League of Legends Stats Reveal Best and Worst Champion Combos

If you've ever wondered which champions work best (and worst) together in League of Legends, Riot Games has some new stats available that do just that, at least for one particular patch.

Dubbed the "Duo Awards" by Riot Games, the stats look at games that were played on Patch 8.5 to see which champion combos had the most and least success when used throughout the patch. Before revealing the winners and losers though, Riot established the guidelines used to qualify champions for the awards to rule out any strange outlier combos.

"We're looking at global data from Riot regions, across all MMRs, in ranked solo games, for patch 8.5 only," Riot Games said. "That might seem like a ton of games to pull from, but the numbers can be off for some of the less popular champions. In order to be eligible for the Duo Awards, the pair had to play at least 2,000 games together. Ideally we'd like a bunch more games (like 40,000), but this should be pretty accurate."

For the category of Best Overall Synergy, it should be little surprise that Xayah and Rakan came in at first place. The duo was made to go together, so it makes sense that they'd be the most dominant duo. Likewise, the second the third place winners have some clear synergy just from the champions' names. Yasuo (mid) and Malphite (jungle) took second place with some huge wombo combo potential while Kayle (top) and Twitch (jungle) took third with some serious gank and survivability potential.

And then there's the worst of the champion synergies, combos that just can't seem to get the job done when they're together. Brand (mid) and Elise (jungle) were the worst duo in the patch followed by Caitlyn (bot) paired with Rakan (support) and Gangplank (top) paired with Tryndamere (jungle). Seeing why champions don't work together isn't quite as easy as noticing why they do, so Riot offered an explanation for why the biggest losers don't pair well together.

"Congrats, Team Firespider! There could be a ton of factors that cause this combustible arachnid duo to fizzle out, but our best guess is that it has more to do with the damage mix than anything else. In fact, A LOT of the lowest synergy combos are double AD or double AP, especially on mid/jungle pairs. It's probably the same problem with Team Undying Orange over there. Rakan is a bit of a different story; the flipside of his great synergy with Xayah is that he doesn't have the same chemistry with other lanemates."

The full post has many more stats, winners, and losers, but you can also search for your own combo using Riot's nifty chart that's found below.