Nocturne Remake, pt. 1 | League TILTS! (2025)

Nocturne was the first League of Legends champion that I purchased back in March of 2013. I really liked his shadowy theme and thought that his ultimate was one of the coolest abilities in the game at the time. I scored my first Quadra on him, his Eternum skin was one of the first pieces of League content that I shilled out real money for (and the first and only Legendary skin I’ve ever bought), and most of my first, cherished, post-game lobby screenshot memories — that all OG League players must have buried away on their Facebook timelines somewhere, I swear — exist with his frighteningly goofy-looking old splash art mocking me in the background. I wouldn’t say I was ever in love with the guy, but I was definitely attached, and happier for it.

In the many years since Season 3 League, however, I’ve come to play Nocturne what has seemed exponentially less and less. As new champions would be released (especially those of the midlane assassin variety — my favorite archetype to play), I must have subconsciously found fewer reasons to play him over others: fewer reasons to favor his particular character traits and skills over others and, with each and every passing VGU, find him feeling as if he were being further nailed into the nefarious coffin of gameplay antiquity. He constantly grew only to seem less and less of a unique experience when compared to other champions- including those technically older than he. At some point recently, he would begin to ironically find play in the meta (owing to the sudden appearance of Season 11’s new mythic items and a particularly cheesy top-lane bruiser build that rocketed his effectiveness straight to LCS center stage), and I would began to feel actively prompted to wonder why I felt none of the old intrigue that his design used to give me. Oddly enough, as of writing this I think I’ve come to realize that at least a major part of that feeling might’ve been because he was being played as a healthy bruiser with assassination capabilities, rather than the dedicated assassin that I had grown into League believing him to be.

Have you ever heard the old adage,

“Be yourself, because everyone else is taken”?

I think of the meaning behind that saying a great deal when it comes to Nocturne and other outdated and underutilized champions. In a sea of so many supposedly disparate gameplay fantasies, each intended to be compelling on an individual level, why play one thing when everything it’s good for is eclipsed or outshined by another?

Here’s a thought experiment. What does a Nocturne do without his ult?

If he only has QWE available, is he ever ideal for accomplishing anything that most other assassins aren’t?
Hint: it’s definitely not sitting in a bush and waiting for an unsuspecting squishy enemy to walk up to him, because unless he is far ahead in levels and gold, he needs at least 2 seconds to fear you before he can start wailing on you without you being able to react. At best, he needs to commit his Q and ult to do the most immediate damage possible in the service of even possibly deleting a squishy champion, whereas almost any Zed or Qiyana in the same position can consistently accomplish the same feat with only a single basic ability rotation, and even sometimes without needing to proc Electrocute.
Does a Nocturne 1v1 in a drawn-out fight out in the open better than most other Assassins? Well, yes, probably due to his spellshield and AA steroids — but doesn’t that make him more of a Skirmisher than an Assassin?

Consciously, of course I know why I feel so little of that allure to play Noc from my first days of League, but with Season 11 nearing its end I’ve especially begun to wonder if there could be any ways that anyone could possibly enjoy the trademark “Darknesssssssss” experience again outside of this long, dark winter of him being an unfortunate flavor-of-the-month pick (unfortunate meaning, “in precarious danger of receiving not-necessarily deserved nerfs, which would further plunge him into the depths beneath League’s hypocritical iceberg of viability). When I stop to consider what Nocturne’s condition as a champion was before the slew of dramatically overtuned bruiser Mythic items granted him the spotlight that he hasn’t seen in ages, I think of him having very little in the way of being an especially desirable pick amongst the Assassin class. Outside of his current, gross item synergy, then, it’s no wonder why he had previously sunk to being so forlorn and forgotten- left adrift beneath my own champion pool, at the very least.

Nocturne is one of the last champs left from the Season 1 and before-days that has yet to receive a modern-day “adjustment” (like Wukong’s from March 2020) or full VGU.

He is preceded in this by the likes of Irelia, Swain, Urgot, Galio, Akali, Mordekaiser, Poppy, Sion, Pantheon, Taric, Gangplank, Twitch, Evelynn, Warwick, Nunu & Willump, Kayle, Fiddlesticks, Yorick, & Volibear, and definitely sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at how far everyone else from year 2 of League’s development has come. What are the problems that Nocturne faces in modern League? What keeps him from blending in with the rest of today’s much more polished cast?

