A League of Legends number cruncher has discovered an unstoppable build that keeps infinitely increasing every stat in the game, and they want you to try it out before it gets removed from the game forever.
Senna is part of a small group of League of Legends champions that keeps growing stronger throughout the entire game. While most characters stop improving once they've reached max level and filled their inventories, some of them have spells that keep increasing certain stats indefinitely. Senna, who collects souls from defeated enemy units, gains attack damage (AD) for every soul, with additional attack range, crit chance, and life steal for every 20 souls she gets.
At around 60-80 souls, Senna is widely thought to have 'scaled' - a League of Legends term for converting relative early-game weakness into late-game strength, and the opposite of 'falling off.' But she can go on collecting souls as long as the game itself continues to run, theoretically allowing her to grow in attack power forever. Normally, that strength is a counter to her squishiness and lack of mobility, but one player has managed to get around that particular issue, by coming up with a build that allows Senna to continually buff every important stat in the game.
There is a forbidden Senna build that scales every single stat infinitely. Check it out before its gone. from r/leagueoflegends
In a post on Reddit, one player has created a Senna build that they claim scales harder than anything in the game. It starts with Senna's own kit, which increases all of those aforementioned stats automatically. As her attack damage grows, so does the healing and shielding, and enemy slowing on some of her spells - the latter of which eventually reaches 100%, making it a root, not a slow. But it's once Senna starts building items that things start to really synergize together.
The build starts with Heartsteel, traditionally a tank item that grants bonus health every time its user is able to stack it by auto-attacking a nearby enemy. That makes for infinitely scaling health, but it can also be used in tandem with another tank item, Demonic Embrace, which turns extra HP into magic damage. More magic damage applies to Senna's healing and shielding, but also to the movement speed ability on her third spell, granting ever-increasing move speed as well.
From there, the build moves to Spear of Shojin, which offers scaling cooldown reduction based on extra AD. As I've already discussed, Senna's AD scales forever, so now so do her ability cooldowns. It's not long before the eight-second duration of that spell outlasts its cooldown. Shojin also synergizes with Runaan's Hurricane, an item that fires extra attacking bolts that allow you to hit multiple targets with a single auto attack, which allows Senna's primary healing ability to also have a negligible cooldown. That might cause mana issues, but those are circumvented by the fifth item, Essence Reaver, which also scales with AD, and eventually allows Senna to actually refill her mana bar by casting spells. The final item, Titanic Hydra, works alongside everything else to cast splash damage on every instance of attack damage that Senna deals, scaling off her also infinite base health, in a cascading effect that's said to "melt" grouped enemies.
It does sound like an incredible time - if you can get it to work. There are a couple of tools to get around the obvious weaknesses - with no boots you'll move extremely slowly, and without the warding tools that are a traditional part of Senna's support role, you won't have the vision you require, so you'd be best served by playing in a pair with a couple of actual supports.
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Also, it's worth noting that right up the top of their post, our Senna savant says, "This build is not good in a real game." It's actually Heartsteel that seems to be the limited factor - without the bonus health, many of the other items don't really work in close enough tandem to get the build going, and given the time it takes to get that item cooking, "the required scaling for real payoffs is not realistically achievable." That said, their description for what it might do if it did work is extremely enticing: "There is a champion with massive AD, hitting you from screens away. You cannot move, and she will keep you in place until you're dead, before becoming untargetable and zooming away. If you do manage to get up close to her, she has huge amounts of health [and even if you do hit her], she will instantly heal all of it back." Add to that the fact that Senna only gets stronger against multiple enemies, and would normally be able to play around an entire team of other players, and it's a horrifying concept.
Sadly, it's unlikely to be around for very long. As part of the 2024 Preseason, Riot has announced a substantial item rework that's going to hit several of the items in this build. With two-thirds of these items understood to be changing, it seems likely that the build will be affected in some way or another. Whether it becomes more or less viable remains to be seen, but if it's truly this powerful, I can't imagine Riot will let it survive for very long if it accidentally buffs it during Preseason.
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I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.