Wednesday, February 01, 2012

League of Legends: Ziggs!

The main menu inside the League of Legends client has a spot for them to link to youtube videos. The video that was displaying there last week was something called 'Ziggs Champion Spotlight' or something like that. I saw the name and thought they'd gotten someone named Zigg to start doing champion spotlights for them. This made me a little bitter since I have a patent on all names starting with the letters 'Zigg'. But then I went to play a game and forgot all about it.

A few days later something clicked and I realized it wasn't a champion spotlight by some guy named Zigg. It was a spotlight of the upcoming new champion named Ziggs. This instantly changed the bitterness around. Now I was very curious since I obviously have to play a champion with such an awesome name. But what was this hero going to be? I went to the preview website and was immediately greeted with the following...

"Sometimes, you want to go a little crazy. Sometimes, you want to throw caution to the wind. And sometimes, you want to blow stuff up just to watch it explode."

I _am_ a little crazy. I frequently throw caution to the wind in the game. And yes, explosions are cool. So this is sounding good so far... What does Ziggs look like?


So he's a Yordle then? (Yordles are essentially Gnomes.) And he has bombs. So essentially he's a gnome engineer named Ziggs? Did they make this champion specifically for me? Thanks Riot! But what does he do...

His passive makes him do more damage on his auto-attacks every 12 seconds. Any damage is good damage but this sort of thing probably doesn't do a whole lot. Shen has a similar ability and it's not terribly exciting.

His Q bounces a bomb along which eventually explodes. Supposedly this is a 'skill shot' and they mention that they were able to ratchet up his damage because it's hard to land this. Intriguing. I'm not terribly good at landing skill shots right now but I would certainly be willing to practice...

His W drops a bomb on the ground that explodes after 4 seconds or on command. When it explodes it does big AE damage to any nearby enemies and knocks them back. It also knocks Ziggs back (but somehow doesn't hurt him). This sounds awesome. Throw the bomb behind people to knock them forward into your team for easy kills. Throw the bomb between someone who's chasing you in order to blow the two of you apart. Disrupt people who are fighting dragon? Can you pull jungle creeps with it? It seems like a really versatile and powerful ability.

His E drops a bunch of land mines on the ground that explode on enemy contact to do damage and slow them down. Slows tend to be pretty good for killing people but how far away you can throw them will determine how good this ability is. Certainly has potential though!

His ultimate claims to be an enormous ranged AE attack that does tons of damage to people near it when it explodes. It sounds like this might be able to finish runners off similar to Graves? It really depends on the definition of enormous! Regardless, huge explosions have to be awesome.


I was trying to get enough IP in game to buy him when he launched but he came out today and I don't have enough. So I think it's time to pony up some bucks and reward Riot for building a champion just for me. This is how a 'free to play' game can get money out of me without scams!

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