Quick Answer: Heimerdinger, Tryndamere and Warwick are the top of the mode — not our guess, Riot's. Classic's first balance patch named them the best mid laner, the best champion overall and the best jungler respectively, then nerfed them too gently to dislodge them. Below them sit five champions Riot nerfed harder (Blitzcrank, Twitch, Jarvan IV, Katarina, Nasus), who are still strong but no longer priority picks. Read the methodology before quoting any of it: Riot publishes no winrates for this mode, so the patch notes are the closest thing to data that exists.
Version note: Re-ranked for patch 26.16 (August 12, 2026), Classic's first balance patch, using Riot's official patch notes as the primary source. Roster facts cross-checked against the official League of Legends Wiki's League Classic page, linked inline.
What Riot's First Balance Patch Told Us
Classic shipped with no public stats, so for two weeks every tier list for this mode — including the first version of this one — was 2013 memory plus vibes. Patch 26.16 changed that. Riot doesn't publish winrates, but they explain every balance change, and those explanations name names:
| Riot's words | Champion |
|---|---|
| "the single most performant champion in the game, both in top lane and jungle" | Tryndamere |
| "the #1 support in the game right now, topping all three of win rate, pick rate, and ban rate" | Blitzcrank |
| "the single best-performing mid laner, and he's way up there in top lane, too" | Heimerdinger |
| "the strongest bot laner in the game right now" | Twitch |
| "the best-performing jungler in the game right now" | Warwick |
| "one of the game's strongest junglers" | Jarvan IV |
| "performing much better than she ought to" | Katarina |
| "performing better than he ought to" | Nasus |
| "performing a little better than she ought to" | Janna |
| "our single worst mid laner AND support" | Lux |
| "the worst of all conventional bot laners" | Miss Fortune |
| "one of the very worst mid laners in the game" | Veigar |
| "one of our weakest supports at the moment" | Soraka |
| "one of the weakest junglers" | Skarner |
| "performing worse than he ought to" | Amumu |
| "quite weak at support" | Alistar |
| "faring even worse than his patients" | Dr. Mundo |
| "doing quite poorly at the moment" | Garen |
That list disagreed with our launch rankings in both directions, so the tiers below were rebuilt around it. The three biggest corrections: Heimerdinger, Tryndamere and Warwick were all in our bottom tier and are, per Riot, the three strongest champions in the mode. Our reading of their 2013 kits didn't survive contact with how Classic actually plays. Going the other way, we had Amumu in S-tier and Riot's data has him underperforming.
The ranking rule used below: place each named champion where Riot placed them, then move them down one tier if the patch's nerf was heavy. Everyone Riot didn't name is ranked on Season 3 kit strength, as before — and being absent from a nine-buff, nine-nerf patch is weak evidence of being mid-pack, not proof of it.
The loading screen says it plainly: these are the Classic versions — old kits, old rules, old tier logic. (Screenshot: Riot Games / League of Legends, via the official League of Legends Wiki)
What is LoL Classic? (30 seconds)
League Classic is Riot's permanent Season 3 game mode, launched July 29, 2026: the original Summoner's Rift, old runes and masteries, the S3 item shop, and 60 champions on their old kits. New to the mode itself? Start with the League Classic hub. This page assumes you know what Classic is and just want to know who to pick.
Two roster facts shape every ranking below. The pool is 63 champions, all from the game's earliest years, so many Season 3 terrors (Thresh, Zed, Elise, Vi) simply aren't in the mode yet, which promotes the champions that used to contest them. And champions play their old kits, so your memory of the modern champion can be actively misleading — old Sion, old Taric and old Evelynn are different games entirely (see the champions guide).
S-Tier Champions
Riot's three named top performers, all of whom kept enough after the patch to stay there. Pick them in any draft where they're open:
- Heimerdinger (mid/top) — Riot's "single best-performing mid laner," and their nerf explicitly does not expect to solve it: "We expect him to do well for now, considering how rusty the average player is, and how strong his turrets are." The patch took 2 base attack damage off his turrets, 15 base damage off Micro-Rockets and added a second to his stun cooldown. Play the turret fortress; the counterplay window is now slightly wider, not open.
- Tryndamere (top/jungle) — "the single most performant champion in the game, both in top lane and jungle." He took the patch's heaviest single hit — Bloodlust's bonus AD per Fury dropped from 5 to 3, cutting his maximum bonus AD from 40 to 24 — so he reaches the crit fantasy later. He still gets there, and undying still wins fights that nothing else survives.
- Warwick (jungle) — "the best-performing jungler in the game right now," and the only correction Riot made was base attack speed, .679 to .644. That is the smallest nerf handed to any top outlier in the patch. If you want the strongest thing that is barely different from last week, this is it.
