Base Attack Speed: Graves' 0.475 Is Dead Last Among 173 LoL Champions — the Top 10 Fastest Are All Tanks

Graves' base attack speed is 0.475 — dead last among all 173 League of Legends champions, slower even than the support mage Annie (0.61). The marksman whose entire kit revolves around auto-attacking turned out to have the single slowest base swing in the game, confirmed straight from ddragon's raw numbers.

What base attack speed actually is

Base attack speed is how many times a champion swings per second at level 1, before any items, runes, or per-level growth are applied. It's set individually per champion and has nothing to do with whether they're melee or ranged, or how their role 'feels'. Of the 173 champions, 55 — 32% of the roster — sit on the exact same value, 0.625, so the 'individual' tuning is really stacked on a handful of templates.

Dead last: the marksman Graves

Champion	Base attack speed
Graves	0.475
Annie	0.61
Akali	0.625
Darius	0.625
Jinx	0.625

Graves' 0.475 is only 0.78x Annie's number in second-to-last — a clean gap ahead of everyone else at the bottom. The 33 marksmen average 0.645, the slowest of all six roles. Popular ADCs like Jinx and Ezreal also sit at 0.625 near the bottom, which shows the marksman role itself gets no favors on base attack speed.

The 10 fastest are all tanks

Champion	Base attack speed
Maokai	0.8
Shen	0.751
Amumu	0.736
Malphite	0.736
Zac	0.736

Maokai's 0.8 is 1.68x Graves' number. And every single one of the top 10 is tagged Tank, all the way down through Rammus, Singed, Nautilus, Olaf, and Nocturne. Tanks average 0.661, the highest of the six roles, about 2.4% above marksmen. The role least interested in trading blows is built to throw the most of them per second.

Growth rates tell the same contrasting story

Per-level attack speed growth has its own extremes. Jhin and Bel'Veth both grow at exactly 0% — their base number never changes as they level. Jhin's entire kit is built around a fixed fourth-shot rhythm, so a flat base attack speed actually fits the design. At the other end, Gnar leads at 6%, the only champion that far ahead, tied to his transformation gimmick.

Source: Riot Games' ddragon API, based on raw base stats for all 173 champions.

Takeaway

Base attack speed runs on an axis completely separate from how a role looks on paper — an ADC's speed seems to come from growth, items, and runes stacked on top, not from the base number itself. Graves trades fewer swings for the weight of a shotgun blast, while tanks bank raw swing count into their base stat just to stay in every fight.

finding out Graves swings slower than a tank almost makes sense once you remember he's carrying a shotgun