I’m heading off to a wedding this weekend, so I won’t have enough time to do a proper Champ of the Week writeup in one week. Over the course of two weeks, though, it should be no problem. With that in mind, I’m happy to announce Talon as this (two) weeks’ Champ of the (two) Week(s).

When Talon first released I was unimpressed. He reminded me a little bit of Akali but without the sustainability. His cooldowns were too long to jump from target to target, he required a lot of damage items to really produce results, and he was painfully squishy. I’ve been spending a lot more time with him recently and I’m starting to come around on Talon. He relies pretty heavily on Doran’s Blade stacking for his early game, but after that he can affect the course of a game as well as a lot of champions. His ultimate can also be devastating to a team in the right circumstances.

So I’ll be playing Talon for the next two weeks, recording my thoughts and once again putting together a video about his skills. Check back for some more impressions this weekend or early next week. If you have specific questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments.

The Talon patch is finally live (so is the champion), bringing us the latest champion along with some prep work for the Dominion launch. It looks like Dominion is damn close to being ready, which I’m really excited about. This patch also brought a host of client changes. It’s cleaned up information in some places but feels a little cluttered in others.

The picture in this post is the new post-game summary screen. You’ll notice the addition of some information, including gold earned during the game and team score totals. Obviously the screen has been rearranged to make the actual game content much larger, with less unused space.

The other UI changes include a rework of the in-game score screen, which I find a lot less effective than the post-game screen. It feels cluttered and a bit busy, I think mostly because every element on each line is a different size. The numbers are smaller than the item icons. The letters are smaller than the numbers. The summoner spell icons are somewhere in between.

There’s also the new death callout system, which I really like. The announcer sometimes can’t keep up with the action, so the callouts provide some extra, easy-to-digest information.

And obviously the landing page has been reworked, though for me it only takes up something like 2/3 of the screen. I don’t know if that’s intentional and there’s more content coming or if it’s just formatted for 4:3 screen ratios. Again, that one looks a little cluttered to me. This way you can keep your friends list open at all times. Why it isn’t opened for you at all times is beyond me, but at least it isn’t covering anything up now.

What do you think. Are you liking the new UI elements or did you prefer the old?

You may have been surprised, as I was, to have no patch today. It’s strange to me that we get a warning about the size of the patch, but not when it will release. Ah well, I don’t set the schedules. We’ll be getting Talon tomorrow, adding a melee assassin to the host of champions available in League of Legends.

When I first saw the Talon mechanics preview, I was ambivalent. His skills didn’t sound all that exciting and, frankly, it looked like there were some other champions that already outperformed him. After his spotlight, though, I’m pretty pumped to try him out. I might have to snag that Crimson Elite skin too. It looks pretty awesome.

I think most of Talon’s flavor comes from his two blade abilities: Rake and Shadow Assault. His other skills seem a little less inspired, but the blade stuff definitely looks cool. I also like that he seems to be focused on picking off a target, disappearing, and then showing back up for cleanup. If there’s one thing I’d worry about, it’s that he’s sort of forced to pick up at least a Phage, if not the Frozen Mallet Phreak suggests. That’s a damn expensive item (the mallet) for a character that seems very farm dependent.

I’ll be playing Talon as much as possible tomorrow and bringing my full impressions soon after. Are you interested in the Blade’s Shadow?