League of Legends: what the Hextech Origin adds to Teamfight Tactics
By Josh Tyler
With Riot’s announcement of a new Origin hitting Teamfight Tactics, we welcome the newest batch of League of Legends champions into the Arena!
Riot revealed today that Teamfight Tactics will not only be bringing four new League of Legends champions into this new (permanent!) game mode, but will also be adding a new Origin! Yes, that’s right, the Piltover region from League of Legends is coming to Teamfight Tactics, with four new champions – Camille, Jinx, Vi, and Jayce – adding new complexity to the game mode! But what does that mean for all the champions currently on the rift?
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First, let’s take a look at what the Hextech Origin brings as a new synergy to Teamfight Tactics:
"Hextech At 2/4 Hextech, disable 2/4 random items on the enemy’s board at the start of combat. Random here = randomly select a unit from all units that have items, then randomly disable one of the items on that unit. This means it actually is generally more reliable vs players who are stacking all their items on a few units."
On first reading of this Origin synergy, I got really excited. It looks like a way to make Teamfight Tactics less item dependent than it has been since its release.
Right now, items are extremely powerful, to the point that it is basically worth building your team comp around the best items in the game (i.e. in 9.14 Locket of the Iron Solari was a very strong item, so beefier classes who also did damage like Brawlers, Gunslingers, and Blademasters emerged at the top of the meta while Rangers fell off). The Hextech synergy can basically negate the “I built the best item in the game, so I win” strategy.
However, I think this Origin is going to be very frustrating to play against because it introduces a lot more RNG to Teamfight Tactics. Because of the way it works, and the fact that there is no way to move items from unit to unit without selling the unit items are attached to, there are going to be a lot of cases where stacked units get targeted by this Origin.
Since the item checks by which champion has units, whether they have three or one, then chooses a champion and disables one item, this Origin will be more effective against players who put all their items on one or two champions. For instance, say I have six units on my board and six items completed. I’ve put three heavy damage items on my Draven and one tank item on my Volibear, Braum, and Leona each, but the enemy team has two Hextechs, so two items get disabled.
You would think that the odds are 50% one of my Draven’s items will be disabled when the game checks since there are six items total and he has half of them. However, the way “random” is calculated, it’s much lower because the game will check to see how many units have an item (25% initially, 33% if that first item is not held by Draven).
This is an example of how putting one item on a few champions makes this Origin less effective. Unfortunately, since we cannot move items once they’ve been attached to a champion, there is no way to take advantage of this mechanic. If you’ve stacked your items on two champions, you’re basically screwed as opposed to someone who just has items scattered about.
So this will discourage item stacking, which is a good thing, but it does so with no response strategy available, absent selling stacked units. Given these stacked units tend to be higher tier or have been upgraded to 2 or 3-stars, or both, doing so is almost always impractical.