Talk:Jayce/@comment-24.49.113.231-20120707143940/@comment-96.237.0.249-20120707203722

I completely agree with Lockdrum.

All champions have a theme of play that drives the player's mindset, with any individual champion's theme defined by their ultimate ability. For Jayce, this theme is made quite clear: versatility. He possesses more skills than any other champion (*qualified below) that he can use during a fight, with each skill having it's own unique benefits. With this in mind, good Jayce play would revolve around analyzing the situation and choosing the right set of skills to turn the fight in your team's favor. Thus, maximizing Jayce's potential is about maximizing his versatility (i.e. understanding and having the appropriate mindset for his theme). Accordingly, good building for Jayce during any game revolves around how heavily one skillset would be required over the other (heavily one or the other, favoring one, or both equally)

From playing Jayce, I find his ulti and passive to echo this theme very well. Maximizing the versatility of a champion who possesses varied ranged and melee abilities would require, above anything else, clever use of positioning. Jayce's ulti and passive together play upon this important fact: upon transforming, Jayce is given just enough mobility necessary to position himself to maximize his chosen skillset. In this way, Jayce is a very well designed champion: he has a 1) clear theme that drives his play, 2) an ultimate that is the lynchpin for this theme, and therefore any player wishing to maximize the champion's potential must make clever use of his ultimate.

To echo Lockdrum, I hope future champions have just as much, if not more, consideration for how their theme will play out, and how that theme adds to the game as a whole.


 * To qualify this statement: while Nidalee also has a transformation ability, her transformation only lends her passive effects, whereas Jayce also gets on-hit effects for his next attack. Thus, a Jayce player, unlike a Nidalee player, has essentially 2 seperate active effects that are encompassed by his transformation, and, at the hazard of using "skills" too broadly, a good Jayce player must use these two "skills" with just as much prudence as his others. I therefore consider Jayce to possess 8 "skills", with 4 "skills" in each skillset