League of Legends players have identified a fundamental problem with how Riot communicates gameplay mechanics. Key interactions that affect every match aren’t documented in the client’s tooltips, forcing players to rely on external sources to understand basic rules.
The biggest revelation centers on slows. Multiple slows don’t stack in League of Legends. Only the strongest slow affecting a champion applies at any given moment. When that slow expires, any remaining weaker slows can take effect for their remaining duration.
This means buying Rylai’s Crystal Scepter on champions with strong built-in slows—like Anivia’s ultimate—provides almost no additional crowd control benefit. The item’s weaker slow gets overridden constantly. Players have been making these purchases for years without understanding they’re wasting gold.
The current system wasn’t always this way. Slows used to stack additively around 2015, but Riot removed that mechanic to prevent perma-slow builds that eliminated counterplay. The change happened nearly a decade ago, yet the game never clearly explained the new rule.
Exceptions exist but they’re explicitly coded into specific abilities. Zyra’s plants spawned with her E stack their slows up to twice. Rumble’s E also stacks. These are special cases, not the standard behavior.
Vision granted by abilities presents another inconsistency. Whether a spell reveals enemies in brush depends entirely on the individual ability. Two visually similar AOE spells can behave completely differently. One might grant vision on cast, another only on hit, and a third might never reveal anything. The tooltips rarely specify these behaviors.
Sivir’s W ability Ricochet demonstrates the on-hit effect confusion. The bouncing attacks don’t apply standard on-hit effects despite looking like modified basic attacks. They function as separate damage instances. Some items and runes work with Ricochet while others don’t, and the distinctions aren’t intuitive.
The Collector and Black Cleaver proc from Ricochet damage. Dark Harvest’s interaction remains disputed among players. These ambiguities exist because the game treats “on-hit,” “on-attack,” and “spell effects” as distinct categories without explaining the differences.
Projectile classification adds more confusion. Jhin’s W was historically blocked by Yasuo’s Wind Wall but behaved inconsistently with other projectile-countering abilities. Riot later reclassified it as a “real projectile” for interactions with newer champions like Samira, but this change wasn’t prominently documented.
Riot announced an official League of Legends Wiki in October 2024, hosting it on their own domain. The catch: it’s still written and maintained by players, not Riot staff. The company provides infrastructure and funding but doesn’t author the content.
