A few weeks ago, I asked the community to fill out a survey about the champion Viktor. The goal was to crowdsource or brainstorm some ideas about why Viktor was such a high priority Mid lane pick, when his win rate in North American and European pro play was so low.

Twenty-one people filled out the survey, with a lot of very detailed and well thought out opinions and perspectives.

My original intention was to supplement this feedback with some statistical exploration, to see whether I could support or counterpoint some of the common ideas. However, I’ve been too busy with other projects to do that properly, so I decided to put these findings out there for people to explore before too much more time passes.

Findings

Here are the general takeaways. Note that these are your responses, and I’ve only added minimal commentary of my own!

Contents
Viktor’s strengths
Viktor’s weaknesses
Low competitive win rate
Is Viktor still a top pick?
Takeaways

Viktor’s Strengths

“How is Viktor strong?”

Descriptions of Viktor’s strengths focused around three main themes.

Versatility
“Viktor is an everyman mid laner.” (Cyraknoss)

Viktor can be blind picked because he is fairly safe against any lane matchup, and he fits a wide variety of team compositions.

Wave Clear
“His [Death Ray] clears waves instantly very early into the game which allows him to [apply] a lot of pressure.” (potato0o0)

Viktor’s early wave clear (which has been slightly nerfed in recent patches) is a big part of his versatility, and something that keeps him safe in a lot of lane matchups. It also allows Viktor to prevent enemy roaming, as noted by Maseratolol and Redhawks401.

Synergy with, and counter against, Sivir
“He works best in team comps that can help him with mobility and survivability (Sivir, Lulu).” (Enigma Mortorz)
“The big thing that Viktor enables is anti-Sivir/engage comps, which is huge when considering that he can burst an ADC/APC/Support to death, while also providing some peel for fights.” (The Lightbox)

Sivir was the dominant AD Carry for most of the Summer split’s meta, so it stands to reason that champions would be popular if they both worked well with her and could also work well against her.

Other Themes
Some other themes that came up less frequently were Viktor’s zone control and his area-of-effect burst damage.

Viktor’s Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities

What are Viktor’s main weaknesses or vulnerabilities?

There were quite a few different angles on Viktor’s weaknesses, including elements of his skill kit, how he can be countered, and how he is played both individually and within a team. The main themes are presented below.

Low Mobility
“His main weakness is his lacking mobility. His Q offers him a speed burst, but requires him to be in range and have the time for both Q and AA.” (Handygamer)

If Viktor can’t reach his opponents, it’s hard for him to effectively get his damage out. That can create situations where he needs Flash to be up if he wants to contribute to a fight.

Low Range
“I think there are a lot of options for champions that can out-range him and make his wave-clearing ability really difficult, so poke comps can render him kinda useless.” (The Lightbox)

Viktor is a medium range caster, so long-range champions can often land damage on him ahead of fights, or prevent him from getting in range to be effective in team fights. As a counterpoint, though, Viktor can always still safely wave clear from under Tower, so that makes himself difficult to siege against, something that poke compositions generally try to do.

Unreliable Crowd Control
“He has unreliable CC that has a cast point that is too short to follow up on other forms of cc and is therefore purely a zoning/disengage tool. As a result, his utility is extremely lacking in comparison to other current meta mid laners (Lulu, Orianna, Azir, Yasuo).” (InvertTheSenses)

Viktor does have some ability to lock down enemy champions, but “his crowd control is hard to use effectively” (Bynjee). The range and activation time on his CC means that it can be avoided relatively easily, so Viktor’s CC is most effective as part of setting up a controlled zone.

High Skill Floor and Team Coordination
“…The position/timing required to play him right is almost unparalleled.” (RisenLazarus)
“…Pretty high skill-floor because if you misplace your [Gravity Field] you can just insta-lose an entire fight (or get killed early).” (River)
“He requires the rest of the team to move around him.” (Anonymous)

Playing Viktor, both as an individual and as his teammates, is very difficult. His versatility means that the player needs to know how to use him best in many different situations, unlike more straightforward champions who may always be played in essentially the same way. And Viktor’s medium range, low mobility, and unreliable CC mean that he relies heavily on his teammates to make good plays and team fights happen.

Low Competitive Win Rate

Why [was] his competitive win rate below 50%, and so low in NA LCS and EU LCS?

The responses to this question mostly had to do with Viktor being misused by less skilled or coordinated players and teams. The common theme was that since Viktor is a complicated champion to play, great teams were able to use him effectively, while less coordinated teams misunderstood him and made poor use of his toolkit.

Here’s a selection of responses to that effect.

• “A top-tier team like SKT T1 can execute Viktor to great success, but lesser teams cannot.” (Pelkasuperfresh)
• “[Viktor] needs proper team composition and coordination to set up teamfights for him…” (Rulo Mercury)
• “Why [Viktor’s win rate is] lower in NA and Europe is because teams are worse at team fighting and positioning, so the immobility of Viktor is compounded.” (xEmpyre)
• “Most people build him wrong.” (sp91)
• “I think very very good players like Faker show the world how broken the champ is and every coach from other regions just jumps on it and bandwagons it without looking at their players and if they can even play him properly.” (potato0o0)
• “The reason Viktor has such a low win rate in NA/EU is because unlike a lot of [flavor of the month] champs, Viktor is much more difficult to play.” (Austin31Bennett)
• Viktor “requires his team to communicate well and play according to his strengths. …In the West, teams like TL may have the individual skill to play Viktor well in lane, but lack coordination later on in the game.” (Handygamer)
• “Most regions see an opening or out of place player and go in. That’s not the fight a Viktor player needs. They need setup: wards, traps, baits. They need to dictate where the fight occurs, not just go when the see an opening.” (Nails_87)
• “I think Viktor is mostly picked because teams feel like they are ‘supposed’ to pick him. They know his power ceiling is insanely high compared to most other midlane mages, and if the mid laner is up to the challenge of playing him correctly the payoff is well worth it. The problem is that quite frankly, very few mid laners are capable of really tapping into his strength.” (RisenLazarus)

Is Viktor still a top pick?

Yes: 76%
No: 24%

The majority of respondents felt that Viktor is still a strong champion, despite his relatively poor win rate, because he is still a strong champion in the right hands, and even with some recent nerfs he hasn’t really lost his core strengths.

However, the nerfs may affect Viktor’s power curve slightly, delaying the time until his wave clear really ramps up. Bynjee wrote, “With the change in 5.16, [Viktor] will be weaker early game I think, so with less dominance in lane, he won’t put the same pressure.”

Meanwhile, vanillasoftserve pointed to a potential trend in the meta that could affect Viktor’s strength: “…If the meta does shift to more assassin type champions then Viktor will see a decline in play.” The idea is that assassins are better able to dodge Viktor’s crowd control and find kills on him in lane, even when he is playing conservatively, so a rise of strong assassins might be able to dethrone Viktor as a blind-pickable Mid laner. It’s unclear whether this will happen, though.

Takeaways

Overall, the consensus is that Viktor is a strong champion in the right hands, but a risky one in the wrong hands.

I’ve done some cursory statistical analysis, and found that in general, it was common for good teams to have a higher win rate with Viktor than without him, while lower-tier teams often had a lower win rate with Viktor than without him, but this was far from a hard and fast rule.

With a new meta brewing for the World Championships, it’s unclear what role Viktor might play. But if the prevailing theory is correct, and Viktor is a more viable pick at the top levels of play, then we may be seeing plenty of him in October, as the world’s best teams congregate.