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My name is Azuk, aka Powertwink on the NA server. I've been playing League since 2014, and have hung around Plat for most seasons since S7, though most of my games are in normals.
I'm sure at least some of you are aware of the "Perfectionist" challenge, which requires an S+ on every champion in the game to max out. I can't remember exactly when I started actively working at it, but if I had to estimate, it was probably in early/mid 2023. At that time, I think I had accumulated around 20 S+ or so just by playing normally. It was actually in October of 2023 that I finally finished, and became one of two people in NA to complete the challenge:
...and since then, I've kept up with new champion releases to keep the challenge maxed out.
I didn't really share it with anyone at the time, but the other day I thought that some people might find it interesting for me to share a few of the things I learned while doing it.
Firstly, I'd like to touch on what I found was most important in landing an S+. The easiest way was just to snowball and get a super high KP, keep deaths reasonably low, and CS passably. It seemed like even if I was carrying with 20+ KP, having more than 4-5 deaths was enough to drop it to an S or lower. CS is also reasonably important, as illustrated best by a lot of the typical roaming midlaners. It's really easy to end up with 5cs/min or even less on a champion like Fizz, Leblanc, or Katarina, which doesn't matter in terms of the game very much if you've got a fully stacked Mejai's, but ending a 35 minute game 15/0/5 on a midlane assassin with 102 CS is a great way to not get your S+. I also found that role matters quite a bit. Playing a champion in an offrole tends to make it easier, as the level of performance needed to outperform OTHER people playing the offrole pick tends to be lower. I used a few odd jungle picks, as it tends to be safer for your KDA and lets you inflate your CS numbers a bit. I also found that you CAN get an S+ with reasonably low KP so long as your deaths are very low and your CS is very high. I had a number of ADC games where a scoreline of something like 2/0/7 with 9-10cs/min was enough for an S+.
There were a number of champions (probably in the realm of 20 or 30) that I managed to get on the first attempt. They were mostly champions that I'd played before that kinda just clicked when I was intentionally playing for the S+, but some (like Hwei) were surprising. I wish I had kept stats, but if I had to guess, I reckon the average amount of games it took was around 5 or so per champ.
One of the more general observations is that of all the champion archetypes, I had by far the hardest time with ADCs. This is due to what I have dubbed "the ADC effect". I'm sure my ADC mains out there have noticed it, but the idea of "focusing the ADC" has been so effectively programmed into everyone's minds that they continue to do so even when it is objectively the incorrect play. I had countless ADC games that were effectively disqualified from a possible S+ very early, simply because people will focus the ADC at all costs. There were SO many games where I would be playing an ADC during a dragon fight, with only a dagger and boots to my name, and get flash ulted by multiple enemies and die while my 4/0 midlaner with an item and a half goes completely untouched, resulting in the enemy losing the dragon and the fight. We often won those games due to this weird behavior, but it made it very hard to get an S+ on a number of ADCs because my death count would be too high.
Now for champion specifics:
Alistar: Probably the second hardest support. I can't pinpoint exactly why I had so much trouble, but it probably took me around 15 games. My intuition is that because Alistar exists strictly to augment and set up plays for allies who have kill pressure, in games where my team wasn't doing well I was relegated to just walking around and soaking XP. The main barrier was cooperative teammates.
Ashe: The ultimate victim of the ADC effect. I think I played around 25 games of Ashe, because it was absolutely impossible to find a game where the enemy Zed and Vi wouldn't come down and flash ult me under tower, even if it meant both of them dying. She isn't a hard champ by any means, and I won a lot of the games I played on her, but I ended a lot of them with 4-5 deaths due to nearly unavoidable circumstances, so it took quite a while.
Azir: I chalk this one up mostly to my inexperience with Azir, as I had probably only played 10-15 games of him total prior to trying for the S+. I play on over 100 ping and with locked cam (though since October I have learned to play unlocked), so learning to shuffle took me a few games on its own. I also found that although Azir's "fantasy" is an AP marksman focused around DPSing with soldiers, I had little success trying to play him this way. He feels misbalanced if this is supposed to be his playstyle, as you'd think that if the focus were his soldier DPS, repositioning them would be more achievable. His Q cooldown is so prohibitive throughout most of the game that you get one decent reposition in most fights, and then you're left with no damage for several seconds after they move out of the radius. I ended up getting the S+ on him running a burst-focused build and looking for shuffle plays. It was with old items, but I was running Luden's instead of Liandry's and rushing straight into mage core items like Rabs and Void Staff rather than picking up a Nashor's Tooth.
Milio: Another champion where I can't pinpoint the actual issue. It felt to me like his base kit was incredibly weak and non-impactful. His Q is reasonably strong in preventing all-ins, but he lacks a real way to make aggressive plays happen and push leads. His E also feels pitifully weak, as a lot of the strength is in your ADC using E and W to apply your passive, and a lot of people simply don't. Without using that portion of the power budget, his E is just a tiny shield and his W is just a tiny heal. It feels like most of his power is in his R (specifically the cleanse portion of it), but into teams with little CC it loses a lot of value. On top of that, your R only gets to really cash in on its budget in mid-late teamfights where you can heal/cleanse multiple people at once, and whether or not you get the S+ tends to be decided in laning phase. If you come out of lane even or behind, it's very hard to pull together enough KP, vision score, and gold to get an S+, especially as a support.
...and finally, Yuumi. What a bastard of a champion. The Yuumi S+ eluded me, so much so that I ended up mastery 4 on her after finally getting it despite only playing her a handful of times beforehand. I have no idea how they calculate grades for this stupid cat. I tried everything. EVERYTHING. I even had my friends letting me KS some games to try and force it. I had probably 10+ games where I thought "certainly this is the S+" and I'd roll a B- or something. It seems like Yuumi plays by entirely different rules. I even tried offrolling, and played Yuumi both mid and top, with stellar KDA, and still couldn't land the S+. Here are some examples:
Some normal support attempts:
...or my Yuumi top game:
...or, the absolute worst of all, my Yuumi mid game, with a KDA of 6/0/49, which netted me a CRISP... S-
Attached is some of the wonderful advice I received from the Yuumi mains community regarding my plight:
And thus, I finally realized my shortcomings; I simply had not applied enough crutical shoelding. Armed with this new knowledge, I entered the rift once more, and proceeded to get the S+ on some random game where I went 4/1/31.
I have absolutely no idea what I did differently. I had a death, had comparable ward score to all of the other games (and even less ward score than some of the games where I got like an A-), and felt like I performed pretty average relative to some of my other games. I chalked it up to some sort of CIA mind control/torture experiment being facilitated by Riot, and went on to complete the remaining champions.
And that, my friends, is how you get an S+ on every champion. The new project is to get mastery 7 on every champion, which will take quite a bit longer as I'm currently sitting at about 5 completed. If anyone wants to know about a specific champion (e.g. how many games it took, any issues I encountered, or weird quirks I noticed), feel free to comment and if I remember the details about that champ, I'll talk about it a bit. Thanks for reading, and delete Yuumi
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