Introduced by Riot Games with great fanfare, Volibear promised to become a true warrior in both the top lane and jungle of League of Legends. Volibear’s backstory was also upgraded to reflect a demigod of fury rather than just a few superficial lines, in short, our bear god was highly anticipated by gamers upon his official release.
However, the reality upon Volibear’s release did not meet the prior expectations; the performance of this champion has been extremely poor in both jungle and top lane. Specifically, according to U.gg, Volibear does not even reach a 40% win rate in both positions, while the data from LoLalytics.com is slightly better but still only hovers around ~40%.
So what caused Volibear to have such a poor start? According to the author, the main reason lies in players not taking advantage of Volibear’s biggest strength, which is the ability to tower dive at level 6. To execute a successful tower dive, you must ensure that your lane has a minion advantage, the opponent is pushed into the tower, and the enemy jungle is disconnected from that lane.
To achieve this, both the laner and jungler must accurately do what is necessary, which is to establish a sufficiently large minion wave, control vision behind the tower, and calculate enough damage to take down the enemy. It is an extremely complex task that players need to practice a lot; average players may find it difficult to master immediately. The common situation when playing Volibear is an unreasonable tower dive, lack of damage to take down enemies, and being killed in return, thereby losing the advantage completely.
Additionally, Volibear’s recent rework has left players unsure of what items to build to optimize the champion’s strengths; building even one incorrect item can greatly affect this bear’s power.
The rare fortunate point for Volibear is that the issue with this champion lies in players not being accustomed to the new playstyle, not that the bear itself has problems. Perhaps Volibear’s fate will be similar to that of Fiddlesticks’ rework, where initially weak and with a poor win rate, but once players become familiar with the gameplay, he will become incredibly powerful.