1. To begin with, Nocturne is extremely one-dimensional. This isn’t a flaw in and of itself, as we might be accustomed to believing: for one thing, champion designs need variety in order to attract the widest possible playerbase, and simplicity of design is best for gameplay experiences that privilege stability and consistency. In Nocturne’s case, on the other hand, there is merely little to no depth in his decision-making capabilities. At any given time a Nocturne is either: (A) running at you, mashing all of his buttons simultaneously; or (B) running away with no diverse strategy in mind, only teeth clenched and an eye on his speedup and spellshield cooldowns.
   Because of this, we find that he has his success too heavily based around item and stat advantages, rather than tactical (vision control, map awareness, or just outright positioning — surprise factor!) or mechanical advantages (AKA the advantage of skill). In a 1v1 situation, there is close to nothing that you can do to get away from a fed Noc that decides to jump on you when he has the stat advantage- due to him essentially having two lockdown abilities: a point-and-click homing nuke that puts him directly on top of you from potentially miles away with no counterplay outside of untargetability (R; #unstoppablebtw), and another point-and-click ability that keeps you in his grasp if you don’t get far enough away within 2 seconds (which is more difficult than it usually would be, given that the first ability placed him directly atop your champion’s character model). In terms of all things League, it takes the minimal amount of skill to hover your mouse over something and simply click on it. A high lack of potential input error like this for such a high output reward, which you get with Nocturne’s R ability, can create situations where results feel absurdly unfair to the receiving party of a given interaction in relation to the amount of effort needed for the aggressor to enact them. This is especially so in situations where receiving players who otherwise should have had the advantage (again — tactical, positioning, mechanical, et cetera) lose out in the interaction.
2. While Nocturne’s abilities can be used both offensively and defensively, (which is a design principle that creates what we call “depth”— AKA variability of desired outcome, based on execution), they still only function well in assisting Nocturne in doing the same, old, typical thing — getting in deep and brutalizing a target before running with tail tucked and the hope of quickly fading into obscurity clutched to his chest (in societal terms, this would make Nocturne the King of the One Night Stand):
   his Q does damage and provides him an AOE speedup that can help him either chase down enemies or run away from them — but is much better for chasing than the latter — that also happens to give him bonus, offensive combat stats (which rewards further aggression, rather than withdrawal);
   his W can be used to shrug off a disable- which can enable both a safer escape and a more successful all-in takedown at the same time in the most ideal circumstances, sure- but triggering the spellshield gives, again, bonus, offense-focused combat stats, so… it’s designed to ironically reward further advancement and antagonism rather than any sort of pacification or retreat;
   and we get the same deal with E, where the fear CAN be used to deter a single would-be pursuer, but the debuff itself also only gives Nocturne bonus movement speed towards an affected target, so- again, we’re almost exclusively rewarding offense over defense.
   In some ways, this kit can be deemed adequate design for a simplistic character that merely wants to do one job consistently. In many more ways, however, I believe that it could simply be made better. Abilities that work both offensively and defensively well shouldn’t do so at the expense of causing the enemy that they are working against to have little-to-no-room for counterplay. This form of interaction is what Riot Games would normally call a lack of agency on the enemy’s behalf, and is already widely regarded in all other forms of competitive gaming as a net negative kind of interaction.
3. Nocturne is deceptively immobile. His ability to use his sole movement ability (AKA an ability that displaces your own champion from point A to point B in a determinate way), is entirely contingent upon him having access to an enemy target. What’s more, while Paranoia does grant him the ability to traverse a great distance with incredible speed— allowing him to dash directly and unstoppably to his target from sometimes multiple screens away — it also makes him his most vulnerable in doing so. This is due to the fact that his range of influence without the ability is mostly basic attack-ranged and that his R gives him no further tools for doing his usual “job” (read: proposed character fantasy) of high-priority target assassination after doing so; outside of his ult’s high damage, all it really does for him as an assassin is to get him where he ideally wants to be (on top of the enemy).
   Paranoia’s vision denial is a really neat mechanic and can have some great tactical uses, but if you’re playing Nocturne as an assassin, being able to deny vision is essentially useless if your target is grouped up with allies close enough to to help peel you off of them (or worse, help blow you up before you can blow up your target). Seeing as Noc’s main role designated by Riot is an assassin, I find these sort of solved interactions problematic. Nocturne needs to rely on his enemy either mispositioning or being so far behind him in stats, such as through gold or levels, that he can delete them instantly in order to do his job optimally and actually has none of the agency that would elsewhere be given to him by his own good positioning or being ahead for himself. What extremely item-reliant champs truly give you is not really a power fantasy, but the illusion of power — all the “show”, with no agency.

