Locke League of Legends: 54% Win Rate, 75% Bans

Locke League of Legends is often described as the most honest assassin Riot has shipped, which makes his release stats look like a contradiction. He had no stealth, no untargetability and no stuns, yet he averaged about 54% in Diamond 2 and above. The honest kit is real, and it is also the reason his balance went wrong.

What Locke League of Legends Changed About Assassin Design

Locke League of Legends is Riot's newest assassin, and he is notable for what he lacks: no stealth, no untargetability and no hard crowd control. That combination makes him an outlier for the class. The creator Vars framed him as the most honest assassin in the game, because the counterplay assassins usually hide from is genuinely available against him.

The reasoning behind that kit is straightforward. Assassins such as Katarina or Rengar frustrate opponents because their supposed weaknesses rarely feel usable, and untargetability and stealth remove the opponent's counterplay window entirely. A champion without those tools should, in theory, give the other player something to do.

Vars names the offenders directly: Zed burning a full screen of distance and an untargetable dash to walk through whatever you throw back, Akali dueling inside Twilight Shroud where she cannot be clicked for half the fight. He lists Katarina, Zed, Shaco, Rengar, Talon and LeBlanc as the champions a large share of the playerbase wishes had never been added.

Locke was supposed to be that champion. The result, according to Vars, was roughly a 54% win rate among players at Diamond 2 and above within the first weeks of launch, with a pick rate of only 5% to 7% and a ban rate north of 75%. Those numbers come from the video's summary of his release window and have not been independently reproduced here.

Riot maintains its own champion balance data through its developer communications, so the video's figures function as creator-reported context rather than official statistics. For a champion with three limiting design rules, the outcome was the opposite of what those rules were meant to produce.

His Release Numbers: 54% Win Rate and a Ban Rate Above 75%

Locke's headline statistic was a win rate around 54% in high Elo, paired with a ban rate above 75% and a pick rate between 5% and 7%. The low pick rate did not mean players were uninterested. It meant three out of every four games ended before anyone could select him.

Vars compares that ban frequency to Season 3 Kassadin, when Kassadin was effectively removed from the draft by bans alone. For scale, the video notes that other recent champions settled around 51% to 53% win rates, and Vars describes roughly a 75% ban rate as one of the highest on record. He also uses Mel, a newer champion who carried a 60% ban rate, as the reference point for "unbelievable" and then points out Locke sat above it. The comparison to Season 3 Kassadin and the 75% ranking are Vars's assessments rather than official positions.

Metric	Locke on release	Recent champions for comparison
Win rate, Diamond 2+	About 54%	51% to 53% typical
Ban rate	Above 75%	Mel at 60% was considered extreme
Pick rate	5% to 7%	New champions normally reach double digits

New champion releases normally climb into double-digit pick rates, since everyone wants to try the new kit. Locke never got there, and the ban rate explains why: the champion could not be selected because he was already removed.

The win-rate gap also widened with skill. In lower brackets, the mechanical demands of landing his full combo kept his performance closer to average. In Diamond 2 and above, where players reliably landed all three nails, the same kit converted into a substantially higher win rate, which is the pattern Riot watches for when tuning high-skill champions.

How Ritual Nails, Soul Ignition and Ashen Pursuit Work

Locke's damage comes from layering several multipliers, which is why his balance failed. Each individual ritual nail deals almost no damage on its own, but landing all three applies a mark detonation that adds a large ability power ratio, and his passive and Ashen Pursuit stack further scaling on top.

Vars describes the total as roughly 500 base damage plus over 200% of ability power from the ability itself, with the passive and Ashen Pursuit adding around another 100% AP ratio. That is approximately triple his ability power in damage before item scaling or base numbers, and the exact values are his account of the release state rather than a published Riot number.

Riot balanced around that number deliberately, for two reasons. First, the damage is all Locke has. A champion like Kha'Zix can fall back on evolved W for poke and tempo, but Locke offers no hit-and-run pattern and no team utility. If he does not execute someone, he is the least relevant champion in the game. Second, hitting the full combo is theoretically hard, so Riot tuned him to still hit hard when a player lands only about 80% of his capacity.

