Champions in the game possess abilities that, when used correctly, are devastating and clinchers, but when used poorly, can save an enemy from death or make their efforts at killing your allies easier. This has become a bit of a meme in the community, usually to the tune of "I'm _________! I'm helping!" To name a few;
Jarvan IV's Cataclysm
Alistar's Headbutt
Anivia's Crystallize
Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab
Gragas' Explosive Cask
Janna's Monsoon
Lee Sin's Dragon's Rage
Singed's Fling
Volibear's Rolling Thunder
For the record, sending an enemy carry flying toward your team so that they can dispatch him/her is good. Doing the same for an enemy initiator, tank, or anyone who *wants* to get closer is bad.
Unskilled, but Strong: In terms of gameplay, Mordekaizer is this. His high damage scaling and multiple attack spells means he can dish out a lot of damage over a moderate amount of time to a moderate area, however he has few to no escape options or enemy zoning options in his kit, meaning that without any form of support he's fairly useless should the enemy simply decide to run away or needs to get away himself.
Stripperiffic: Almost every non-Yordle female. Worst offenders:
Janna's clothes can be summed up as two long pieces of cloth covering just her chest and privates. When you send her to attack somebody, she responds "Stop looking at me like that!"
Evelynn is essentially a blue-skinned cloaking dominatrix who gets pleasure from the deaths of her enemies. If you buy one of her skins, she loses the blue and becomes a human female in black leather.
Nidalee wears a Fur Bikini has a dance where she pole dances on her spear. There is even a skin for her that dresses her in a french maid costume instead of her furry jungle outfit. Her cougar form becomes black panther form.
Kayle is a notable aversion: she wears full plate armor and a helm. Subsequently, people think she's male.
The creators have cited such confusion as the main reason for the other examples here.
Garen's sister, Lux, wears plated armor pieces that don't cover her midriff, thighs and upper arms, but she wears chainmail and blue clothing which covers those areas. This after fan criticism, in which that design lacked that clothing covering her thighs and midriff◊.
Karma is another good aversion, but people can obviously tell she's female.
Not as bad as some examples, but her visual rework◊ certainly shows more leg.
Annie is a child, so she averted that for a long time to reduce creepiness... but the popular fan-made Teen Annie skins often portray her as a skimpily dressed teenager.
Soraka doesn't wear much at all, and there is a Dryad skin if blue doesn't turn you on.
Most of Sivir's armor covers her arms. She's basically wearing a fur bra and a big, jewel-encrusted loincloth.
The Exiled Morgana skin. Angelic and very revealing.
Ruthless Pantheon. Amusing He-Man reference, or eye-candy for the ladies?
Miss Fortune's in-game sprite is practically topless, and almost all of her quotes are a Double Entendre.
Vayne's original aversion of this trope didn't hold true with Dragonslayer Vayne, which bares a midriff and cleavage. Heartseeker Vayne is even worse in this regard.
Ashe and her basic outfit which is similar to Sivir with slightly more clothing (and she lives in the coldest part of Runeterra). Woad and Sherwood Ashe justs amps up the fanservice.
Can't forget about Ahri, Elise, and Battle Bunny Riven, now.
Support Power: Most summoner spells, but especially Heal and Clarity which restore health and mana respectively to all nearby allies.
Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors: An increasingly prevalent view in the metagame is the presence of different carry-support bot lane compositions: "sustain" (focus on healing to stay in lane and farm more), "poke" (harass the enemies until they are softened up or forced back to base), and "kill" (go aggressive and try to get kills early on) types. In theory, sustain beats poke by simply healing back damage done by harassment, poke beats kill by whittling down enemies from afar to the point where attempting to be aggressive is suicidal, and kill beats sustain by inflicting too much damage at once to heal back, hopefully enough to be lethal.
Of course, this is not set in stone since supports can be more than one of the above and many factors including player skill also determine who has the upper hand during in the lane phase.
Taking You with Me: Several characters have something that allows them to do this.
Yorick can bring someone back to life for a short time to try to kill their killer...or anyone else in the area.
Karthas can still cast spells for a short time upon death.
Kogmaw becomes a literal walking time bomb upon death.
Zyra transforms into a giant plant who gets one shot to heavily damage an enemy.
Teeth Clenched Team Work: When you really really hate your teammates during a match for some reason, but are close to winning your team becomes this.
