With over 126 champions of varying origins, designs and influences, you’d think you may have seen it all in League. You have a child with a flaming teddy bear, the tentacled alien analyst, Satan incarnate, a robotic girl with a lethal ball and an arrogant (if gorgeous, in my eyes) fencer with a French accent.

But this new champ shakes up the playing field AGAIN with its design and role. Meet Kindred, The Eternal Hunters.

They Are Coming

Announced as early as Patch 5.17 when weird marks started appearing on player heads, Kindred is a champion with two identities, and subsequently two kinds of roles that they can fill.

This isn’t uncommon in League – champions like Ekko, who were designed for a middle lane mage ended up as a tanky jungler – but Kindred is different. Kindred is designed as a jungling marksman, (markslamb?) something that has always been tricky to execute in League.

Marksmen by nature are very vulnerable to damage early game while junglers soak up a lot of it from jungle camps, so putting those two roles are … well, strange to say the least. But Lamb and Wolf have a few tricks up their woolly and fur-lined sleeves to compensate for that little difficulty. And things only get stranger from there.

Orianna-Tryndamere-Bard-Kalista

Kindred’s passive Mark Of The Kindred allows Lamb to choose a target to hunt, while Wolf randomly selects a jungle monster. Upon assist or kill of their targets, Kindred gains a permanent physical bonus to their attacks. Dance of Arrows has Lamb vault in a target direction firing three arrows at the nearest enemy targets. Wolf’s Frenzy activates a zone that allows Lamb to reduce the cooldown of Dance of Arrows to two seconds while she’s inside it. Wolf attacks the last target she has in this zone. Passively, it gathers stacks while she moves around the map. Once the stacks reach max, they drain health from the next target that Lamb attacks.

Mounting Dread has Lamb slow an enemy, and if she manages to attack it three times, Wolf pounces on her target, dealing tons of (physical percentage of their max health) damage. However, it is their ultimate Lamb’s Respite that throws in the icing on the already crazy cake. They give the target, of their own choosing, a zone where nothing can die for a few seconds and healing them at the end of the duration. Yes, nothing will die inside of it, including allies, enemies, Dragon and Baron, and are healed by a flat amount at the end of the skill duration.

“Tell me again, little lamb, which things are mine to take? ”
“All things, dear wolf.”

With such an intensive skillset, combined with an unusual role, Kindred takes the cake and eats it too with strange mechanics, an even stranger ultimate, and a design that looks right out of a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Time will tell if this champion will live up to what it was designed for – or at least until the next Design of Legends comes out – but for now, Lamb and Wolf will surely shake up with their shenanigans on the Rift, along with all the other crazy things that have come out recently.

And you thought Mordekaiser getting Dragon as a pet was weird.

You may check out Kindred’s official reveal here.

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