The comparison Vars makes is Evelynn. Her hate spike and Locke's ritual nails work the same way: both carry very high AP ratios on the condition that every component lands. Missing a single nail costs the nail damage and the mark detonation damage that follows it, which is why all three are mandatory. In theory this should give the opponent a window to respond.

In practice, it did not. The slow from the first nail made the second and third nearly guaranteed, and three nails in a row slowed the target enough that Soul Ignition's movement speed plus Ashen Pursuit's gap close made escape close to impossible. Nails can be thrown one after another almost instantly by mashing Q, so a realistic cast lands two to three nails rather than one. Jhin's Curtain Call is the contrast Vars draws: its slow wears off before the next shot, so the shots do not chain the way Locke's do.

Soul Ignition Is What Made Locke So Hard to Trade Against

Soul Ignition gave Locke a defensive option that no other assassin had, which removed the main counterplay window his honest kit was supposed to preserve. The ability granted bonus attack and movement speed and reduced incoming damage, with part of the damage taken during the window refunded as health up to a cap.

Because that refund worked even while he was hard crowd controlled, killing him required more burst than most champions possess in the early game. Vars's shorthand is that you had to kill him twice. He puts it more sharply elsewhere: Locke was a 100-to-zero champion who could not be 100-to-zeroed himself, and a correctly timed Soul Ignition can heal his entire health bar.

Permeant damage is the assassin class's normal weakness. Assassins have no endurance, so whatever they lose in lane stays lost until they recall or die. Against Annie, for example, a player could walk up and land Q-W, and if Locke had pre-activated W first, he refunded the whole exchange. That is lane endurance no other assassin has.

A sustained-damage champion could eventually outlast him, but burst damage is what dominates League's duels, and burst damage is exactly what Soul Ignition was built to absorb. The best answer was persistent damage, from a Master Yi or an AD carry, rather than another burst rotation.

Why Locke Had Almost No Losing Matchups

Locke could not be countered cleanly in lane because he combined long-range poke, burst and sustain in one kit. Ritual nails had a 950 cast range, which let him push and farm from safety against melee champions, while Soul Ignition refunded the damage he took in short trades against mages.

Vars breaks the mid lane into three matchups, and the pattern is the same in each one. The table below reflects his account of the release state, not a measured win-rate matrix.

Opponent type	How the lane played out
Mages	He had the range and mobility to rush them down as early as level two
Other assassins	His burst was higher, and Soul Ignition made him unburstable
Melee fighters	He harassed safely with Q and traded short before committing to an all-in

Once he built a two- or three-kill lead, he was unbeatable in duels and skirmishes. He could lock onto a priority target, blink in, one-shot them, then use Ashen Pursuit to reset onto the next target and the next. Ashen Pursuit resetting on takedown made him, in Vars's words, an infinitely better Katarina.

The counter list was short for a structural reason. Vars argues a champion needed four things at once to beat Locke:

1. Endurance equal to his, either spammable shields like Riven's or heavy sustain like Warwick's.
2. Enough sustained DPS to brute-force through Soul Ignition's refund.
3. Lane pressure strong enough to discourage his engage and match his harass.
4. Chase potential to punish him if he tried to kite away.

Almost nobody in mid lane had all four. A champion with one or two of those traits still lost, because Soul Ignition erased the value of anything short of a full commitment. By mid game the only champions who could trade with him were tanks and dedicated duelists such as Riven, Fiora and Yasuo.

The Two-Sided Locke Experience in Team Fights

Locke's kit produced one of the strangest split experiences in League, where he dominated duels and slivers of the map but often died without a kill in a full five-on-five. Vars describes the classic line of a Locke player going 21/7/3, tearing the map apart, then getting stunned and blasted the moment a real team fight starts.