This also happens if you get in a team whose strategy is to faceroll the opponents' team so hard they surrender, and the other team is very stubborn and refuses to surrender. And if you're doing this in a bot game? This will ascend beyond Teeth Clenched Team Work and go into And I Must Scream. Unlike players, bots don't surrender and get items for free, so really, you shouldn't just decide "I'll farm kills cause it's a bot game" Because they will outgear you if you let the game go on too long. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though; if the players who turtled the game decide enough is enough they can always turn 'em around and fight Baron or backdoor them.
This also happens in-universe; some champions are Arch-Enemies (see above) and wouldn't even consider helping each other in any other situation, but if they're picked by allied summoners they're forced to work together in order to win. There's a reason for the magic that prevents champions on the same team from attacking each other.
Riot then released this "spotlight". Game Breaking... no, Game DESTROYING power, a "blurry" screen debuff, and the ability to kill members of your own team who defect to the other side. They released an actual spotlight video shortly after.
Their 2012 prank (a really bad 3D mode) was obvious (made even more so by the Urf cameo at the end), but nonetheless hilarious. Incidentally, they've actually named April Fool's Day "Urf Day."
Thanatos Gambit: Many Karthus players intentionally sacrifice themselves so they can use his passive to take champions down with them. Other times, champs such as Xin Zhao intentionally dive into the fray and allow themselves to die so the team can wreak havoc while they're focusing on them.
Drawing fire from the enemy team is generally preferable the more durable a champion is relative to their allies. The survival of such durable champions tends to be somewhat secondary to their less durable allies surviving. It's not a crucial part of the plan, but it is hardly unexpected...
Title Drop: The Howling Abyss map includes a ghost shopkeeper named Greyor who can have this to say about the map's past:
True Sight: Vision Wards and Oracle's Elixir allows one to see invisible champions and enemy wards in one place and anywhere the user goes, respectively. Regular Sight Wards only reveal the presence of un-stealthed champions.
Two Guys and a Girl: The three Ninja champions of Kinkou are two males and a female; Shen, Kennen and Akali, respectively. They work together to oppose enemies of the balance. Akali is The Lancer who pushes for judgement, Kennen is The Heart who encourages mercy and redemption, and Shen serves as The Hero who makes the final decision.
Unstable Equilibrium: This game, like most MOBA titles, features this quality, particularly via gank loops. If we're laning opposite each other and I kill you, I get a Gold and EXP advantage, not only from ganking you but because you then have to spend upwards of 75 seconds out of the fight (dead, respawning, traveling back up the lane). This G and EXP advantage lets me gain new equipment and abilities with which to repeat the process. When the page refers to a Champion getting "fed", it means that s/he was the beneficiary of this vicious cycle... and because it only has to happen two or three times for the advantage to become insurmountable, the match can be all but over within ten minutes. However, a small relief is that champions on a 3+ kill spree will yield an extra gold bounty upon being killed (referred to as being "shut down" by the announcer). It's not much- it caps at 200 bonus on top of the usual 300 for really, really fed enemies- but it helps.
Tryndamere can go into one of these for a few seconds during which he cannot die. It even says ENDLESS RAGE! ENDLESS RAGE! ENDLESS RAGE! over his head.
Alistar's Unbreakable Will, removinging crowd control effects on him as well as giving him massive damage reduction and attack damage to charge in and lay on the hurt.
Olaf's Ragnarok makes him immune to crowd control effects and directly reduces damage taken by a set amount.
Useless Useful Stealth: For the first three years of the game, the stealth mechanic that assassins Evelynn and Twitch were based around was incredibly problematic, being amazingly overpowered after some patches and almost useless after others (being stealthed meant you were for all intents and purposes, invincible and invisible against anything but skillshots). In 2012, however, the stealth mechanics for Evelynn were fully revamped so that she's visible at close range, making it more of a sneaking mechanic than an invisibleIntangible Man and the long-term stealth on Twitch was removed entirely.
The Usual Adversaries: It seems many champions got where they are because of Noxian generally-underhanded actions either for or against them.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: Some champions are allies with each other or at the least on friendly terms in the lore. And of course if they're on opposite sides you can force them to kill each other over and over again. Go out of your way as Lux to have her kill her beloved brother Garen? Go ahead. You Bastard.
