The making of Pyke – a new breed of League of Legends champion

Pyke, the Bloodharbor Ripper is the latest addition to League of Legends, but he’s an anomaly within the extensive roster of Riot’s MOBA. He’s a hybrid of two very different champion archetypes: an assassin and a support. Assassins rely heavily on high speed and mobility to take down squishy targets as quickly as possible. But supports are almost the opposite - while a broad category, supports primarily exist to protect their weaker allies through shields, healing, and various other buffs. Due to the strange space that Pyke occupies it can seem that he doesn’t have much of a place within the game’s rigid meta. So how did he even come to exist? According to LoL’s senior gameplay designer, Andrei ‘Meddler’ Van Roon, there are two reasons. The first is mechanical: “we wanted to open up some of the positions in the game to as wide a range of players and preferences as possible. The support role already has characters that are fighter/supports, like Leona, and plenty of mages. But, pretty conspicuously, we didn’t have an assassin/support. So if it was the assassin playstyle you’d like, we couldn’t really offer you that much.”

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2PUmP6I