League of Legends: Meet Riot's "Slowest Marksman Yet"

I went away on a work trip for a week. One single week. Now there is all the League of Legends [official site] news in the universe to catch up on and the EU LCS season starts again in mere minutes. I'm going to start my catchup session by chugging coffee through a Twix (instructions here in case you have never done this) AND talking to you about new champion Jhin The Virtuoso, "League's slowest marksman yet".

The TL;DR of Jhin is basically: Let's hope League of Legends players are good at four-play*.

Oh for goodness sake. I've just started reading his passive and it says things like:

"Jhin’s crits deal less damage than normal, and his attack speed doesn’t actually scale with attack speed. Instead, Jhin gains attack damage from any attack speed and crit chance he earns through itemization and runes, while crits give him a burst of movement based on his attack speed."

Guys, I'm too jetlagged for this. Give me a minute to get another coffee.

Okay. Back now. So the important thing about Jhin is that he has four shots in his gun for basic attacks and that last one always crits and does some extra damage based on a portion of the target's missing health. I can imagine laning sessions going full Sesame Street as I keep track of my crits. I think Count Von Count would like Jhin.

He also has a bouncy grenade (it bounces up to four times), a long-range shot which can root an enemy (if they've already been marked by allied damage, Jhin's basic attacks or his trap), an explosive trap, and an ultra-long-range ultimate attack which you can fire four times. That ult sticks to the general theme of the character - the fourth shot does massively increased damage and is guaranteed to crit.

As per Riot's explanation, they see Jhin's laning combo as follows:

You lay a few traps and then allow the lane to push back towards your tower. If the enemy comes too close they'll activate a trap and get marked and slowed. Using the shot on Jhin's W will then root your foe keeping them within the trap's explosion range. Finish off with a fourth-bullet crit and accept rapturous applause while running about as per the speed boost said crit will give you.

Basically, Jhin's deal is strategy I think. His low attack speed means you can't really rely on just bursting someone down if you get caught out and his ultimate seems to freeze him in place as a kind of four-shot turret. You have to prepare battlegrounds so engagements go in your favour (those traps are a big deal, both as control methods in a fight and as makeshift wards/protection devices) and you have to know the state of your ammo. A crit could make a fight and a reload pause could break it.

Here's the champ reveal page so you can read through Riot's appraisal in more detail. While you do that I'm going to have a third coffee. This one is a celebratory coffee because Riot seem to be moving away from champ reveals where the artwork has them reaching out towards the viewer like they're in an early episode of America's Next Top Model. Hooray!

*I'm not sorry.