Violation of Common Sense: Some champions fit a particular role or archetype but have playstyles that directly contradict some cardinal rules of playing the role. Graves is a ranged carry whose kit encourages him to get closer to his enemies, Singed is a fighter who does the most damage running away from enemies or even running circles around them, Karthus is a mage who can get away with intentionally dying so that he can cast his spells uninterrupted, etc. Doing this on most other champions of the same type is likely suicide.
Walk It Off: Everyone regenerates health naturally... but to varying degrees of usefulness. Mostly, sticking around with abysmally small amounts of health is suicidal at best and pointless at worst since you'll probably have to stay too far away from enemy minions to actually get experience and last hits.
Special mention goes to Garen who regenerates a small percentage of his HP every second as long as he hasn't taken damage from an enemy champion, turret or neutral monster in the last few seconds.
Weak Turret Gun: Double Subversion. Towers will kill low level champions in only a few hits but as champions get stronger the damage is less of a threat. It gets to the point where many champions can destroy a tower from full health before it can actually kill them.
Wait, why did one of them die? Two? THREE!? Is that a tea kettle I hear? No, it's Singed. And if the enemy is chasing him, not only did your team gain a boatload of free time to knock down a turret or three, but they're likely not too intelligent. Why? Well, Singed LEAVES POISON GAS BEHIND HIM. If you've ever fought a good Singed, you know just how difficult that bastard is to bring down.
There's also Master Yi. If you're building to troll, dunk or just be a distraction, Boots of Mobility and five Phantom Dancers coupled with the might of Highlander might just buy your team the time it needs to take that vital turret/inhibitor down. And you can rest assured that your teammate is likely laughing his ass off.
Furthermore, one basic strategy with Shaco is to wait in a bush and place 5 or 6 jack in the boxes in a bush, then run towards it with an enemy following. Can be made even worse if the enemy has fallen for this before, but is pulled into it by Ahri's charm.
Why Am I Ticking?: Zilean can plant time bombs onto units, including enemy champions. It's very possible to get one of these on you while you're running away and accidentally get a teammate killed if you don't keep your distance.
World War Three: A sort of parallel — according to the August 3rd entry to the Journal of Justice, there were 5 horrific Rune Wars. To avoid another, where Real Life has the United Nations, Runeterra has the League of Legends.
World of Buxom: It would be shorter to try to list the non-Yordle adult females that aren't well-endowed.
Wretched Hive: Zaun and Noxus both qualify. Especially Zaun: sure, they may respect sentience of every type (as evidenced by Blitzcrank's freedom), but it's an industrial cesspool that values science above everything else, including morality, and is loaded with complete sociopaths who are given a free run of the place.
The X of Y: Most champion's subtitles are this if not simply The X.
You Kill It, You Bought It: Instead of randomly-spawning runes in DotA, there are certain neutral creeps scattered about the map which give temporary Status Buffs. If you get killed while wearing one, they pass to your killer, with the sole exception being King Mooks like Baron Nashor; their buffs just disappear if you die.
is a free-to-play Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game and spiritual successor to the widely popular Warcraft 3 custom map, Defense Of The Ancients, and claims to be the most played game in the world. Yes, even more than the behemoth World of Warcraft.Like DotA, League of Legends gives you control of one champion, who has unique attacks and abilities, and sends you out against enemy Mooks and champions to earn experience points and gold. You then attempt to destroy the enemy's base while preventing them from doing the same to you. Behind all this is the surprisingly well-realized Play the Game, Skip the Story hook that "Summoners" do battle with each other by summoning champions and pitting them against one another in gladiatorial combat. Your Player Character is one of those summoners; it is persistent and gains experience with every battle, as opposed to champions who start every match at Level 1. This opens up various customization options which have a practical effect on gameplay: summoners can bring two Support Powers into battle, and have access to "Runes" and a "Mastery" skill-tree to directly improve a champion's stats during gameplay. There is actually a fair bit of back story being developed via the "Journal of Justice," a weekly magazine- or newsletter-type release by Riot Games.League of Legends, like all MOBA games stems from Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars, originally a Warcraft 3 custom map. LoL currently competes with several other games that originate from DotA, including it's own direct sequel, Dota 2. However, LoL has many distinct differences from DotA, most of which simplify the game to some extent. The creators of the game are also heavily pushing for it to become more involved in Professional Gaming, and it has long since eclipsed the original DotA's popularity. Like we said: most played game in the world
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