2016 Champion Tier List - Solo Queue - Patch 6.9 Update

Preface Chatter

The Tier List

God Tier [Highest Influence]:

Tier 1 [Strong/Preferred Choices]:

Tier 2 [Viable/Balanced Choices]:

Tier 3 [Needs Higher Skill/Knowledge Than Usual]:

Tier 4 [Low Benefits for Effort Used]:

• Akali [Tier 2 Top, Mid] - The latest changes on Hextech Gunblade and price reduction on Zhonyas are extremely good news for Akali players everywhere, and she's definitely on her way up. She's not played too much at the moment, but expect to see much more of her shortly.
• Anivia [Tier 2 Mid] - The changes to Anivia's ultimate and increased E projectile speed were definitely nerfs to her overall kit, and at this point she's fairly balanced. She's definitely not as burst oriented as she used to be, which means that her ability to catch players off guard with her damage is no longer as easy to access.
• Aurelion Sol [Tier 1 Mid] - The buffs to Rod of Ages are a massive increase to Aurelion Sol, who's been flying under the radar ever since he was first released and nerfed. Not many people are playing him on the professional ladder at the moment, but expect a big surge once the cat's out of the bag.
• Caitlyn [God Tier Marksman] - Overall, it seems like marksmen aren't particularly impactful on the game simply because of the current meta. As long as you can farm up your items and have some sort of minor utility, your champion does well on the ranked ladder. Being good in lane against Lucian, Ezreal, and Vayne is also very important, and Caitlyn does this quite well as a long range bully. She's extremely safe, and her traps allow her to protect her mages during teamfights from would-be front line assassins.
• Cassiopeia [Tier 3 Mid/Top] - Tempted to put her in Tier 4, but without going too crazy on bashing, Riot might need to go back to the drawing board on this one.
• Fiddlesticks [Tier 1 Jungle] - After the price reduction on Zhonya's Fiddlesticks is definitely stronger than ever before. Similar to Aurelion Sol, he's not going to see much of a popularity increase since most professionals prefer not to drop him on a team. However, unless the enemy team has a good Gragas, Azir, or Janna, Fiddlesticks can absolutely dominate games. After he gets his Zhonya's, there's pretty much no stopping him without good coordinated map control, which is generally absent from most ranked ladder games.
• Karthus [Tier 2 Mid] - Another big beneficiary of the mana regeneration changes, Karthus is a bit of a sleeper pick at the moment. His ultimate still has an extremely long cooldown, but with how easy it is to hit 40% cooldown reduction in Patch 6.9, that shouldn't be a major issue.
• Kindred [God Tier Jungle] - Despite the removal of devourer, Kindred is still doing very well in jungle. Nidalee is arguably stronger, but Kindred's game-changing ultimate synergizes well with a large variety of teams.
• Malzahar [God Tier Jungle] - As a jungler, Malzahar's voidlings allow him to take near zero damage, resulting in an extremely safe clear and excellent objective control. Meanwhile, the changes to his ultimate allow him to easily maximize his damage while still providing an insanely powerful gank.
• Malzahar [God Tier Mid, Tier 1 Top] - As a laner, Malzahar's new CC preventing, damage mitigating, tilt-inducing passive is insanely good in lane. They've also increased the amount of spell up-time via reducing his Q cooldown, and also made it much easier to land by reducing the delay. You're probably never going to see him in a ranked game until his nerfs next patch, but if he goes through definitely pick him up, even if you have to put him top, support, or even marksman. Voidlings still scale off physical damage!
• Ryze [Tier 1 Top] - The changes to the mana regen items were a direct buff to Ryze, and he's very powerful right now as a result of it. He's deceptively difficult to play, but a good Ryze player is close to old Ryze, where they could do sub-par in lane and still 1v4 late game.
• Veigar [Tier 3 Support] - The changes to Veigar's passive make him a much better potential support since he can stack AP upon harass.
• Vel'Koz [Tier 2 Mid] - The change to a more combo-oriented Vel'Koz really reduced his overall damage output. As a result, he's not longer as strong as he was before the rework.
• Vladimir [Tier 3 Top] - Vladimir's seeing a bit of a rough time after the removal of AP spellvamp items. He's dealing more damage to himself than he's healing, which makes for an awkward setup. It may be that he's not being played correctly at the moment, but time will tell if his massively low win rate is just a fluke. 
• Ziggs [Tier 2 Mid] - His new W mechanic is super cool, but the fact of the matter is that most games in ranked ladder aren't comprised of high tension poke battles and waveclear abilities anymore. Instead, tower sieging appears to happen once a few enemy champions are slain, in which case the winning team just smashes through towers for free anyway. He's not bad, but certainly not broken.
• Zyra [Tier 1 Mid] - Zyra's new passive spawns quite a number of seeds. Her overall kit is now much stronger, especially since she can apply the Liandry's Torment to many more targets at the same time now. Her mana costs were also reduced from 75 per Q to 60 per Q, which allows her to be much more spam oriented compared to before.