Should You Main Yasuo? Tier C
Yasuo is tier C for maining, around the middle of the game. 23 Challenger and 32 Grandmaster mains across the three major regions, on 1,448,831 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Yasuo scores 3.13 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 3.13 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 23 Challenger · 32 Grandmaster · 330 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 1,448,831 games played worldwide · 15.73% pick rate · 17.66% ban rate
Ban rate warning. Yasuo is banned in 17.66% of games. Even where the density number is strong, you will not get to play it in roughly one game in 6.
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
Yasuo surprisingly he's okay. So you know you can all know the 010 Yasuo meme. Basically Yasuo gets destroyed in these fights around like basically you just die over and over and you snowball the game for the enemy team.
This is actually the most amount of challengers in the game. I think at 23 challengers and 32 GMs, he is banned 18% of the time and picked 16% of the time. So, he's okay to me.
It's similar to Yone. You're going to have similar results. They're basically the same champion.
So yeah, Yasuo and Y kind of go together. They're okay. With how many players play them, they might it is actually pretty difficult to reach challenger or GM on these champions because based on how many people that are playing them you would maybe see more but yeah essentially this is kind of where the champion lies.
It's not going to be like a Riven situation where even though there's, you know, like these top champions here are going to be a lot stronger to main just because you have an edge, everybody already kind of knows what Yasuo and Yone do. So 19 challengers on Yone, 28 GMs.
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.