UK streamer and top-laner No Arm Whatley – who one-tricks Tahm Kench in League of Legends – has reached Master tier without using a single ward.
The 25-year-old from Surrey, who has won the NUEL League of Legends university esports tournament in the past, set himself a challenge of going from unranked to Master with a vision score of zero during the 2022 LoL pre-season.
Wards in League of Legends of course allow a team to see into the fog of war, giving them useful information such as discovering where enemies may be, to track objectives such as Baron and Drakes, and so on.
During the laning phase, wards help players spot – and avoid – incoming ganks from the enemy jungler, for example.
For no-ward Whatley, this meant tracking the enemy jungler more closely, and having a harder time in 1v1 or 1v2 duels as the demon catfish – not to mention being unable to clear enemy wards. And having to deal with stream sniping certainly gave him a Thick Skin.
“I don’t want to pretend like this is in any way proof you don’t need wards. This was just a fun experiment to see how much harder the game becomes without warding.”
No Arm Whatley, demon catfish enjoyer
“I feel like I got a far better sense of jungle tracking and paying attention to how the enemy jungler was pathing around the map,” he said in this post on the League of Legend subreddit.
“There was never a moment where I felt like I was safe due to being fully warded, so I was more vigilant about my positioning and the types of trades I took in lane, since I couldn’t precisely know when the enemy jungler was coming.
“Support roams were MUCH harder to deal with as they aren’t really tied to their camps in the same way junglers are, meaning without vision you can’t really track them. Overall my map awareness improved a lot though.”
No Arm Whatley is a Tahm Kench OTP (one-trick pony), meaning he mostly plays that one champion – The River King. However, he did also play as Warwick during the climb, when Tahm Kench was banned or already picked, for example.
While he did go for a vision score of zero, Mobalytics’ No Ward Whatley page does erroneously state he has a score of 0.1, and that he averages over 21.66 wards in the first 15 minutes of a game, which is pretty much impossible and seems to be a bug on the platform.
Tahm Kench is known for being a strong top-laner in League of Legends – and has been for some time now. He also has a copypasta attached to him, with sayings such as ‘unbench the kench’, ‘unroll the tadpole’, ‘unclog the frog’, ‘unload the toad’, unmute the newt’, ‘permit the kermit’ and more. For No Arm Whatley, he’s the champion of (river) kings.
No Arm Whatley – who is a Twitch partner with around 8,000 followers on the livestreaming platform – explained how he did it.
“[Tahm Kench and Warwick] have strong laning and the potential to 1v2 the enemy top and jungle if you’re caught in a bad spot,” he said. “As a top laner you’re not as expected to contribute as much to vision since you’re more isolated and far away from Dragon, which is where most games are played around. This challenge would be much much harder on support or jungle due to how those roles interact with vision.
“I don’t think not warding specifically lost me many games. It just made them harder and then when they were harder I couldn’t carry as much.”
He added that this is not meant to encourage other players to avoid using wards: “I don’t want to pretend like this is in any way proof you don’t need wards. This was just a fun experiment to see how much harder the game becomes without warding, I would have 100% done this faster had I utilised vision.”
The challenge seemed to be An Acquired Taste.
No Arm Whatley also explained that he did this in around 200 games, though he did get hard-stuck in Diamond 4 for around 80 games before shooting up with an 80% win rate.
For others inspired by No Arm Whatley who want to unbench the Kench and play the demon catfish in the top-lane, you can check out No Arm Whatley’s Tahm Kench guide here.
Related article: League of Legends subreddit ranked second most popular gaming page on Reddit in 2021
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
