League of Legends: what the Hextech Origin adds to Teamfight Tactics

The champions

"Camille Class: Blademaster Ability: Hextech Ultimatum – Camille roots and damages her current auto-attack target. Camille’s abilities that can attack that target will switch their current target to do so. Meta: Ideally, Camille can single out an enemy and help her team focus fire them down. Explicit external control over AI’s targeting is a new effect, and we’d like to see players consider who they want to target on the enemy team. Tier: 1"

As a 1g unit, Camille seems like she could be a cut above the rest. Her ability gives her single-target CC. It’s very interesting and refreshing to see Riot giving the player some control over a champion’s behavior since it gives more skill expression and less RNG, but I worry that Riot might go overboard on this trend. We don’t want to turn this mode into tiny League of Legends.

"Jayce Class: Shapeshifter Ability: Thundering Blow + Transform Mercury Cannon – Knock back his target then change to ranged, gaining max attack speed for a few attacks. Meta: Jayce is able to break up the enemy frontline fairly early on in the fight, a premium and rare effect in TFT. Jayce has a particularly low mana cost for a shapeshifter (50). Tier: 2"

First off, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I called it, I called Jayce coming to the game. Second, I think Jayce could be ridiculously strong just based off synergies alone.

He’ll be able to get the Hextech synergy with Camille, obviously, which will be massively impactful early when there are fewer items built. However, Jayce will also be able to get the Shapeshifter synergy with 1g units Elise and Nidalee. Even though those units aren’t too strong at the moment, they could make Jayce a massive early game terror.

There’s also the fact that Jayce’s ability gives him CC and ranged attacks. This could be ridiculously unbalanced, as he’s basically the inverse of an Assassin because he knocks front line champions to the backline and then do ranged damage. He can expose squishy units and potentially be out of their attack radius, all with a very low mana cost.

"Vi Class: Brawler Ability: Assault and Battery – Vi targets the furthest enemy and launches towards them, knocking aside everyone else while knocking up and dealing damage on impact with her target. Meta: Vi provides backline access on priority targets. Something we particularly wanted for Brawlers. Tier: 3"

Vi’s ability is honestly just a worse version of Blitzcrank’s. She’ll target the furthest target and dive onto them, but if she can’t completely blow them up Vi will be the one at risk of being blown up. Since she does have a synergy that gives her some extra tankiness, that might not be as big an issue and she could be able to draw attention away from her team’s frontline, but I don’t know if Vi will be that good.

"Jinx Class: Gunslinger Ability: Get Excited – Jinx gets more excited as she scores takedowns. After her first, she gains attacked speed. After her second, she pulls out Fishbones for AoE damage on Autos. Meta: Jinx is a ramping AoE AA carry (opposed to Draven ramping single target AA carry). She’s a particularly squishy, high risk/reward carry. Tier: 4"

I’m not quite sure how Jinx’s ability (specifically after her specific takedown) will interact with the Gunslinger synergy, which can make the user’s autos target multiple members. However, the fact that she has a built-in attack speed steroid in her kit means that she will probably scale like a monster, especially if she gets some items.

The Hextech champions will become available today on the Public Beta Environment (PBE) and will hit the Arena with Patch 9.16.