After hints and very limited-perspective art, we finally have a definitive reveal of the next champion for League of Legends: Jinx, the Loose Cannon. Lore-wise a criminal in Piltover who’s just out to have a violently good time, the Harley Quinn similarities seem obvious in more ways than one.
Gameplay-wise, Jinx is an AD Carry with a single move-speed enhancing ability and no gap closer, but plenty of damage and a bit of non-ult-based crowd control, so she looks to be a very different sort of champion.
P: Get Excited!
Jinx’s passive is Get Excited! It gives her a bit buff to her movespeed every time a tower or champion she recently attacked is killed or destroyed. The buff decays quickly, but this seems to be an extremely powerful ability specifically to chase down a team fleeing a lost teamfight, even if it will likely have very limited application otherwise.
Q: Switcheroo!
The Loose Cannon’s first ability switches her weapon back and forth between a minigun and a bazooka. The minigun gives an attack speed buff with each shot, stacking up to three times, while the rocket launcher uses mana for each shot but does more damage and has an AoE.
The obvious use for this is for Jinx to start in minigun mode until she gets the three stacks before switching to firing rockets, taking momentary advantage of the attack speed increase to use the strengths of both modes at once. The mana cost will likely be a serious issue during laning phase, but by late game teamfights will most likely only come up if Jinx was using her rocket launcher to farm minion waves.
W: Zap!
The second ability on our newest reveal is a simple skillshot doing damage and applying a slow to the first enemy hit. The most boring of Jinx’s abilities on paper, depending on the slow amount this could be huge. Single-target slows are historically extremely debilitating, and Jinx’s is even a skillshot, so this may well be all Jinx needs to ensure she can and will prevent an enemy from escaping.
E: Flame Chompers!
For her third ability, Jinx tosses a line of grenades. After a few seconds they will detonate to inflict AoE damage, but if an enemy steps on one before then they will detonate it early and be snared.
This is huge. It’s really huge. There are exceedingly few AD Carries who bring immobilizing abilities to lane, (Ashe, Varus, and Caitlyn) and the only ones who bring reliably targetable abilities of the sort (Ashe and Varus)have to use their ults to do it. Having an aimed snare on a non-ult cooldown could potentially make Jinx one of the hardest snowballing AD Carries the game has seen since Vayne, and definitely goes a long way to make her safe despite lacking a gap closer. No one wants to step on a snare while chasing someone.
R: Super Mega Death Rocket!
Our upcoming champ’s ult is a global-range skillshot. That is not original. Ashe has one that stuns/slows, Draven has one that boomerangs back for more damage. Jinx’s just does damage, but it does more damage the farther it travels, and it also does extra damage based on the amount of health missing. Oh, and it also happens to do this damage in an AoE.
The potential of this ult is amazing. There are going to be videos all over YouTube of people getting double and triple kills picking off an enemy team trying to escape a lost teamfight, or sniping a bruiser in top lane from all the way in bot lane mid-fight. Let’s not even talk about the potential shenanigans regarding taking out entire teams while they’re doing Baron.
Just look at that smile, she’s havin’ a ball!
Jinx looks to be a tricky, high-damage champion with options at all ranges.
She herself is not particularly mobile unless she is already winning the fight, but she has enough crowd control and damage options to be able to effectively control the terms of engagement better than almost any other unsupported AD Carry in the game today.
All we have to do now is wait to see the actual numbers and ratios on her abilities to find out if she is good, just quirky, or absurdly lethal.