A-Tier Champions
Two groups sit here. First, the champions Riot named as overperformers and then nerfed hard enough to matter:
- Blitzcrank (support) — was the "#1 support in the game," topping win rate, pick rate and ban rate. The patch cut 20 base damage off a rank-1 Rocket Grab, added 2 seconds to its cooldown, pushed Overdrive from 15 to 20 seconds and took 50–100 damage off Static Field. A missed hook now costs real time. Still a fine blind pick, no longer a first-pick priority.
- Twitch (ADC) — was "the strongest bot laner in the game." Riot deliberately made his lane worse to protect his scaling: 2 less base attack damage and a much steeper early Expunge mana cost. Draft him when you expect a long game and have a support who can cover the first fifteen minutes.
- Jarvan IV (jungle) — "one of the game's strongest junglers." Riot left Flag-and-Drag alone and taxed his late game instead, cutting armor per level and Golden Aegis' per-champion shield. Play for the early and mid game.
- Katarina (mid) — "performing much better than she ought to." Death Lotus lost roughly a fifth of its maximum damage, which Riot frames as a bugfix: she was throwing 12 daggers instead of the intended 10.
- Nasus (top) — "performing better than he ought to." Early lifesteal is down and Wither costs 100 mana instead of 80, so bullying him in lane works again — but the infinite stacking is untouched.
Second, the strong Season 3 kits Riot named in neither direction. Absence from the patch isn't a promotion, so they sit a tier below the champions Riot actually measured:
- Kassadin (mid) — the defining ban of the actual Season 3, and the logic hasn't changed: survive to 6, then roam the map at will. The smaller roster means fewer of his historical counters made the cut.
- Twisted Fate (mid) — take him when you want the map, not the lane. Destiny is arguably the strongest ultimate in a mode with slower rotations and no modern wave-clear power creep.
- Lee Sin (jungle) — the S3 jungle king gets the S3 jungle he ruled. Play for early skirmishes and Wriggle's-era duels rather than a farm game.
- Jax (top) — draft him when your team can survive to 40 minutes, which S3 games routinely do. Old itemization (Trinity Force, Guinsoo's) is exactly his wheelhouse.
- Vayne (ADC) — hypercarry logic compounds in a slower mode. Games last longer, peel supports are all in the roster, and true damage ignores the tanks S3 builds produce.
- Amumu (jungle) — still the best teamfight ultimate in the roster, and the patch handed him a real buff package: Cursed Touch now shreds 15/25/35 magic resist for 4 seconds instead of 15/20/25 for 3, and Bandage Toss got a clean 80/140/200/260/320 damage curve. He drops from our launch S-tier anyway, because Riot's data had him underperforming before those buffs landed.
- Others: Ryze, Karthus, Gragas (mid), Malphite, Singed, Olaf (top), Evelynn (jungle), Ezreal, Kog'Maw, Corki (ADC), Sona, Lulu, Leona, Zilean (support).
B-Tier Champions
Solid, playable, situational. Most of the roster lives here, and in a mode with no ranked queue, B-tier is not a reason to skip a champion you love:
Ahri, Alistar, Annie, Anivia, Ashe, Brand, Cho'Gath, Dr. Mundo, Fiddlesticks, Janna, Kayle, Lux, Malzahar, Miss Fortune, Morgana, Nidalee, Nunu, Pantheon, Shaco, Sivir, Skarner, Soraka, Taric, Tristana, Veigar, Wukong.
Reads from inside the pile, patch first:
- Six of these were the patch's biggest buff winners, and Riot named all six as bottom-of-role before the changes: Lux (move speed 330→340, Final Spark cooldown 80/60/40 down from 80/65/50, AP ratio 75%→85%), Miss Fortune, Skarner (Crystalline Exoskeleton cooldown 18→14, plus a Fracture missile-width bugfix from 70 to 120), Soraka (Astral Blessing armor up to 25/50/75/100/125 for 5 seconds), Veigar and Alistar (Triumphant Roar heals allies for 75% effectiveness instead of 50%). They hold B rather than dropping because the buffs are substantial — check back after a patch of play.
- Alistar and Dr. Mundo are the two demotions from our launch list. Riot calls Alistar "quite weak at support" but "pretty decent in both solo lanes," so if you want him, take him top or mid. Mundo got a genuine buff package and is still, in Riot's words, faring worse than his patients.
- Janna was nerfed as the patch's second support target: Monsoon's mana cost doubled to 200/275/350. Ulting for tempo is no longer free.
- Nunu and Shaco reward coordinated play — objective control and early cheese — more than solo queue chaos.