The cause is the honest-kit tradeoff. Assassins such as Zed or Talon can dive a backline head-on and escape through untargetability, stealth or a delayed damage window. Locke cannot. If he enters a fight a second early, or a second late, his damage window closes and he sits there with nothing left. Vars calls it a pressure swing from Thanos to nothing.

This is the reverse side of the release problem. Riot gave Locke the highest burst margins in the game so he could kill during his narrow window, then gave him Soul Ignition so he could survive long enough to use it. The second concession is what made the first one excessive: it turned a champion who dealt huge damage into one who also refused to die to a single burst rotation.

Locke is also the only assassin who actually gets destroyed in the situations he is supposed to be destroyed in. Five-on-five is where every theoretical weakness becomes real. Annie can stun and blast him before he finishes a rotation, and without stealth or untargetability he has no way to walk through it.

What the Nerfs Changed and What They Did Not

Riot's nerfs lowered Locke's win rate to around a modest 50%, but his ban rate remained near 50% according to Vars. The numbers in this section come from his account of the post-nerf state and had not been independently verified for this article.

The nerfs reduced his damage, which raised the importance of landing all three ritual nails. The problem, in Vars's framing, is that the mechanics that made landing all three easy were left untouched. The first nail applied a slow that made the second easier, and Purgatory's wide-area 99% slow could open the engage from range.

So the ban rate stayed high for a coherent reason. Players ban what they do not want to play against, and after the nerfs Locke still punished the same mistakes in the same way. He became easier to punish in return, but the situations where he won still looked identical from the receiving end. In the matchups where he should win, he still wins, and in the matchups where he should lose, he now does.

The earlier problem was different: he was winning in spots where he was not supposed to. Riot moved him from overpowered toward appropriately punishing without addressing the structural cause. The damage was never the load-bearing problem on its own. The problem was that the compensation for his missing safety tools, Soul Ignition plus the nail slow, made his intended risk nearly impossible to trigger.

Frequently asked questions

Was Locke League of Legends overpowered on release? Yes. Vars reports that he reached roughly a 54% win rate in Diamond 2 and above within the first weeks, with a ban rate above 75%. The ban rate is the stronger signal, because it means three out of four draft lobbies removed him before anyone could pick him.

Does Locke have stealth or untargetability? No. He is the first assassin since Katarina to carry neither stealth nor an untargetable defensive cast, and he also has no stuns or roots. That absence is what led Vars to call him the most honest assassin in the game.

Why was Locke's pick rate so low at 5% to 7% if he was so strong? Vars attributes it to his ban rate. When three of every four games ban a champion, the pick rate cannot climb even if every remaining game would have selected him. New champions normally sit in double digits, so the 5% to 7% figure stands out for the opposite reason.

Why does Locke still get banned after his win rate dropped to about 50%? The nerfs reduced his damage but left the mechanics that make his full combo easy to land, including the nail slow and Purgatory's 99% slow. Vars argues his winning pattern looks the same to the opponent, which keeps the ban rate near 50%.

Why does Locke feel useless in team fights? He lacks the tools other assassins use to dive a backline directly. Without stealth or untargetability, an early or late engage leaves him exposed, and Vars notes that champions like Annie can stun and blast him in a five-on-five.

Turning Locked Knowledge Into a Published Article

Locke's case is a study in a design that should have created counterplay and still produced a ban rate above 75%. Vars built the argument in the fenced transcript by walking through the numbers, the abilities, and the matchups, and the whole thing lives in a single YouTube video.

If you have that kind of breakdown sitting in a recording, whether it is a champion analysis, an interview, or a lesson you made for your own audience, you can turn the transcript into a written article with Skala Blog. Paste the video URL, transcribe it, and generate a draft you can edit and publish. Anyone who has followed creator tooling in this space, from the Brazilian developer community around Gustavo dev doido to the teams building on OpenAI models, will recognize the pattern: the knowledge is already recorded, and a written version gives it a second life in search results and a format readers can scan.

Source video