League of Legends Worlds 2023: Why Xayah and Kai'sa are dominating the bot lane meta

The League of Legends (LoL) Worlds Championship is already ongoing and while we expected seven champions to dominate Worlds, two AD Carry picks in the bot lane have absolutely dominated in the Play-ins: Xayah and Kai'sa.

Both the Vastayan Rebel and the Daughter of the Void had an overwhelming presence at the first stage of the competition, with Xayah having a 100% pick/ban rate and Kai’sa having 96%.

Honestly, it got so redundant that some fans even thought they wouldn’t even see other bot lane champs at that stage of the competition.

According to popular esports information page Liquipedia, while Kai’sa tops the list of champions with the most games (24 games), she only had a 50% win rate. Xayah, on the other hand, only had 19 games on her but had an impressive 68.42% win rate.

But what makes these two so popular at Worlds? We’ll take a look at each bot laner, their pros and cons, and how you can utilize them for your own ranked matches.

Xayah

There are plenty of reasons why the Vastayan Rebel has been the most preferred champion in the bot lane. She is one of the best counters for nightmare AD Carry picks like Zeri, Nilah and Samira.

On top of this, as we mentioned before, Xayah is able to farm and lane effectively in the early stages of the game.

She has a couple of defensive tools at her disposal, so she’s not the type that needs to be babysat by her Support for a very long period of time.

Xayah can use her ultimate to escape damage because she becomes untargetable and ghosted for 1.5 seconds.

The feathers she scatters when she attacks are also a nuisance to the enemy team if placed strategically. Each feather causes physical damage to the opponent, and if an enemy champion is hit by three feathers, they also get rooted. This allows her to be quite the menace in front-to-back and kiting team fights.

Currently, she’s only B-tier, but if she’s given a team with dependable crowd control and engage skills, she can definitely finish up those quadra and pentakills.

Specifically, during the Play-ins, GAM Esports' Nguyễn “Slayder” Linh Vương and BDS’s Juš "Crownie" Marušič achieved a pentakill while on Xayah.

This is another reason why the Vastayan lover combination in the bot lane, Xayah and Rakan, are once again becoming popular both in pro-play and solo queue.

Xayah synergises the most with Rakan and even has skills that interact with him. Rakan can protect Xayah with his shields and give her a bit of healing as well. On top of that, Rakan's W, Grand Entrance can knock up enemies for much-needed crowd control.

Other popular combinations that we saw at Worlds aside from Rakan are Nautilus, who can block damage for her, engage with hooks and deal with crowd control with Depth Charge.

Reworked Rell is also a popular choice recently, given that she can absorb so much damage, and can stun enemies with her Shattering Strike, and even break their shields.

Make sure to use items that add to Xayah’s attack damage, ability haste, move speed, and critical strike. Some of the most popular items used by LoL pros are Navori Quickblades, Lord Dominik’s Regards, Kraken Slayer, and Noonquiver.

Kai’sa

Kai’sa had the most games during Play-ins, although, unlike Xayah, she didn’t have a 100% pick-ban rate throughout each drafting phase.

The Daughter of the Void is a great counter against Zeri and Aphelios, two of the other favourite ADC picks of LoL pros, especially from the LoL Champions Korea (LCK).

This may be attributed, in large part, to her new lethality build, which improves her mid-game spiking and enables her to one-shot most enemies with a rapid succession of combos and auto strikes.

Her skill, Icathian Rain, is perfect for catching isolated targets, and as long as she has teammates who can set up her ultimate, she can be unstoppable.

Her ultimate, Killer Instinct, may also be utilised offensively or defensively, and it has a repositioning ability. However, if you want to stay alive long enough to cause significant damage to the other squad, you should try to situate yourself using it to avoid getting focused on.

Kai’sa synergises well with Taliyah in the mid lane and Poppy in the jungle, and she can also do well with support champions like Rell, Alistor, and Rakan.

In terms of build, getting the Hail of Blades rune will help compensate for Kai’sa’s weakness in the early game and can allow her to farm more effectively, win her lane and scale better.

When it comes to items, she benefits greatly from Umbral Glaive, because it gives her all the stats she needs to have agency in the early game. Another one of the items you can pick is Serrated Dirk.

Pros like T1’s Lee “Gumayusi” Min-hyeong and JD Gaming’s Park "Ruler" Jae-hyuk also tend to go for Kraken Slayer, Berserker’s Greaves, and Duskblade of Draktharr.

Kai’sa’s build is also pretty flexible, with some pros combining items for magic with physical damage items, to the point that a meme stemmed from it:

Kai'Sa can also gain an advantage while using hybrid damage items. Some pros experiment on including Rabadon’s Deathcap (a popular mage item) and other items that add to her ability power. And for some reason, it still works.

Do we expect the Worlds bot lane meta to change during the Swiss Stage?

We don’t expect much to change in terms of priority for both Xayah and Kai’sa, especially since Patch 13.21 won’t be touching both Xayah and Kai’sa.

However, since the Swiss Stage would include teams from the LPL and the LCK, we think that Zeri and Aphelios might still be a bit of a priority, only if both Kai’sa and Xayah are banned.

How about you? Which bot lane champion do you think is better?

Anna is a freelance writer and photographer. She is a gamer who loves RPGs and platformers, and is a League of Legends geek. She's also a food enthusiast who loves a good cup of black coffee.

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