- Anivia and Veigar punish the mode's slower midlane rotations, so pick them into a lane you can hold; both are immobile in a roster full of assassins.
C & D-Tier Champions
Bottom of the list: kits that were already struggling in their own era, or that depend on opponents not knowing 13-year-old counterplay.
Gangplank, Garen, Master Yi, Rammus, Sion, Teemo.
Garen is the only one Riot confirmed, calling him "quite poorly" performing, and he got the buffs to match: base health regeneration 8.2→9.0, Perseverance regenerating 0.5% max health per second instead of 0.4%, and a rank-1 Demacian Justice cooldown of 140 seconds instead of 160. Master Yi quietly got worse — the patch fixed a bug that had his Wuju Style cooldown lower than intended.
Context matters for the rest. Several of these are still fine picks for learning the mode: simple, cheap to execute, and brutal against disorganized games. They rank low because their ceilings collapse against players who remember how to itemize and kite, not because they can't take games. Old Sion is the outlier worth trying — the pre-2014 kit is genuinely strange (see pre-rework kits), and AP shield-detonation builds shock people who've never seen it.
The Three New Champions: Unranked For Now
Akali, Kennen and Shen arrived with patch 26.16 and have no track record in the mode, so they get no tier. What they are:
- Akali (mid/top) — her June 2012 kit, which means Twilight Shroud grants real invisibility plus bonus resistances, and Shadow Dance stores up to three dashes like ammo. Twin Disciplines gives her on-hit magic damage after 20 Ability Power and spell vamp after 10 bonus attack damage, so she wants both stats. Riot's own advice: "Better buy a Pink Ward."
- Kennen (top/mid) — July 2013 kit. Three Marks of the Storm stun, and Slicing Maelstrom damages and marks a random nearby enemy champion several times per second. Playable as a dive-bomb AP carry or an AD auto-attacker.
- Shen (top/support) — April 2013 kit, with the global Stand United shield-and-teleport intact. The version people forget: Vorpal Blade heals Shen and his allies over time whenever they attack a marked target, so he brings sustain the modern Shen doesn't.
All three are energy champions, which is why the same patch added energy Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences to the Classic rune store — buy them before you take these picks seriously. See the builds guide for the rune page.
How We Ranked These Champions (Methodology)
Riot withholds all match data for Classic, notably winrates, explicitly to "preserve gameplay exploration and prevent aggressive metagaming," and third-party stat sites do not track the Classic queue as of this writing. The 26.16 patch notes are the one crack in that wall: Riot explains every change, and those explanations state outright which champions are over- and underperforming. That is a ranked read on 18 champions from the only party that can see the data, and it is the backbone of the tiers above.
Its limits are worth stating. Riot describes performance in words, not numbers, so "one of the game's strongest junglers" and "the best-performing jungler in the game" can't be separated precisely. Every statement describes the mode before August 12, so all of them are now one patch out of date. And a champion Riot didn't mention might be strong, weak, or simply not high enough on the list to touch this cycle. Everything Riot didn't name is ranked the old way: documented Season 3 strength of these exact kits, roster context (63 champions is not 2013's full pool, so missing counters promote some picks and missing teammates demote others), and early community discussion, weighted lightly.
Use it accordingly: treat a one-tier gap as noise and a two-tier gap as signal. Nothing on this page is a winrate claim.
Roster & Mode Updates
- Patch 26.16 landed August 12, 2026 — three champions added, 19 rebalanced, plus a systems pass. Remaining confirmed future additions: Caitlyn, Fiora, Graves, Irelia, LeBlanc, Mordekaiser and Urgot, still without dates.
- The systems changes move picks, not just macro. Turret health rose about 15% while champion damage to turrets now converts 20% of Ability Power instead of 40% — a direct tax on AP splitpushers and tower-melting comps. Jungle camps scale to 5–25% more health after the first clear, so weak-clearing junglers stay weak longer. Early Homeguard is gone and early death timers fell by two seconds at levels 1–8, which softens snowballs without helping the champions who win by snowballing.
- Mode patches. Per the official wiki, Classic "is expected to branch out from the modern version of the game, with patches expected at the same cadence," tuned to preserve the slow-paced design. Re-check this page after any patch that touches champions — and read the rationale text, not just the numbers, because that is where Riot says who is winning.
Wondering what to build on any of these picks? That's the builds guide. S3 itemization differs enough from modern League that the right champion with the wrong build still loses.
One Hit Kill Guides' League Classic coverage was created under Riot Games' "Legal Jibber Jabber" policy using assets owned by Riot Games. Riot Games does not endorse or sponsor this project.