League of Legends has a new playable character, and this one is so ridiculously strong that the entire community is cowering in fear – up to and including pro-level players.
Ambessa is an interesting addition to League of Legends’ roster, as she’s the first new character to have started life outside the game. Ambessa features in the first season of Arcane as the mother of Piltover elite Mel Medarda, but with the release of Arcane Season 2 next month, will step onto Summoner’s Rift as a full-fledged League of Legends character. While spin-off strategy game Teamfight Tactics has played host to a number of outside influences, most relevant among them Arcane Season 1’s Silco, none of those have been included in the main game before now.
As a leader from the war-mongering empire of Noxus, Ambessa is an able and aggressive fighter, wielding twin chain-axe weapons, and using hefty armor to limit incoming enemy damage. If that makes her sound like a tank, you’d be wrong – Ambessa seems like a quintessential example of what League of Legends refers to as a ‘Juggernaut’. This character archetype can give and take plenty of punishment, but is supposed to be held back by limited mobility – if you can stay out of a Juggernaut’s reach, you’ll quickly alleviate any threat they pose.
Honestly what the fuck at this point 😑 https://t.co/Ny4ga5D0ZrOctober 22, 2024
I say supposed to be held back, but that’s not really the case here. Ambessa’s passive ability grants her a dash after every active ability cast. In an efficient combo that leads to the kind of stickiness that ensures that once Ambessa is close to you, she’ll be very hard to remove. It’s not an entirely new tool – marksman character Kalista has a little hop she uses after every single attack, but that’s a better fit for her glass cannon-style character class. On a warrior like Ambessa, this is pretty terrifying.
The reactions of the community are diverse. Some players are pointing out the complexity of Ambessa’s skills compared to those of older champions – while the new arrival gains mobility, attack range, attack damage, and resource replenishment from just her passive, a character like Nasus only gets flat life steal from his version of the same skill. Others have noted that this could be the end of the game’s 14-year-long mobility creep arc – with a dash on every angle ability, “you can’t creep mobility any higher,” even if some players in the comments on that post are prepared to view that as a challenge. My favorite reaction genre, however, is that of players who have simply given up. That includes former European champion Andrei ‘Odoamne’ Pascu, who simply tweeted, “Honestly, what the fuck at this point” in response to a rundown of Ambessa’s abilities.
I’ve been around for a lot of League of Legends champion releases by this point, and so I know how this goes – streamer ioki probably said it best in their acknowledgment that “she’s getting nerfed 10 times on release guaranteed.” Ambessa will release astonishingly powerful due more to the number of tools in her kit than the numbers behind that kit, and as such, Riot will have little choice but to reduce those numbers over and over again until she’s no longer viable. That’s a fate that’s befallen plenty of new arrivals and will befall many more before League of Legends is done, yet Ambessa still feels like a step beyond what we’ve seen before. Given that this comes so hot on the heels of another Arcane fumble – the $250 skin gacha system unveiled just after Riot laid off a bunch of cosmetic designers – it’s perhaps not the best community marketing the studio could have come up with for the upcoming second series.
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