With the removal of the dodge stat, Riot inevitably had to remake Jax in some capacity. I was really curious what it would mean for the Grandmaster at Arms, but it looks like he won’t be changing much. In place of the old Counter-Strike, which trigged an active stun ability when Jax dodged an auto attack, Jax now “charges” the ability, allowing him to dodge all incoming attacks for a short duration, followed by an AoE stun and damage effect. Think of it like Sion’s shield, just on a much shorter fuse.

Obviously this has some pretty serious implications for the late game. A 100 percent physical damage mitigation, even for a couple seconds, is a pretty big deal. You will notice that Counter-Strike is now on a pretty long cooldown – more than 20 seconds at rank one – though it does scale down as rank improves.

Jax also lost his old passive, presumably to account for the increased survivability granted by his new skill. In its place, Jax now has the stacking bonus attack speed component of his ultimate on a passive. This allows him to jungle easily from level one, which I think is the scarier part of his remake. If you watch the Champion Spotlight Phreak posted, he takes down dragon at level 7 without losing much health at all.

If you hated Jax prior to this remake, I’d imagine you will learn to hate him all over again. The changes will be going live with the next champion patch.

As 2011 drew to an end, Riot completed the dodge rune refund that began earlier this December. In case you aren’t aware, dodge runes are still available from the store. Riot is planning to remake the champions that rely on dodge (honestly, only Jax comes to mind for me), but until that’s done you will still be able to use dodge runes in game.

I’m definitely curious to see what the Jax remake will look like. Jax has been a hot topic of discussion since his initial remake back in the Twisted Treeline era of League’s development. At the time he was as hyper a carry as a hyper-carry could be. He’s since been toned down, but he will always be one of the champions that has had his day in the sun, while characters like Katarina and Twitch haven’t seen serious play in more than a year.

Personally, I’m not sad to see dodge go. It just doesn’t seem to have a place in League of Legends. My obvious point of comparison is DotA, where evasion can’t be had early in the game. In that game, evasion works well as a late-game mechanic for carries, who can still be shut down by teams with hard CC. In LoL, dodge is only acquired early, and tends to unreliably augment a character’s survivability.

How do you feel about the removal of dodge? Are you looking forward to a Jax remake? What will you be doing with your IP?