10 League of Legends champions with the highest skill cap

League of Legends champions always come with their unique skill requisites and no two champions require the same amount of time and dedication to learn.

While some of the easier ones in League of Legends like Garen, Annie, and Malzahar just take a few playthroughs to pick up, others require hours of dedication to just get the basic combos and game sense right.

This list will go into some of the hardest champions in League of Legends. These 10 picks have some of the highest skill caps in the game, and often only look good when professional players and high-ranked players are wielding them.

10 League of Legends champions with the highest skill cap

Top lane

Gangplank

Image via Riot Games `Image via Riot Games

Gangplank's kit isn't exactly hard-to-execute in Legaue of Legends. However, due to a very weak early game, it is quite difficult to use him effectively during the laning phase.

Though Runes like Grasp of the Undying tend to make things easier for him early on, he can still feel underwhelming in the lane.

His strength lies in split pushing and having a very powerful late game, with the help of his barrels and ultimate ability, Cannon Barrage. Knowing when to teleport into team fights, when to split push and how to use his barrels takes a considerable amount of time to learn, and this is one of the reasons why he is often considered to be difficult to master by many League of Legends players.

Jayce

Jayce has one of the most complicated kits in Leagueof League of Legen. He is a transforming champion, and cycling through all the 6 abilities and keeping their cooldowns in mind makes him one of the trickiest top laners to pick up in League of Legends.

Moreover, he is incredibly mana-hungry, and managing his mana bar is the first thing that players need to learn before even moving onto his more advanced combos.

Buying a Tear of the Goddess and building it into a Manumune can alleviate a lot of the mana issues. But, this will delay his power spike.

When mastered, he can be incredibly oppressive to play against, and he can is effective in both the side lanes and late-game team fights.

Riven

Out of all the top lane picks in League of Legends, Riven is perhaps the most difficult to pick up. It’s ridiculously difficult to effectively use her passive Runic Blade when executing her combos as it demands that players attack move in between her Q procs to maximize her damage as much as possible and give the whole combo a type of fluidity.

Riven is all about chaining her abilities into one big combo in Legaue of Legends. Attack move is an incredibly important part of her kit, and that itself takes hours of practice.

Additionally, as her kit and execution revolve heavily around her abilities, cooldown management is also a big part of mastering her completely. An important part of her learning curve is to know when to be aggressive and when not to.

Jungle

Nidalee

Much like Jayce, Nidalle is also a transforming champion. However, she is used more as a jungler than in any of the lanes.

What makes Nidalee such a skill-intensive coin flip pick is how she either secures early leads and snowballs the entire game, one-shotting the enemy carry, or how she falls incredibly far behind and gives her team another reason to blame the jungler for their loss.

She has no middle ground and as landing her spears makes for almost the entirety of her team fighting prowess, she can either be incredibly potent or be completely useless.

Gank timing, jungle clear speed and spear accuracy only come after a lot of game time.

Lee Sin

Which Lee Sin main does not dream of effortlessly “insec kicking” the enemy ADC into his team? While it might be the flashiest play out there, it is by not easy to pull off.

Piloting Lee Sin in League of Legends, be it in the jungle, the mid lane or the top lane requires a great deal of game sense, and hours of combo practice.

Lee Sin can feels like a fighting game champion at times, and it’s one of the reasons why Lee Sin mains spend hours in custom tutorials to practice his combos over and over again.

The Insec kick comes as a culmination of all that hard work and hours spent, and knowing when to enter fighrs and use the Dragon’s Rage on will require players to to play a lot of matches as the champion.

Mid Lane

Azir

Azir is a lot like playing Age of Empires, as he often forces the player to keep track of everything going on the screen and micromanage his sand soldiers to the best of their ability.

The Shuriman Emperor is perhaps the hardest champion to master in the entirety of the League of Legends roster. It’s only the professional mid-laners who make him look easy, while the rest of the solo-queue ladder spends their entire match trying to figure out when to use his Emperor’s Divide.

Azir requires a great deal of reflex and position management from the player, along with the ability to manage four sand soldiers at the same time.

When mastered, Azir is by far the strongest mid-lane mages in League of Legends at the moment. His kit's versatility a main reason for his high pick rate in pro play.

Yasuo

The edgiest and flashiest League of Legends champion is also one of the most difficult to master. Either a player is feeding the entire enemy team with a Yasuo, or solo carrying the game, and taking 1v9 trades if need be.

Much like Nidalee, Yasuo too is a coin flip when it comes to solo queue, and though he comes with a lot of playmaking outplay potential, execution is where some of his major challenges lie.

It takes a great deal of game sense and practice to master League of Legend’s edge lord

He is very susceptible to ganks and can also be easily shut down with the use of proper CC and the Exhaust summoner spell.

Bot Lane

Vayne

Vayne has been the single most difficult ADC pick in League of Legends, ever since her release many years ago.

With attack short-range and an even shorter pool of health, she always remained a pocket pick from professional player and was never able to make her way into the competitive meta,

Vayne is all about positioning herself right in team fights, and though she is capable of playing well in front-to-back fights, she is often susceptible to hard CC, and navigating around that will require a good deal of game sense.

Vayne is an incredible support carry, but she is heavily reliant on her team unlike picks like Tristana, Ezreal, and Kai’Sa she doesn’t come with a lot of engagement tools or even escape options.

Kalista

For the more inexperienced League of Legends player, Kalista’s “auto hops” can be a curse in the disguise of a blessing. On paper, it might look like an ability that helps players kite team fights effectively, but one wrong hop can be fatal in League of Legends.

Kalista is very squishy, and apart from the hop, she really has no escape tools at her disposal. Hence, point-and-click CC’s can counter her rather effectively, and it’s one of the reasons why wielding her effectively requires a great deal of attack move prowess and game knowledge.

Kalista is amazing at securing objectives, but the reason so many solo-queue players don’t pick her in League of Legends is because of the skill cap required in team fights.

Support

Bard

Although it might seem that either Thresh or Pyke should take the cake when it comes to difficulty among the supports, that is not the case at all.

Bard has the highest skill ceiling among all the supports in League of Legends at the moment. Not only does he have an incredibly complicated kit to wrap one’s head around, he even comes with a high-risk, high-reward ultimate ability called, Tempered Fate which can either win or lose players their games.

Unlike the other supporters in League of Legends, Bard has no middle ground. Either he is aiding the enemy team, or he is shutting them out so hard that they have no other option but to rage quit.

Edited by Gautham Balaji