League of Legends’ latest champion has been revealed, with Riot Games finally unveiling Naafiri and her Hounds of Iron with a flashy cinematic on June 21. Naafiri is an assassin who hunts and attacks her prey as a pack of Dune Hounds, both in lore and on the Rift—and she should be easy for eager League gamers to play.
Riot’s goal with the Hound of a Hundred Bites was to create a League champion that was fully a creature, a mid-lane assassin whose gameplay focuses on macro play, and—perhaps most importantly—is a low-complexity pick.
According to the Riot devs, Naafir is among the easiest assassins players can select in season 13. She is a “beginners-friendly” champion, champion designer Glenn Anderson said. “We wanted to feel like players are controlling more than one being that is sharing an intelligence, but also we needed to maintain the goal of being very easy and simple to play,” the League designer explained alongside her first-look.
In the end, Riot created a champion that tries to “read players’ minds”’ so that it does what players would want the pack to do at the right timing, sometimes without even giving an input. The result is a terrifying pack that can finish off minions for the player and jump on the target last hit by Naafiri’s abilities.
To create this mind-reading champion Riot had to create new technology around her to pn down how the pack moves around Naafiri, how it responds to attack commands, and how to make it stay at a proper attack range, product lead Lexi Gao said. These efforts were all focused at creating an assassin that will most likely be the first one players approach when they desire to learn a new role.
League fans can already hear the howling of the pack from a distance, and can expect Naafiri to arrive on the Rift later next month.
