Hot on the heels of the Tryndamere remake, Phreak put together a Tryndamere remake to show off his new skills. The video was supposed to “show [us] how to use his new tricks,” but it was pretty much a spotlight like any other. Phreak briefly explained his skills and then went on a tear, amassing 20+ kills in what looked to be a very slanted game.

I was hoping for a bit more when I saw that a Tryndamere video had been posted. Really, I was hoping I had missed something in the Champ of the Week last week. Maybe I just misunderstood his skillset, or maybe the key lies in some strange build. Unfortunately, it seems the key is as expected – get fed and he feels great.

What do you think? Did the spotlight make you a believer?

I decided to post the video trailer for Demonblade Tryndamere here just in case any of you were looking to purchase him/the skin and wanted some context around the purchase. My week with Tryndamere was cut a bit short due to my traveling, but I still feel like I’ve had enough time with him to analyze his playstyle since his remake and the things he’s now up against. This is going to be kind of dense because Tryndamere is built around some complicated mechanics. Bear with me.

I just got out of a game with a Tryndamere on my team who started the game 0-7. To be fair, he was not a great player, but I think Tryndamere’s freshly weakened early game had to be a partially contributing factor. Though I did jungle with Tryndamere a decent bit over the past week, I’m not going to cover that much here. Trynd is a seriously weak jungler – any jungler worth his salt knows that Tryndamere relies on losing health to make it through the jungle. He’s easily ganked, easily countered, easily shut down. It’s not a good thing.

Let’s talk laning. Old Tryndamere was decent in lane for a couple reasons. First, if you got him below 50 percent HP and were standing next to him, he was going to crit your face off. His crit chance would skyrocket, which then added both damage and crit damage to each successive swing. Except when it didn’t. There were times when I was ready to scream at my computer because of missed crits or enemy Tryndamere players who landed several in a row at level 1. It was inconsistent, and while I understand the desire to level this out, I don’t think the remake really accomplished it. He hits less hard, which is fine when playing against him, but it has completely de-incentivized him to get into a fight during the early game. He doesn’t get the combat benefits fast enough any more, which is a big problem, and it extends to the late game.

Old Tryndamere used to be able to get his most useful stats when he was at full HP: crit damage and additional damage. Though new Tryndamere has passive additional damage as part of Bloodlust, and a decent bit of it, he doesn’t get any additional damage until he starts to lose health. Instead, he gets crit chance, which is a pretty crappy stat. It doesn’t scale well, can be totally eclipsed late game by armor penetration and flat damage, and Tryndamere gets enough in an average build that the 35 percent from his Fury generation isn’t really all that helpful late in the game.

Early, though, he’s totally reliant on that 35 percent crit if he’s forced to fight, but he’s much better off not engaging. Tryndamere has no decent lane harass if he can’t stay on top of creeps and stack up Fury, and he’ll take somewhere between 15 and 20 attacks to get full Fury in the early game. It’s ridiculously easy to counter for most solo champions. The nerf to the Spinning Slash cooldown also reduced his ability to get into and out of those early fights. Without a strong farm, Tryndamere is severely gimped, unable to contribute meaningfully in a fight.

His one saving grace right now is his ultimate, which can allow him to creep back up the power scale, if only because he can stay involved in a fight long enough to hopefully last hit or grab a few assists. When he’s ahead, his ult feels like a decent way to prolong a fight, but with the nerf to the Bloodlust heal, it almost always feels like he’s just delaying the inevitable.

That does it for last week’s champ of the week. I’ll have this week’s posted later today. Remember, no FG LoL Mondays tonight but, by all means, feel free to invite me for a game if you see me online this week.

Well, unfortunately I’m going to have to push back some of the upcoming changes I have to the Champ of the Week feature, but that doesn’t have to delay this week’s Champ any longer. This week I’ll be playing Tryndamere.

If you check my recent games list, you can see that I’ve already played a decent number of games with the Barbarian King. I made sure to sneak in a few before the remake so I could assess what the changes have given to or taken from his viability. First, let’s talk some history.

Tryndamere has posed some fairly unique problems to the League in the past. For a while it was Cleanse that gave him some ridiculous killing power, back when it could clear Ignite and offered CC immunity. I remember some of my earliest games against Tryndamere being more frustrating than even old Eve games. Even after the Cleanse nerfs, though, Tryndamere has enjoyed insane power creep. He remains the one champion that has allowed me to come back from a game in which all of my buildings were down but the nexus. I got to a point quickly enough in that game that I simply could not be killed and I was able to 2-3 shot most of my opponents.

Tryndamere’s basic design issue is that he gets exponentially stronger as he loses health, but can remain at one health point – his strongest point in the game – for an extended duration thanks to his ult. The old Tryndamere gained crit chance as his health went down. As he crit targets, he gained stacks of Bloodlust that improved his crit damage and could also be spent for a sizable heal.

He caught a remake today that changed all that. Tryndamere is now a Fury champion, which means he gains Fury from attacking targets. Bloodlust has been reworked to give Tryndamere flat damage as his health decreases instead of the old critical damage but still allowing consumption of the resource for a heal. His passive no longer grants crit chance based on health missing, but requires Fury to give the benefit. The change has created a strange tension between his skills. For one thing, he’s heavily reliant on having creeps nearby to buildup Fury before a fight, especially in the early game. The Fury gives him extra crit chance, but in order to heal, he has to sacrifice all of it. Without extra crit chance he has a hard time generating Fury, especially 1v1.

The old Tryndamere could sacrifice his crit damage for a heal, but even sacrificing all the crit damage from Bloodlust, he would still have some crit chance thanks to missing health, which would in turn allow him to build more Bloodlust stacks. The new system is complicated, and not entirely clear, especially to newer players. As much as Riot wanted to make his power level transparent, Tryndamere actually still gains better damage from losing health than he does gaining Fury, which is a little bit silly.

I’ll be spending the week looking at how the changes have impacted his build, his jungle, and his lane presence. For now, I think the new Tryndamere has an unnecessarily complicated damage system that fails to address what Riot was really after, but I’ll save that determination for the end of the week.