As a bonus, and because I do not find Paranoia to be worth much offense (pun intended) when it comes to overly one-note design (and to hark back to my 1st point of one-dimensionality), I concede that Noc’s ult — again, his strongest ability — can be viewed as giving him intangible strengths that cannot exactly be quantified in terms of a power budget. The ability to forcefully deny shared vision at any time and for every member of the opposing team all at once cannot be understated in its potential effectiveness. However, I believe that Paranoia can also alternatively viewed as having the one fatal flaw of making him both incredibly unpredictable — in this strategic way, through this manner of information denial — and predictable. When you consider the ability mechanically, without the damage component (which I think is a useful practice, in a game where numbers can always be tuned and tend to do so in a downwards fashion when champions are deemed oppressive), what it does is that it causes him to literally present himself on the doorstep of an enemy if he chooses to utilize it offensively, and offers extremely limited tactical utility outside of that due to having no passive effects or other ability synergies. Yes- Paranoia does allow for the occasional, crazy galaxy brain plays involving juking in and out of obstructed vision, and does allot Nocturne some potential usefulness to his team through map pressure outside of his otherwise combat stat-oriented kit, but if you are only casting Paranoia as-is for that tactical edge (without using the damage-dealing second cast) you are getting the least possible benefit out of a very high and very important cooldown. Nonetheless, I would still argue that this limitation of Nocturne’s current ultimate should be seen as mainly being due to the inability of his other basic abilities to either augment its uses or to amplify its strengths and that such a creative and unique ult (which might even be considered the saving grace of the champion, in today’s sense) — not to mention the nearsight mechanic — deserves to be preserved (if not, at least, appreciated) for what it could possibly helps us to imagine that a more recently designed and released Nocturne might be apt to do.

This is to say, to be clear and frank, that I believe the core thematic of Nocturne, in both narrative and gameplay, to be truthfully encapsulated by his ultimate ability.

After all, what would any of us know or be attached to him for in our experiences of him outside of it? Unfortunately, as we have begun to see, not only is Nocturne’s kit simplistically unimaginative towards the aim of representing the hash-slinging-slashering character fantasy evoked by Paranoia and all of its magical connotations, but the implementation of his abilites are uninteractive, even moreso — with the enemy as well as with each other. For Nocturne to ever be reworked in a way that strives to maintain the current direction of his identity (I’m looking at you, Aatrox), I would argue vehemently that it would serve best to begin with re-contriving the narrative, gameplay, and thematic flairs and synergies of his character through a lens of viewing his ultimate as a primary characteristic for inspiration.

We’ve seen Riot do this successfully before: approaching a rework of the inclination that certain, patterned, “high moments” of gameplay need be preserved for legacy and player familiarity purposes, with these high moments usually being closely linked or even entirely attached to interactions surrounding a champion’s ult, and the labor of redesign intentioned to privilege the retention of these mechanical moments for fantasy and interactive purposes while shelving all others. Think, Fiddlesticks, Gangplank, Warwick (to a lesser extent), Swain, Nunu & Willump.
Even outside of having Paranoia, however, what we still see with the current kit is that a Nocturne will always do whatever he wishes- with his enemies having very little say in the matter- provided he has the capacity to do so. On the other hand, if he does not have a lead, then the enemy conversely gets to do the same to him. This, again, may not be bad, but I certainly think it to be suboptimal design. Certainly enough, we’ve seen the systematic abolition of many previous champion kits that have suffered this kind of binary in recent League history: Mordekaiser (multiple iterations), Pantheon, and Tahm Kench, just to name a few; simply unfun when fed.

With all of these major pain points in mind, I would like to direct your attention to the looming premise of Nocturne’s upcoming Visual-Gameplay Update (VGU). We know that these projects normally entail a detailed assessment (and sometimes, complete reimagining) of a champion’s core identity, and that the primary goal of the venture is to bring all of a proposed champion’s gameplay experience and presentation up to par for not only League’s current technological and thematic ecosystem, but also Riot’s current “wow factor” standards.
A while ago, I decided that I would be interested in attempting this undertaking on Nocturne’s behalf as an explorative creative project of my own. The remainder of this essay will detail the beginnings of my corrective thought processes on the matter, and lead into a few further essays where I reveal the results of a few months of my mental laboring over Nocturne’s character, League’s class design philosophy, and the overall MOBA character design process.

