‘League of Legends’ Reworks Warwick: New Abilities, Lore, and Character Design


League of Legends is reworking Warwick, one of the oldest and most beginner friendly champs in League, with new abilities, lore, and overall character design.

Warwick is the latest rework in a series focusing on junglers and assassins, bringing new abilities and designs to champs in desperate need of fixing. The ever changing landscape of both professional and normal play requires constant tweaking, and sometimes even a complete overhaul.

Warwick is one of the oldest champions in League of Legends, and his “kit,” the abilities a champion uses, has changed very little. A few tweaks here and there on patches mainly focused on bringing his abilities in line with other champions so as to prevent over-powered usage.

Warwick is a jungler, a character who wanders the various fog-of-war covered areas between lanes, farming monsters and attacking from the fog.

But as League of Legends has introduced new champions with more effective kits, Warwick has fallen out of favor with more experienced jungler players. The new rework intends to keep Warwick beginner friendly, but also raise his potential skill level to a point where he can be used by anyone.

One of the focal points the League of Legends development team has for Warwick is to improve his “ganking” potential. Ganking is where a player ambushes one of the lanes in attempt to kill the opponents therein. Currently, Warwick typically is ineffective at ganking until he reaches level six, where his ultimate ability can be activated to stun and attack an opponent.

The new Warwick design is intended to both encourage and reward players for ganking earlier than level six, an important design rework as most of the current top level jungle characters have some sort of hard crowd control (a stun or snare) that prevents opponents from escaping.

The League of Legends developer blog had the following to say.

“Currently Warwick is very beginner friendly. We actually want to embrace that and push it even further than it is now. We want Warwick’s gameplay to actually teach new junglers how to be an effective jungler. Right now Warwick can’t gank until level 6, but what if Warwick’s kit actually encouraged players to gank often and early? We also have heard loud and clear that player think Warwick’s kit is kind of boring and outdated. While we don’t want to raise Warwick’s skill floor, we do want to increase his skill ceiling a bit and add more depth to his gameplay. We also want to bring Warwick’s art and thematics up to modern Riot standards by giving him a proper place in our world.”

[Image by Juergen Schwarz/Getty Images]

Warwick’s kit definitely needs a major overhaul. While his abilities may make him effective for hunting monsters in the jungle, it lacks the necessary components for constant lane harassment common to most champions. His ultimate ability may be powerful, but the cool-down on it is too high for Warwick to be effective at running from lane to lane engaging enemy players.

Champions such as Lee Sin, Nautilus, Elise, and even Cho’gath all have normal abilities that either stun, snare, knock up, or dash which allow them to rapidly close with the enemy, prevent their escape, or both. Hopefully the Warwick rework will allow the champion to become a viable pick in non-beginner play.

League of Legends is also planning to rework the lore, or backstory, of the champion as well. The League of Legends developers intend for Warwick to be a victim of another champion, Singed, rather than a mad-scientist who drank an elixir. This backstory rework will be a significant as Trundle’s lore rework.

[Image by Tim Bartel|Flickr| Cropped and Resized | CC BY-SA 2.0 ]

So what do you think of the new rework to a League of Legends classic character? What do you hope to see different? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

[Featured Image by downloadsource.fr|Flickr| Cropped and Resized | CC BY 2.0 ]

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