The best and worst classes and origins in Teamfight Tactics

Classes and origins are simultaneously the most confusion and most important aspects of Teamfight Tactics. No matter how strong an individual unit is, they’ll never be as good as they can be if they don’t have a bonus.

So let’s break it down as simply as we can. Which classes are good? Which classes are bad? If you want to know why, keep scrolling past our list.

Keep in mind that Teamfight Tactics is constantly evolving. Just because Demons are mediocre at the moment doesn’t mean they will be next patch. This guide was last updated on June 24, with Teamfight Tactics still on the Public Beta Environment.

Even if the balance changes, the classes and origins will be similar most of the time. Learning what makes each good and bad is crucial to improvising your way through patch notes. Build that knowledge!

Classes

The Elementalist bonus summons a giant rock elemental to defend your team (it’s basically Ivern’s Daisy if you’re up on your League of Legends). This class is excellent because it provides a bunch of squishy units with a tank, and it has three of the best units in TFT: Brand, Anivia, and Kennen. With just those three, awesome units, you get a tank unit for free.

Characters like Gnar, Shyvanna, Swain, and Nidalee are underwhelming until they transform (Elise is always underwhelming). But the Shapeshifter bonus doubles the unit’s health after it shifts shapes. This guarantees that your new Mega Gnar or demonic Swain will get to deal some damage before they get knocked off the field.

Sorcerer increases your entire team’s AP, and is going to be our first class with a caveat. In the early game, your Sorcerers like Kassadin, Lulu, and Ahri don’t do much on their own. Even the three cost units like Morgana and Veigar aren’t going to win you a game. These are late game units, just like they are in League. Once you get an expensive unit like Aurelion Sol or Karthus, you can back them up with damage from a weaker Sorcerer and watch your enemies melt from damage.

Unless you’re brave and going full Assassin, you need some tanky units in TFT. The Knight bonus is great because all the Knights (except Poppy, sorry) are extremely good units for their cost. The Knight bonus is good because it makes the already tanky units even more tanky by increasing armor.

Assassins are very powerful in TFT. They jump into the backline and assassinate enemy units. Putting multiple Assassins out at once increases their already high crit damage. The goal of an Assassin should always be to take down a backline unit before they cast their spell.

The Assassin bonus helps make that a reality. Part of what makes Assassins so good is the units that comprise the class. Units like Rengar, Katarina, and Pyke can all work as Assassins in a comp together while helping the team pick up the Wild, Imperial, or Pirate bonus.

Like Knights, Brawlers have a lot of cheap, powerful units meant to tank a wave of incoming enemies. The bonus gives Brawlers extra health, which is always good. And with items like Warmogs or Giant’s Belt, Brawler health can get out of control pretty quickly. But unit selection is what kicks Brawlers under Knights. Knights have five good units and one mediocre unit. Brawlers have three good units, a mediocre unit (Rek’Sai) and a pretty terrible unit (sorry, Blitzcrank).

Attack speed is a very powerful tool in TFT, and it makes some units very hard to deal with. All the rangers are good, with Vayne and Kindred being the best. These units focus on dealing damage with auto attacks, and when you put them together, they increase that attack speed ten-fold. There’s not much to say about Rangers. They’re just pretty solid.

Gunslinger is our next big caveat class. Gunslinger two is an incredible bonus. Lucian, Graves, and Miss Fortune are all great to have, and dealing bonus damage to a random unit is stellar. However, sticking four Gunslingers on your team is almost always a mistake. It isn’t that dealing damage to all units is bad, it’s that sacrifice of putting pretty useless units like Tristana and Gangplank on your team that kills the class’ four unit bonus.

Guardians have a bonus that’s theoretically pretty good. You make your Guardians tanky and you add bonus defense to all your nearby friends. But that stops being helpful when you consider the units in the class. Leona is a great TFT unit, but she can’t get the bonus alone. You need Braum on your team first, and Braum is bad. Sorry, Guardians.

