Two Weeks In: How Is Locke Really Doing in League of Legends?

Every new champion release follows the same script. The trailer drops, the subreddit melts down, half the playerbase locks in the shiny new toy the moment the patch goes live, and for about a week it's impossible to tell whether the champion is genuinely strong or just new. Now that Locke, the Ashen Exorcist, has had a little time to settle into the ranked queues, we finally have enough games in our database to answer the question everyone's asking: is Riot's nail-slinging Demacian exorcist actually any good?

The short version? Locke's launch has been a fascinatingly lopsided one. The raw numbers make him look like a flop. Dig one layer deeper and you find a champion who is quietly dominating in the right hands, in the right role, at the right point in the game. Let's break it down.

The headline number isn't pretty

Across all ranks and both of his played positions, Locke is sitting at a 45.5% win rate on the current patch. That's low. Genuinely low — the kind of number that lands a champion in the bottom bracket of any tier list, and on MetaBot's League tier list he currently grades out near the bottom of the pack overall.

But there's an asterisk the size of Demacia attached to that stat, and it's spelled out in his 14.9% pick rate. Nearly one in seven games right now features a Locke, which is astronomical for a champion this new. When that many people are first-timing a mechanically demanding assassin — missing combos, feeding early, learning his cooldowns the hard way — the aggregate win rate gets dragged through the mud. A 45.5% win rate at a 15% pick rate is not the profile of a weak champion. It's the profile of a hard champion that everyone is still learning. We've seen this exact pattern on nearly every high-skill release, and Locke is following it to the letter.

A tale of two roles

Here's where it gets interesting. Locke is being forced into two roles, and the gap between them is enormous.

• Mid lane is his home. Here he posts a 47.9% win rate and pumps out roughly 890 damage per minute — comfortably his most productive position.
• Jungle is, frankly, a trap. Locke jungle limps in at just a 40.4% win rate, with his damage output cratering to around 705 per minute as he's forced to spend gold and time clearing camps instead of snowballing lanes.

That seven-and-a-half point spread tells you almost everything. Locke is a laner who happens to have enough mobility to look like a jungler, and a chunk of that 45.5% overall figure is being weighed down by optimistic players trying to make Locke jungle happen. It isn't happening. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: play him mid. Our data on his build and role breakdown is unambiguous on that point.

The mastery curve is real — and steep

If the overall win rate is the pessimist's view of Locke, the high-elo mid data is the optimist's. Because once you filter down to the players who actually know what they're doing with him, Locke stops looking like a bottom-tier pick and starts looking like a menace.

In Diamond, mid-lane Locke jumps to a 56.8% win rate in Division II and hovers in the low-to-mid 50s across the surrounding divisions. Read that again: the same champion that's "F-tier" in the blender of all ranks is winning well over half his games in the hands of skilled midlaners. That's one of the widest skill-expression gaps of any champion in the game right now, and it's the clearest possible signal that his kit has a high ceiling. The floor is brutal, but the ceiling is sky-high — you just have to climb to it.

This is a champion who punishes mistakes and rewards mechanical precision, which is exactly what you'd expect from an assassin-mage hybrid built around chaining "three separate hits" burst windows. The players putting in the reps are being paid back handsomely.

Strong early, fragile late

Locke's win-rate curve over the course of a match reveals his personality perfectly. His early-game win rate sits around 48% — already above his own average — before sliding down toward 43% in the late game. In plain terms: Locke wants to snowball. He has strong magic resistance and health regeneration baked into his base stats, which makes him a nightmare to trade against in the first few levels, especially into other magic-damage mids. But if the game drags to 35 minutes and he hasn't converted that early lead into towers and kills, his squishy assassin profile starts to show.

The takeaway for anyone picking him up is to play like your win condition expires at 20 minutes — because statistically, it kind of does. Get aggressive early, abuse those beefy early trades, roam for kills, and close the game before the enemy scaling carries come online.

Builds and runes: full AP burst

Locke is being built as a glass-cannon burst mage, and the results back it up. The strongest-performing mid setup in our sample pairs the new Gunmetal Greaves with a core of Shadowflame, Lich Bane, and Rabadon's Deathcap, rounded out by Mejai's Soulstealer and Stormsurge for the snowball-hungry — a build that's posting an eye-catching 53.6% win rate across more than 3,000 games. Zhonya's Hourglass shows up constantly as the defensive answer to his paper-thin health bar, letting him dive in, unload, and stasis out of the retaliation. You can see the full item priority and situational options on his build page.

On the runes side, Locke players have converged hard on Electrocute out of the Domination tree — a natural fit for a burst combo that lands three quick procs — supported by Sudden Impact and the Bounty Hunter line, with a Precision secondary of Triumph and Coup de Grace to help him close out kills. The best-performing pages in our data are winning at a ludicrous clip in smaller samples, which again points to how much reward is waiting for players who set him up correctly. The optimized rune breakdown is worth a look before your next game.

Who Locke beats — and who ruins his day

Matchup data is where Locke's identity as an assassin really crystallizes. He feasts on squishy, immobile targets and other assassins he can out-tempo. His best mid-lane matchups read like an assassin's dream menu: he's beating Talon (56.7%), Aurora (54.9%), Mel (53.4%), and LeBlanc (52%), with Hwei and Syndra also landing on the right side of 50%. If the enemy pick is a fragile burst mage or a mirror-match assassin, Locke is thrilled.

The flip side is equally consistent. Locke gets handled by anything that can lock him down or simply refuse to die to a single combo. His worst mid matchups are Viktor (40.6%), Lissandra (41.9%), Annie (42.8%), Diana (43.9%), and Galio (44.2%) — a rogues' gallery of point-and-click crowd control and anti-assassin sustain. The lesson is textbook: Locke hates being crowd-controlled out of his engage, and champions that can guarantee a stun or a knockup shut his whole gameplan down. If you're on the receiving end, our Locke counters page lays out exactly who to reach for, and the deeper matchup win rates are there if you want the full lane-by-lane picture.

A few things to know before you lock in

The community data has already surfaced Locke's quirks. He carries noticeably less crowd control than most champions in his class, which makes securing kills and setting up ganks harder than his mobility might suggest — you have to create your own openings rather than relying on hard CC. He also tends to run a lower vision score, so consciously buying control wards and clearing the enemy's is an easy edge. On the plus side, his high self-healing and tanky-for-an-assassin early stats mean he genuinely wins extended trades that other assassins would lose. If you want the full mechanical rundown, his abilities page and champion guide cover the kit in detail. Stylistically, if you already enjoy champions like Akali, Fizz, or Ahri, Locke will feel like familiar territory.

The verdict

So, how is Locke doing? It depends entirely on who's holding him. Judged by his overall 45.5% win rate, he looks like a disappointment — but that number is a mirage created by a sky-high 15% pick rate and a punishing learning curve. Judged by where he's actually meant to be played — mid lane, aggressive and early, in the hands of players who've put in the practice — Locke is already a 53–57% win rate carry with one of the highest skill ceilings on the roster.

Expect that headline win rate to climb as the first-week tourists move on and the dedicated one-tricks take over. Riot may still reach for the balance knife given how oppressive he becomes when mastered, but as a launch, this is the good kind of "underperforming": a champion whose numbers are being held down by his own popularity rather than any real weakness. Locke isn't a flop. He's a sleeper — and the players who figure him out now are going to be very glad they did. Keep an eye on his MetaBot stats page over the next couple of patches; this is a win-rate curve that's only heading one direction.