Who are the hardest League of Legends champions to play in 2025?

With over 150 champions (and counting), League of Legends offers something for every kind of player – but not all characters are easy to pick up and play right off the bat.  

Some of the hard champions to play in LoL include complex combos, managing multiple abilities, or landing clutch skillshots under pressure, requiring playing on a knife’s edge between risk and reward.   

If you’re looking for a new challenge (or are just curious), here’s our list of the eight hardest League of Legends champions to play in 2025. 

Champion difficulty is pretty subjective – it often comes down to your own individual experience and role familiarity on whether a champion is “hard” or not. For example, a newer player may find Bard confusing and tricky, while a Support main with over 1,000 hours logged might barely break a sweat playing him. 

That said, the hardest LoL champions usually have a few things in common: strong mechanical skill, smart decision-making, and on-point reflexes. You’ll need to juggle things like combos, skill rotations, resource management, aiming skillshots, and keeping up a high APM (actions per minute). 

It’s also worth noting that Riot Games includes an official difficulty rating for every champion on their website and in-game client

So, who are the hardest League of Legends champions to play in 2025? Let’s get into our list. 

Most ADCs play similarly: hit minions, farm gold, stay in the backline, and deal damage. But Aphelios is a whole different ball game, requiring knowledge about the five different guns he switches between and their unique abilities. Without proper ammo management and gun rotation knowledge, Aphelios will be useless baggage to his team, so it’s a must to study up on what each weapon/ability does. 

Aphelios is also one of the few ADCs without any form of mobility to escape or run down fleeing enemies, making positioning correctly a vital task. This is all on top of farming CS and gold, making The Weapon of the Faithful one of the hardest LoL champions to master and utilise effectively, currently with an 8% pick rate. 

Zoe is a hard champion to play in LoL, since she’s (mostly) a skill-based mage, meaning she primarily relies on skillshots to deal her damage. Her Q, Paddle Star, deals more damage the longer it flies in a straight line. At the same time, her E, Sleepy Trouble Bubble, needs to be aimed where enemies will be hit directly or walk into it accidentally. 

With the right items, her Q and R combo can one-shot squishier champions, but only if you can tame (and aim) the fast-moving projectile – a Zoe that can’t land her Q is a waste of space – literally. Her challenging skillshots and combos mean she’s a rare sight in most games, with a 3.4% pick rate.

Riven has always been one of LoL’s hardest champions, hands down. Her abilities and overall kit may seem basic on a surface level, with no real skillshots, but she actually has a complex combo system that takes time to master. 

With her high skill ceiling, Riven’s pick rate remains relatively low, making her a more niche pick in the meta. With three casts of her Q, Broken Wings, and short cooldowns of her other abilities, any players wanting to climb ranked with Riven will need to memorise each and every combo and reel them off in a way that feels like muscle memory. 

Kalista is one of the hardest LoL champions and ADCs to play well – and that’s saying something. Her kit relies on constant movement through her passive kiting mechanics, utilising her auto-attack, which requires players to already have knowledge of how to kite and position well to avoid being caught out. 

While most ADCs deal most of their damage through their autos, Kalista requires players to know when to use her Rend to deal the most damage possible. Not to mention her R, Fate’s Call, which can fling her Oathsworn ally in any given direction. A mistimed toss can easily ruin a team fight or come across as trolling. 

Many players will groan in dismay when they see an allied player choosing Yasuo in draft pick. This is because he’s notoriously hard to play, easily considered one of LoL’s hardest champions to master mechanically. 

To even be able to use Yasuo’s Last Breath R ability, players will have to land two perfect Qs to throw out a tornado whirlwind and knock up enemies. Not to mention that using his R in the wrong situation can cost your life, which is why you see so many Yasuo’s inting with poor KDA ratios as seen on LeagueOfGraphs. 

Nidalee is all about landing skillshots and knowing when to go in. Her entire kit revolves around landing her famously hard-to-hit spears and quickly switching into her cougar form to maximise her damage output and mobility. Her cougar form also means she has six, not the usual three, abilities to learn. 

She’s one of League of Legends’ most difficult champions because if you miss her Javelin Toss, you might as well Alt-F4. After all, that’s where most, if not all, of her damage comes from. As a Jungler, Nidalee’s farm comes from jungle camps, so knowing where to position traps and pathing are also important macros to keep in mind. 

Lee Sin has always been considered one of League of Legends’ hardest champions, for many reasons. His three basic abilities all have two parts, meaning that no single ability is strong all on its own – it’s all about the combos. This means a lot of key-mashing is required for playing The Blind Monk. 

Lee Sin’s hardest ability is his ultimate, Dragon’s Rage. The idea is to deliver the target directly to your team, known as an inSec kick (named after pro-player inSec), which is easier said than done, as it requires flanking. Between ward hops, insec kicks, and map pressure, Lee Sin demands fast reflexes and good game sense to succeed. If not, you’ll be left in the dust. 

To complete our LoL hardest champions tier list, we have Gangplank, a League of Legends champion in Top with a high skill ceiling. While his kit seems simple at first glance, timing his Powder Kegs is everything. Most of his damage comes from these barrels, turning his gameplay into an entire mini-game of placing barrels, chaining explosions, and slowing enemies, all while farming gold and scaling into the late game. 

Due to this complexity, Gangplank tends to have modest pick rates, usually favoured by experienced Top players or GP mains comfortable with juggling micro mechanics and macro decision-making. When playing the Saltwater Scourge, you also need to think about his global ultimate and manage his passive damage and gold-generating Q, Parrrley, making resource tracking part of his learning curve. 

That covers our picks for some of the hardest champions to play in LoL. Mastering them takes immense patience, time, and plenty of in-game experience – but for the right player, they can be the difference-maker when it comes to climbing the ranked ladder, especially in lower tiers. 

Of course, there are plenty of other tough champions on Summoner’s Rift that didn’t make the cut. Azir with his high mechanical ceiling, Draven’s axe-catching, and Irelia and her fast-paced combos are just a few names worthy of the title of “hardest LoL champion.” Difficulty is constantly evolving with the meta, but if you’re looking for a challenge, you won’t run out of options any time soon.