Several of the major news outlets have had a chance to take a look at Yorick at E3, bringing us a first glimpse of his skillset and artwork. The following information comes from PC Gamer, which should have a video of The Gravedigger later today.
Yorick’s skillset is based around summoning ghouls. The ghouls work sort of like Malzahar’s Voidlings, attacking the nearest champion, though they cannot be controlled by the Summoner. His three skills are as follows:
Necrotic Ritual: Summons a green ghast that explodes in a cloud of poison, slowing the enemy and dealing damage over time.
Devouring Ritual: Summons a red ghast that siphons life from his attacks and channels it to Yorick. It also empowers Yorick’s next attack with a hefty amount of lifesteal.
Spectral Ritual: Summons a blue ghast that embodies the powerful Summoner Spell Ghost, with increased movespeed and the ability to walk through units. Best of all, he bestows the same buffs to Yorick for the duration of his brief existence, ensuring that Yorick can chase down his target.
The ghouls currently last for roughly four seconds, though there is talk of increasing that number to six or eight. Yorick’s passive also grants him stat bonuses based on which ghouls are active. His ultimate sounds a bit like Rumble’s – a line skillshot that slows or possibly roots enemies caught in its path and either dealing nuke damage or damage over time.
Frankly, he sounds a lot like Rumble to me. Looking at his skillset I can only think one thing: lane presence. Yorick will have it in spades. A poison/slow, health regen, and a built in ghost for getting through minions – he’s going to be one bad dude to lane against. Hopefully I’ll be able to snag that video footage later today to share with you. Until then, check back soon for previews of the two champions set to follow Yorick – Leona and Skarner.
In the wake of E3 and leading up to Dreamhack next week, Riot is going to be very busy. As such, the company has announced that Yorick won’t be adhering to the normal schedule of release. Here’s the official word from Tamat:
The end of Season One is approaching fast, and between the Season One Championship at DreamHack and E3, there’s an awful lot to do here at the Riot Office. Additionally, Orianna was an extremely exciting and edgy new champion, and we want to take the extra time to ensure that the next champion will be just as groundbreaking before we turn them loose on the Field of Justice. For these reasons, we’ve decided to take a bit of break from champion releases and balance changes until after we return from Sweden following the Season One Championship.
As we draw closer to these events we will be releasing more previews of the exciting content that will be coming sometime after our end of season break. This will include Yorick, the Gravedigger and several more champions along with some exciting new features for PvP.net. Stay tuned for more information as our coverage of E3 continues.
I’m glad to see Riot communicating these timing adjustments to the player base. It makes perfect sense that they would delay the release, but the forums still tend to explode with “OMGWTF WHERE IS DAT NEW CHAMPIONZ?!?!” if nothing is said.
The Rumble spotlight went live last night and, though I really wanted to dump all of my impressions out at midnight, I decided to wait until today to hopefully give a more balanced look at the League’s new champion. I’m not sure it worked. Rumble seems like the worst parts of the tanky meta all rolled into one little bundle.
First of all, the shield thing has got to stop. Rumble not only gets a damage shield, which likely scales with AP, he also gets a movement speed boost with it, and it’s on a crazy short cooldown. At level 7 Phreak’s shield had a 5 second cooldown. Granted, it didn’t look like it shielded much, but 5 seconds? Yuck.
Rumble also appears to be able to abuse the minion aggro AI in lane because he can cast so often. Minions typically don’t aggro on champions if they’re using spells on one another, an issue typically balanced by the fact that lane casters are fairly squishy. Still, you already know some frustrating exceptions to this rule. Mordekaiser, for instance, can dish out a lot of champion damage without taking aggro from minions because he’s dealing spell damage. The same seems to be true for Rumble, which will be extremely frustrating for the softer characters in lane.
I’ll be interested to see how he actually plays in game. For right now, I’m worried Riot has added yet another bruiser class character to the game, even if he relies on spell damage to bring down opponents.
