Smolder has been soaring over League of Legends’ Summoner’s Rift for little over a month now, and he’s already on track to becoming one of the most hated champions.
According to Lolalytics, Smolder is comfortably sitting at 53.26 percent win rate, with his pick rate being at 19.42 percent. That being said, Smolder doesn’t even make it to Summoner’s Rift in 40 percent of cases, since players frequently ban him.
League Patch 14.5 introduced a ton of changes to Smolder. Even though Riot Games intended these tweaks to be small nerfs, the changes will actually help this small dragon to become more oppressive in the mid-to-late-game. The devs tinkered with all abilities except Achooo! (W). Their idea was to preserve the option for players to lean into tankier builds while making the trade-off more prominent, as a tankier Smolder will deal less damage.
Fans are already sick and tired of seeing Smolder in their solo queue games, and for good reasons. First of all, Smolder can safely farm from a distance and scale using his Super Scorcher Breath and Achooo!. Even if his enemies get their hands on him, he can just flap his wings and fly away.
But this isn’t where Smolder’s solo queue tyranny ends—he scales incredibly well, and the more stacks of Dragon Practice he has, the harder it is to reach him. Super Scorcher Breath deals AoE damage when you get enough stacks of Dragon Practice, and you even get an Elder Dragon-like execute later in the game. That makes it almost impossible to approach Smolder if he has a strong front-to-back team comp to protect him.
All things considered, Smolder will surely dominate League for another two weeks (or more), and in my opinion, his pick and ban rate will go up even more.
