Are Champions with low winrates (47% and lower) inherently bad?

So many things go into win rates, they can not be used to make broad statements. Things like champ strength, difficulty, popularity, are all things that can affect a champs win rate. So really, the only way to tell if you like a champ and how good they are is to play them. You can use win rates in a more specific sense, but you have to say what causes that low win rates, not just say a champ is bad because there win rates are low.

I don't think low winrates always suggest a champion is bad. Often it simply means that the champion has a high skillcap or needs an more than average team-coordination, or is just pretty situationaly and often picked under the wrong circumstances. If a champ is inherently bad still has to be judged case by case. Lee and Zed bothe have below 47% winrate in average, yet they are amongst the most contested picks in profesional play.

Most of the time 45-50% winrate means a champion is balanced.

As we all know, smoking is really bad for your health. What a lot of people don't realize is that when you smoke, those few minutes of your expected lifespan are literally transformed into the ash you flick away into an ashtray. Ashtrays, each and every one of them, are constructed by a single group running several dozen front companies. Basically, unless you're putting out your smokes beneath your heel or in the ashtray your kid made at camp, you're dispensing your ashen life into this group's eager little recepticle. Their ashtrays absorb the life force from the ashes and sends it to a central holding facility. No one knows for sure what these guys are going to do when they've collected all that life energy, but it's probably going to be huge. Incidentally, there's talk of a rival organization leading the anti-smoking political agenda from behind the scenes. They probably figure removing smoking sections, and thus ashtrays, from restaurants and bars is a good first step towards thwarting whatever it is this ashtray company is trying to do.

You have to look at the stats in more detail than just overall winrate.

If a champion has bad winrates in solo queue but does okay in team play (or vice versa), it may be that their playstyle depends on teamwork -- or thrives when there is a lack of it. For instance, Yi does well in solo queue but tends to get shut down hard in Ranked 5s. A lot of assassins and heavily snowbally champs are like that.

If a champion does poorly at low tiers but better at high ones, they may just have a high skill floor and/or skill cap.

If some players are doing well with a champion but others aren't, then it may just have something to do with playstyle or builds. This is less visible from the outside, but Riot can get this kind of information.

But if nobody's getting a winrate close to 50% with a champion, then that's a problem.

Sometimes a champion's kit is just outdated or doesn't fit well in the current meta. Those are champs that are generally slated for reworks (e.g. Urgot, Yorick.) Sion just got reworked...

Sometimes champions have kits that make them very hard to balance -- they had to be nerfed because they were too strong, but even slight tweaks upwards in power would make them "anti-fun". Generally at that point they have to rethink the champion's whole kit. Yi's rework was like that, and arguably Soraka and Sona got reworked along these lines too.

And sometimes champions are good, but only as niche picks/counterpicks. Like you have to build a whole team around them for them to really be effective, or they can counter certain champs really hard but have bad matchups against many popular champs. Sometimes that indicates a need for a rework, but sometimes that's just how the champion needs to be based on their core identity.

Win rates mostly dictate a champion's difficulty. HOWEVER, the obvious outliers are Urgot, Yorick, Gnar, and now Azir. With Azir, it's because hes difficult, but also really clunky to play, and has quite a few bugs. Yorick's reason is because he has one of the worst post lane gameplay in the game. Urgot and Gnar? They're simply underpowered.

There are winrate for both soloQ and ranked 5's. It makes a big difference what winrate you are looking at. However, I'd say that a winrate below 45% indicates that a champion is underpowered.

Depends. If they are simple with a low win rate, chances are they are just bad champions. Like Garen is pretty simple and his winrate is maybe a bit too low for how simple he is to play.

Lee Sin for example has a 45% winrate, he is good. He is more complex than... Amumu, Rammus, or Warwick who all have above 50% winrates.

So I've been playing Zac jungle lately. I see that he has a low winrate. Does this mean I should probably pick someone else to play to improve my chances at winning?