League of Legend’s new character shows great potential

By: Cody Hood

The masked man runs to the carnage of the battle, looking at the littered blades and bodies. He takes it all in, his eyes perceiving it as a beautiful piece of artwork assembled by the greatest artists of his world. He looks up only to notice escaping enemies. Taking his small rifle and fully assembling it into a massive cannon, he takes aim while the long cloak he’s wearing holds a massive engine underneath.

“Make Them Beautiful” is all that rings in his mind as he carefully takes each shot. The ring of each bullet is a masterful orchestra to his ears, each shot piercing his enemies looks to be a splash on an empty canvas of the battlefield.

At the end of it all, he fixes his cannon back to it’s normal state, taking a soft breath in and looking at the cherry blossoms and lotus flowers all around him. The actual battlefield now looks much more dark and grim with a single man leaving.

Jhin, The Virtuoso is a new champion being introduced to League of Legends in Patch 6.2. He is to be a bursty, high-range marksman capable of outputting his damage from far away. His abilities are rather unique, each having a name corresponding to some element of drama, from dancing to a curtain call.

He’s an assassin for the corrupted leaders of a place named Ionia. It’s theorized by many that he is a schizophrenic, seeing the cherry blossoms and lotus flowers bloom when his targets perish, as well as when he thinks to himself while an angelic choir sings in the background, but it cannot be heard when he’s verbally saying things.

His passive is named Whisper. It has a few parts to it, the first being called Death in 4 Acts. This ability is a four-shot passive. His first three shots do nothing special, but when he fires his fourth shot, it’s a guaranteed crit. He then needs to reload Whisper, taking about two and a half seconds in order to achieve that reload.

He can never grow in attack speed besides his natural attack speed growth. Instead of getting attack speed from his items, he instead gets extra damage and extra speed from the second part of his passive, Every Moment Matters.

His crits deal 25 percent reduced damage from normal crits, but whenever Jhin hits an enemy with a critical strike, he is granted extra movement speed for a few seconds.

This passive is mostly mathematical in terms of increasing damage with the fourth crit, but I enjoy it. It helps solidify Jhin as an opportunistic damage dealer, timing his attack to be when he’s at his strongest.

His first ability is called Dancing Grenade. It’s a point-and-click ability where he tosses out a small canister that hits the targeted enemy, and then it bounces up to three additional units. If a bounce kills an enemy, then the canister’s damage is increased by 35 percent. This effect can stack with each bounce.

This spell is Jhin’s only great ability to kill large amounts of minions in one quick go. The ability isn’t very strong on it’s own, but once it gets rolling from minion kills, the damage becomes frightening. Overall, it’s a good ability, but not anything noteworthy.

Jhin’s second ability is Deadly Flourish. This ability causes Jhin to fire a long-range laser in a direction, going until it hits an enemy champion and dealing reduced damage to champions. If an ally hits an enemy, Jhin hits an enemy or his third ability, Captive Audience is triggered, and then when he hits his enemy, they become rooted in place for a quick moment.

This ability has the longest range of any basic ability in the game, and it’s satisfying to land. There’s no audial cue, but seeing somebody get hit by it can lead to quite a bit of damage adding up over time.

Jhin’s third ability is called Captive Audience. The passive is that when Jhin scores a killing blow on an enemy, a lotus flower appears out of the corpse and explodes moments later.

The active can stock up to two, and it makes him toss down a Lotus Trap, which goes invisible when it arms. When an enemy walks over the trap it triggers, causing the trap to bloom into a lotus flower, which slows enemies and explodes after a moment for high damage. This ability is quite good and helps to deter other enemies from appearing in Jhin’s lane and threatening his performance. The passive also allows him to snowball when he scores a killing blow in a team fight, allowing him to sit back and watch them detonate over his enemies.

Jhin’s ultimate ability is called Curtain Call. He sets up his rifle and fully assembles it into a cannon, forming a cone over a large area. During this time, he has 10 seconds to fire four bullets downrange, causing high damage based on missing health and slowing. The last bullet does massively increased damage.

This single ability is my favorite ability in Jhin’s kit, and it persuaded me to buy him as soon as he came out. He truly feels like a sniper, taking each of his shots precisely and lethally. The audio effects are absolutely beautiful, each round sounding thick and heavy as it flies through the air, the angelic chorus in the background truly solidifying the audio effects. The channel bar also says “Make Them Beautiful,” which is a nice touch to his character.

Overall, Jhin is an excellent character capable of incredibly high damage for a marksman. He feels more like a physical damage mage than a marksman, but he feels very satisfying overall. His abilities barely have any theatrical, dramatic theme to them, but in the same point, he feels like a dangerous hitman, capable of picking off a single target with his incredibly high damage.

His voice over fits him well, reminding me of a very harsh critic when he speaks, but it’s still with many types of terms from the theater. I’ll definitely be playing him a lot when he’s released.