Here’s a quick, more class-conscious review of Nocturne’s gameplay situation before we delve into the last bit of conjecturing surrounding how he might need to be changed to fit today’s standards of polish and the character imagination (as a reminder, Nocturne is supposedly an assassin — with no secondary role currently being indicated by Riot):

• Nocturne’s W nullifies not only enemy retaliations, but sometimes meaningful opportunities for enemy interaction. Assassins are meant to utilize their characteristic advantages strategically, not by systematic brute force.
• Nocturne’s E gives him hard CC lockdown that the enemy has no way of counteracting other than getting or staying away from him entirely, which is class-uncharacteristic (and on a basic ability, no less); if the only way to beat the crap out of him is to get closer, but you literally are not allowed to do so when this ability is off cooldown, then he might as well be a juggernaut, shouldn’t he? (The same can be said of W to an extent. Where it gets off as less sinful is that it isn’t an enabling, offensive-oriented ability… mostly.)
• Nocturne’s Q, at last glance, is rather all-or-nothing; if you land it but can’t go in, you are now at an extreme disadvantage for being engaged on, but if you miss it, you have essentially stat-checked yourself and have forced your decision-making to be solved down to a binary of either “I’ll go in if my stats and damage are still higher,” or ”I must stay away at all costs.” Where this kind of spell could be improved upon is in not shouldering the bulk of Nocturne’s ability to put himself in favorable positions, as well as to draw out the trait advantages he should already have.
  (To draw an illustrative comparison between Noc and another champ of the same class, Zed can miss WE, WQ, or even the whole WEQ-combo and still be enabled in having used W by it still giving him the possible strategic advantage of having a repositioning tool available. In contrast, Noc’s Q serves no dual purpose other than arguably helping him to make an escape through aiding him in what any other champ would be able to do anyways in a failed all-in situation — walking away. The reason why I think that this is bad design is due to it also being his primary damage tool — again, if you are using Q to get away, you probably didn’t have enough damage to go in in the first place and bit off more than you can chew. Nocturne, unlike other assassins, always has to go in deep behind enemy backlines in order to get his job of high-priority target neutralization done, and typically has to stay in until he’s the last one standing- or die trying. This, my friends, is actually what a Diver is meant to do.)

All of Nocturne’s abilities sport the illusion of versatility; they might be useful for covering bases in ways that give you less to think about in any given situation, but they don’t actually give you the ability to do more than one thing or produce more than an one outcome at any given time. You can’t use Q to go in AND get the speedup for running away simultaneously- you either Q in or out. You can’t use W for an on-demand steroid if your prey chooses only to try and run, not using any abilities in retaliation of you pouncing on them. You can’t use E for more upfront burst, or to get someone off you that you really need immediately out of the way (but not necessarily dead — that’s what W is for, as we discussed earlier). In addition, each of these things can only be utilized once in most engagements, and, again, none of them really interact with each other. They only appear to have depth and synergy because they typically all just get pressed at the same time, making you exceptionally good at doing the one thing you always wanna be able to do anyway when piloting this champ. Single-mindedly running in, gunning for one specific target and securing a takedown can be satisfying when ahead, but almost always ends up being an extremely dissatisfying thing to want when behind (because you don’t have the damage to make it happen or usually have to die for it). And when your primary job is doing just that — not necessarily because it’s what you drafted for in champ select, but because all of the tools you possess lean so heavily towards enabling that one idea of usefulness— your effectiveness becomes incredibly limited; if you had planned to build for durability from the beginning there would have been plenty of other champs that would have functioned better for the job of getting in deep behind enemy lines for the sake of locking priority targets down — a delayed stun and some damage steroids does not a Vanguard make.

In summary, Nocturne is one of the best contenders for posterchild in League of the cliché, “unstoppable when good, useless when bad”. With such a unique and interesting mechanic in his kit as his ult has, as well, I still feel that his kit’s implementation should still be seen as an extreme letdown of a potentially realized fantasy — even when he’s carrying your team, it’s almost never the case that he’s doing well specifically because he’s Nocturne, but because he’s being piloted by a decent enough player who probably got a lead. He also suffers from not only having his skill ceiling and depth of expression severely hampered but a lack of thematic cohesion and imaginative innovation, owing mainly to how one-note his abilities are.

I see these disappointments not particularly as a failure of Riot’s design team themselves, but as opportunities to expand the imagination of League’s design space. As I have already named that I am putting my money where my mouth is in this sort of criticizing, so to speak, I must add that I additionally intend for this sort of thought-experimenting to assist me in concocting ideas of what a class-specific (or class/archetype-first) approach to champion design might afford us not just as League players, but as a gaming community. (To mention: this writing is also an open exercise for envisioning what a potential future game design career might feel like for myself). Obviously, this suffers a bit of hindsight bias (and works better for redesigning old kits because of it), and I’m not usually one to denounce the fertility of mind that comes in inspiration of designing something new (especially never having made a game or shipped an original design yet myself), but… I’m just interested in seeing what it feels like to be at the wheel of my own design-brain, and think that the improvement (and/or development) of a transparent, logical methodology of champion design (and therefore redress and redesign) could help bridge the gap between Riot’s design team (and all game developer design teams) and our all-too-often vexed player community.

Thank you for your time, and read on to my next essay for the reveal of the new Nocturne, The Primal Shade.