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Blitzcrank fans have a reason to celebrate today – Piltover Customs Blitzcrank was added to the store today, as was Samurai Master Yi. As an added bonus, Chosen Yi is now down to 520 RP, permanently. The Crank skin is indeed his legendary, pricing out at 1820 RP.

Personally, I’ll be passing on the Blitz skin. I really like Boom Boom Blitzcrank – been waiting for a sale on that one (I think I missed the last). The hotrod theme just doesn’t do it for me, personally. I might get the Yi skin on a sale day, but I love my Chosen Yi and I always have Assassin Yi as a backup. We’ll see.

Riot posted one of the cryptic announcement threads that typically lead to legendary skins this weekend. The post was titled “Blitzcrank Makes the Cover of Mid Lane Magazine.” Obviously, that’s a fake magazine, but the post goes on to describe a Crank skin made by Piltover Heimer.

Here are the details on “Piltover Customs Blitzcrank:”

We took our largest, most gigantic Great Steam Golem down to the Custom Shop to see what the Revered Inventor was really made of. We expected him to be intimidated, but the moment we walked in the door his face lit up. From that moment we knew he was up to the challenge, and we just couldn’t wait to see our old friend Blitzcrank get the royal treatment.

The first thing that we noticed was the finish. Gone were the dings and soot-stains that come from a career of heavy lifting, replaced by a superb paint job that positively emanated speed and performance. A shiny chrome grill glinted in the sunlight, a great compliment to the sleek new exhaust systems.

But the real test was yet to come. We fired it up and the exhaust just roared, giving you that satisfying feeling of a true performance machine. A set of performance tires had replaced the legs, and they gripped the lane for a silky-smooth ride, even when we kicked it into full overdrive.

Our brand new Piltover Customs Blitzcrank hit the mark across the board. If you were still skeptical about whether or not Heimerdinger could live up to his reputation, allow me to put your mind at ease. Take your Golem in for a tune-up today!

With all the model changes and the fact that Riot made a special post about it, you can bet this is probably the legendary Blitzcrank skin. It does sound cool, but I’ll have to see it in game before I decide whether or not to pick it up. I love Blitzcrank, as I may have mentioned, but I already really like Boom Boom Blitz. It would be tough for me to justify buying his legendary unless it’s significantly better than that skin.

Riot caught a lot of criticism around the release of the legendary Alien Invader Heimerdinger skin, though it wasn’t just about the legendary skin. Most players think skins are in general too expensive, and I have to agree.

I’ll include Riot’s full official response here, if only because it’s so weird:

Summoners,

We have a couple pieces of good news for you. For the next release of skins, we are going to be shipping out 6 skins, all for 520 RP, including the much-anticipated French Maid Nidalee skin.

We have heard the community requests for more low-priced skin options and a more clear definition of Legendary skins. In response, we are doing a one-time release of skins at 520. Players have anticipated the release of French Maid Nidalee at prices up to 10,000 RP, but we are releasing her with the other 520 skins to start to balance the skin pricing. We are also releasing the other following skins at 520 RP:
• Caterpillar Kog’Maw
• Sonoran Kog’Maw
• Goalkeeper Blitzcrank
• Striker Ezreal
• Blast Zone Heimerdinger

Please note, we will be releasing skins at other price points in the future.

Going forward, per suggestions from the community, Legendary skins will have:
• Texture changes
• Model changes

And at least one of the following additional features:
• Some New Animations
• Some New VO
• Some New Effects

Finally, we wanted to share our plans for skins going forward. We are getting very close to meeting our goal of having a skin for each Champion. Once we reach that goal, we will move forward with creating downright awesome skins, and more player options in skin prices. To reach that second goal, we will be adding inexpensive skins for Champions that only have high-priced options, and we will be adding cooler skins for Champions that already have an inexpensive option. However, it will likely take a few months before we have multiple skins for every Champion.

We will keep listening to (rational) feedback, and we appreciate everyone who has contributed ideas and suggestions for how to improve our skin offerings (a lot of them are in this post). Please let us know if this is a step in the right direction.

– RiotChris

For starters, why does it take a huge community response to not take a lashing on skin prices? And why does the post make it sound like this is some kind of favor? It’s also a little disconcerting to see that the primary goal so far has been churning out skins and that Riot will focus on quality later. If these are just the slush pile, how much will the “downright awesome” skins cost?

All of this could be my own obsession with the wording, but this post really rubbed me the wrong way.