Darius vs Locke Counter Pick

Locke plays like an assassin built for the mid role, not the jungle, and it shows: Darius wins 60.8% of 217 games on patch 16.13.1, a comfortable Easy rating against a champion with no real disengage tool. A few facts explain the gap.

• Locke’s 655 health and 32 armor at level one barely edge out Darius’ 652 health and 37 armor, so the earliest skirmishes are close, but Darius’ 2 difficulty rating means he rarely misplays the exchange that follows.
• Silver Stake rewards Locke for finishing a target that is already low, which means he wants extended fights to swing his way — exactly the kind of drawn-out trade that instead favors Hemorrhage’s stacking bleed and Apprehend’s armor shred.
• Ashen Pursuit is a dash rather than a blink, so Crippling Strike’s slow can still catch Locke mid-repositioning far more often than a genuine escape tool would allow.

Purgatory threatens an execute if Locke gets to cast it freely, but landing it against a Fighter with 2,590 health at level 18 and a Q that heals on cast is a tall order once Darius is ahead on Hemorrhage stacks. Both sit at 340 move speed, so neither side reliably outruns the other, and the skirmish tends to be decided by whoever lands the first bleed rather than by who disengages first.