Should You Main Darius? Tier F
Darius is tier F for maining. Only 12 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 875,704 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Darius scores 1.16 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 1.16 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 2 Challenger · 10 Grandmaster · 141 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 875,704 games played worldwide · 9.51% pick rate · 15.11% ban rate
Ban rate warning. Darius is banned in 15.11% of games. Even where the density number is strong, you will not get to play it in roughly one game in 7.
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
Not marksman anymore. So not ADC. I think he goes mid.
So pretty solid pick. Next up is going to be Darius. So even though we do have Raider Go, it's going to be an F tier.
Okay, so why is Darius in F tier? Raider Go is rank one Korea or he got to like rank three Korea and he got to rank one E west. Why is he in F tier?
Well, it's because Darius is played a lot. He is banned a lot. So essentially, you're going to be banned 15% of the time.
You're going to be picked like the enemy team will pick it against you like his picked rate pick rate is 10%. So essentially enemy enemy team might be picking against you like half the time of that. So 1/5if like 20% of the time you're not going to even get him.
You're not going to get to play him. Across all major divisions essentially his he only has two challenger Dariuses. So Raider go being one of them and I honestly don't know the other one.
And there are 10 GMs. So even though he shows up a lot of times players don't seem to hit the highest MMRs with him. So there's a ton of mains and it is incredibly hard to play areas in the highest of elos.
So that is why it skews towards very bad. There are certain caps on champions. And I think this is like Darius is just a little bit too simple of a champion.
I think most people know how to play against him. And he has a lot of counterplay potential. You can just range him down.
He doesn't he does ends up getting outskilled. So, you have to be very good macrow wise in order to play him. Vader, I think, is incredibly good macro-wise.
So, he ends up like if you watch him, he'll just end up not fighting you certain times because he is seeing that potentially he could lose and throw. So, then he's just going to skip the fight and push another lane. It is incredibly difficult.
I think what he's doing on Darius is really crazy. So that being said, not very good to me. I would not recommend it.
But I think does have some potential. If you do want to basically just watch him and play like him, then I think maybe you can. But yeah, if we didn't have him as a content creator, I maybe even consider putting Darius down down way more.
So not sure. But yeah, that is what it is.
How this was measured
Two numbers, one division. First, how many players are currently in Challenger or Grandmaster maining this champion in Korea, Europe West and North America, from onetricks.gg. Second, how many ranked games the entire playerbase plays of this champion worldwide across every rank, from op.gg. The result is high elo mains per 100,000 games played, then reduced by the champion's ban rate, because a champion you cannot pick is a champion you cannot main.
This is not a win rate list and it is not a patch strength list. It measures availability-adjusted high-elo main density: how much Challenger and Grandmaster main representation a champion has relative to how often it is played. It is not the probability that maining this champion will get you to high elo. The score counts Challenger and Grandmaster mains only, drawn from a tracked pool that starts at Master; it does not include the Chinese server, and it counts accounts rather than people, so one dedicated player with several high elo accounts shows up more than once. Patch 16.15. The full plain English explanation, including everything this list cannot tell you, is on the main list page.
Popularity is not the signal. What matters here is how densely high elo mains appear relative to how often the champion is played.