Base Crit Chance Is 0% For All 173 Champions, Items Cap At 25% And Four Of Them Make 100%

I went through the base stats of all 173 League of Legends champions one by one. crit (base crit chance) and critperlevel (per-level growth) are zero for every single one. Jhin, Tryndamere, Kayle, even the marksmen who are supposed to live and die by crits, no exceptions. Not one champion is born with a right to crit.

What this number actually means

What we're looking at is the crit / critperlevel field in ddragon's base champion data, the slot meant to hold a champion's level-1 crit chance and its growth per level. Under the current balance, crit chance doesn't belong to champions at all, it's entirely owned by items. So these two fields are just zeroed out now, basically dead weight sitting in the data (I doubted my own script and ran it three times before trusting the result).

17 items on Summoner's Rift, and a wall at 25%

Seventeen items carry a crit chance stat. Line them up against their price and they split cleanly into three tiers.

Item	Crit Chance	Price
Cloak of Agility	15%	600g
Zeal	15%	1200g
Atma's Reckoning	20%+	2900g
Noonquiver	20%	1300g
Galeforce	20%	3500g
Infinity Edge	25%	3500g
Phantom Dancer	25%	2650g
Essence Reaver	25%	3050g
The Collector	25%	3000g

Of the 17, 12 land exactly on 25%, which functions as the real per-item ceiling. Stack four and simple math already gets you to 100%. The reason full-build marksmen want to pile up four crit items comes down to basically that multiplication.

Only Atma's Reckoning breaks the wall

The lone exception is Atma's Reckoning. Its base is 20%, but the passive adds another 0 to 30% crit chance scaling off bonus health. A tanky marksman who picks it up clears the 25% wall with room to spare. Price makes it interesting too: Cloak of Agility costs 600 gold for 15%, Infinity Edge costs 3500 for 25%, but Galeforce, at that same 3500 price point, caps out at 20%. Crit chance doesn't scale with gold spent, only with which item you choose.

Jhin's contradiction

Jhin's base crit sits at 0 just like the other 172, but the fourth shot of his passive has its own mechanic: it deals bonus damage scaled to crit and the target's missing health, and every crit grants him move speed. A champion with zero innate crit, built from the ground up around critting. A little contradictory, but funny.

Takeaway

All 173 champions starting at 0% base crit chance is proof that, for Riot, crit is entirely the item's job, not the champion's. Everyone starts from the same zero regardless of role or kit, and the only thing separating you is which item you buy. Twelve of seventeen items landing exactly on 25% probably isn't a coincidence either.

25% times 4 equals 100%, there's something clean about math that doesn't even need a calculator