Blademaster is a hard one to rank last. It has two of the best units in the game with Draven and Yasuo. But Aatrox, Gangplank, and Fiora are all very undesirable units. The bonus of extra attacks isn’t worth stacking your team with bad units. And even if Shen is pretty great, he has no synergy with Yasuo or Draven. The bonus is very rarely worth having because of how low-impact it is, and the units in the class.

Origins

With the Phantom bonus, you essentially kill an enemy unit at the start of every round. Not to mention that all three Phantoms are very good units.

Stopping your enemy from moving for a few seconds is very good. If they can’t move, they can’t attack. If they can’t attack, they can’t gain mana to use their abilities. And aside from Braum, all of the Glacial units are usable.

Right now, this is only Yasuo, one of the most powerful units in the game. All you have to do is set him to the side and he’ll double his health. Pretty straightforward, extremely powerful.

Wild is good for the opposite reason that Glacial is good, since it increases attack speed over time. The faster you attack, the faster you gain mana and deal damage. The Wild bonus also has a great spread of units, and it makes getting Shapeshifters (one of the best classes) very easy.

This is the first origin where you need to be careful. The bonus here is very good, it essentially just makes one random unit on your team un-killable. But things get tricky if you try to push noble too far. Relying on a Legendary unit like Kayle is always a tough sell, and Fiora is a very bad unit who you don’t want anywhere near your team. Garen, Vayne, and Lucian are all good on their own, but have zero synergy with each other. Three Nobles are good, six Nobles are bad.

Imperial is a great bonus with great units. But it relies a lot on randomness until you pick up the full set. Doubling the damage of an Imperial unit like Draven is awesome, but it’s not quite as awesome on Darius. You also have to rely on Swain for the full comp, and you won’t be picking him up until late game unless you’re doing bad enough for first pick in the Shared Draft. Careful that you don’t build yourself into a corner hunting for the full set.

Pirates are weird, because their bonus doesn’t actually benefit you at all in combat. It just gives you tons of bonus gold. But it’ll bolster your economy, which makes re-rolling for a better, non-pirate-having team comp pretty easy. The problem here is that you have to use Gangplank, who is no good. This is probably a bonus you’re going to replace at some point unless you can replace GP with Miss Fortune.

Ninjas are great units, but have limited use. One Ninja or four Ninjas increase Ninja damage. But by the time you get all four Ninja units, you probably already have a working team comp. You have to make a very dramatic shift in the middle of the game to replace three units with Ninjas. You can bet the farm and have it pay off, or you can lose very quickly. Only being able to play one of these units at once makes the bonus very difficult to use properly. It also forces you into an Assassin comp thanks to Akali and Zed both being Assassins.

The Dragon bonus is actually pretty good, as it makes Shyvanna and Aurelion Sol immune to magic damage. Both of those units are great too, so why is this so far down? Well, they don’t have great synergies together. If you have Shyvanna, you want two other Shapeshifters, and if you have Sol, you want two other Sorcerers. That puts you at six units already, which is pushing it to only have two of them be immune to abilities.

Void is pretty underwhelming on all fronts. You need three of them to make your entire team ignore 50 percent of enemy armor. This can be great against Noble or Guardian teams. The problem is you need to use three Void units, when two of them are decent (Kha’Zix and Cho’Gath) and the others are just bad. Tough sell for some armor pen.

The Demons have a mana burn passive, which can be interesting, but is rarely worth it. All of the demons sans Brand and Swain are mediocre or bad. If you want to build an entire comp around them you can, but it’s unlikely you’ll make it far enough to really see the benefit of burning away enemy abilities.

Yordles and Demons are neck and neck on who has the worse collection of units. The answer is probably Demons, and the Yordle bonus is actually a bit more useful. Where Yordles fall apart is the sheer volume you need to make them work. To get the Yordle bonus, where your units dodge attacks, you need three Yordles. There aren’t really three Yordles worth using in any comp, let alone one where you could win.

Robots start with 100% mana. But there is only one Robot in the game right now, Blitzcrank, and he sucks. So, this is a pretty bad bonus.