Hunger is taking on a new form with League of Legends’ next champion, Briar. The unique diving jungler is bringing a ton of new mechanics to Summoner’s Rift, including a near-global ultimate ability that zips you across the map to your next prey with ease.
Lead game designer August Browning also detailed another version of her ultimate that would have decimated her enemies—and broken the damage charts—if it ever made it to the live servers.
In a developer blog released today, a handful of Riot Games devs discussed how Briar was given life, her early iterations, their initial explorations in character lore and champion design, and even some scrapped ability ideas. For example, Briar’s original ultimate ability had a passive where she would revive herself, similar to Aatrox’s old design.
She would absorb blood from all enemies around her and she would revive with a ton of health, ready to fight once more. There was, however, an additional active on the ability where she would deal one million true damage to herself, die, trigger the revive passive, and absorb health from all enemies around her.
“At one point she had a revive, similar to old Aatrox,” Browning said. “It was on her ultimate. When it was off cooldown, if you died, you would suck blood from everybody around you and you’d revive with a lot of health. But it also had an active use. The active was that she killed herself. She would do 1 million true damage to herself, but then obviously trigger the passive to resurrect and drain everybody near you.”
It was an incredibly broken “suicide-self-revive-wombo-combo,” especially when combined with her terrifying Blood Frenzy state, the amount of damage she does outside of her ultimate, and her ability to heal for an ungodly amount. As a result, the developers knew this ultimate had to be changed or removed completely.
Related: When is new LoL champion Briar coming out?
Even for her current ultimate, Riot devs said they had to remove its true global range since Briar players could easily shoot the projectile into the enemy’s base and force the champion to die in the opposing fountain. This way, her new ultimate could still find unique engage angles from almost any place on the map without endangering its own user.
“Briar isn’t technically a hard champion to play,” Browning said. “But she does require some extreme awareness and good decision making. The best Briar players will be the ones who learn how to manage her frenzy state because she can easily get herself killed with her W and her ultimate if she isn’t careful.”
