Jinx/Development

X WUZ HERE
By X


 * Vi DefacedSquare.png FATHANDS


 * Piltover Crest icon.png LAME-TOVER


 * Blast Shield.png WUSSY VEST
 * Vault Breaker.png FAIL TRAIN
 * Denting Blows.png LOVE TAPS
 * Excessive Force.png INSUFFICIENT FORCE
 * Assault and Battery.png POLICE BRUTALITY


 * Vi sTaNdS fOr STUPID. RuNnInG aLL oVeR ToWn WiTh SiLLy CaitlynSquare.png HaT LaDy, VI CoUlDnT sOlVe a CrImE iF A CrImiNaL sNuCk Up BeHiNd HeR aNd ShOt HeR iN tHe HeAd - I MeAn TuRnEd HeRsElF iN - WaiT WhaT wAs I sAyIng? oH YeAh, VI DoEsEnT GeT iT: RuLeS aRe MeAnT To Be BrOkEn, LiKe BuIlDiNgS, Or PeOpLe!!! IlL Be bAcK sOoN EnOuGh. No OnE DIE sCrEaMiNg WiThOuT ME!!!!



Mayhem everywhere you look
By 



The name's Vi. I'm an enforcer. And this is my town - Piltover. They call this place the City of Progress - or they did until she showed up.

Her name is. That's what they call her, anyway. No one knows who she is, or where she came from. This scrawny pain in the neck shows up one day, firing heavy guns in the air. And laughing - always with the laugh. I can't stand her.

Everything changed the day she arrived in town. They might as well call it the City of Crime. Panic among the people. Chaos in the streets. Mayhem everywhere you look.

The worst part is: none of it makes any sense. Ask her why she's doing it, and she'll give you a million different reasons. But the only one that matters is:

She's having fun.

Piltover is just a plaything to her. She's enjoying the time of her life, and she doesn't care who gets hurt.

Well, I'm here to shut down the party.

It doesn't matter what she wants. I don't care what her sob story is. I'm gonna put her away for a long, long time. And right before I do, I promise you: I'm gonna wipe that stupid grin off her face.

Permanently.



Jinx, the Loose Cannon, revealed
By Tyler 'RiotWenceslaus' Eltringham

Fire up your and take aim with a massive  as, the Loose Cannon. Packing major attitude and equipped with a cornucopia of carnage, Jinx is a marksman primed to leave your foes marked for demolition.


 * Abilities

I= Jinx gains a massive movement speed boost whenever a champion or tower that she's recently attacked is killed or destroyed. This boost decays over time.
 * Get Excited!

Jinx swaps weapons:
 * -|Q=
 * Switcheroo!
 * Jinx's basic attacks but gain increased range and deal increased damage to her target and nearby enemies.
 * Jinx's basic attacks for a short duration, stacking up to three times. Stacks fall off one at a time once Jinx stops attacking.

Jinx snaps off an electrical blast that deals damage to and the first enemy hit.
 * -|W=
 * Zap!

Jinx throws out a line of snare grenades that detonate after a few seconds, lighting nearby enemies on fire. Enemy champions who walk over a grenade will cause it to detonate early, them briefly.
 * -|E=
 * Flame Chompers!

Jinx fires a global rocket that gains damage as it travels. The rocket explodes on the first enemy champion hit, dealing damage to the target and all nearby enemies based on a percentage of.
 * -|R=
 * Super Mega Death Rocket!


 * Gameplay



Jinx is a versatile marksman armed with an arsenal of eclectic weapons. Her assortment of arms wreaks a ton of havoc, enabling her to deal brutal bouts of damage at the expense of mobility. One of the most important facets to playing Jinx is harnessing the power of to safely harass her enemies from a distance with her  before unleashing a hail of  pain when the moment calls.
 * Bot lane

Despite her lack of built-in escapes, Jinx stores a few maneuvers inside her hyperactive brain that help her avoid ganks. briefly snares encroaching junglers, a well-timed discourages pursuit and careful management of objectives provide a massive speed boost thanks to  triggering when a tower falls.

And towers will fall. Clearing waves through liberal use of her area-of-effect attacks, Jinx brings constant lane pressure. Keeping her opponents on their heels, or making it impossible for them to pressure her, helps ensure she makes it to the mid- and late-game stages where her tremendous potential truly shines.

One thing, though, that remains to be said: there's almost never a time when a isn't just about the best possible answer to any problem. Jinx's is a global execute that picks up speed as it hurtles towards an unsuspecting victim's facial area. Whether KO-ing a low-health enemy team during an early-level fight from across the map or nailing a retreating foe for the last-second kill, there's nothing a well-placed  can't do. Except hit non-champions. It can't do that.

Jinx begins to dish out the damage once teamfights break out. Lacking reliable peel or protection for herself, though, she relies on her positioning and her teammates to keep her alive while she sends her enemies screaming. Jinx's range and damage remain potent throughout the game, making her ideal in a composition built around long-range poke. In the heat of battle, using her and  from a distance helps whittle down enemies until she scores a kill, while  create zones that opposing champs would do well to avoid. Once triggers, Jinx unlocks her clean-up potential, quickly repositioning to avoid threats and mowing down stragglers trying to run away.
 * Teamfights

League of Legends Music: Get Jinxed
By Christian 'Praeco' Linke

While finishes loading  and  for her debut on the battlefield, we wanted to share one more glimpse into her chaotic personality.

For Jinx, the fun doesn't end just because she's sleeping. Featuring hexplosive sequences packed with bombs and bullets and her unique take on fun, League of Legends Music: Get Jinxed frees the Loose Cannon to serve up wild hijinks without those pesky Piltover laws getting in the way.

Whether through cinematics, motion comics, log-in screens or music, we're continuing to explore new ways to deliver champion stories. Showcasing a new song inspired by a hedonistic supercriminal and her vivid imagination running wild? Time for a music video.

The Arsenal: Designing Jinx's Zombie-Slaying Weaponry
is defined by her weapons. and are as much a part of Jinx's personality as her manic smile and her contempt for the rule of law. So when the time came to give Jinx a zombie-slaying spin, the first priority was making sure we got her weapons right - for both the theme and the champion.

Artists Paul Kwon and Charles Liu worked together to give Jinx the arsenal any good zombie-slayer deserves.

Origins: Jinx
From robot cowboy snipers to napkin doodles, each of League’s 138 champions started somewhere. This is the story of Jinx.

There was once a bulletin board at Riot where anyone could share their awesome (or slightly less awesome) ideas for future champions. Always crowded with artwork and kit designs, the board was a place of inspiration for champ designers, even if most of the ideas never made it to official development.
 * A GIRL AND HER GUNS

Years ago, illustrator Katie De Sousa posted to that board a picture of a gun-toting, braid-rocking criminal. Prompted by a love for villains and playing ADC, Katie hoped to bring a little bit of chaos to the marksman roster. The gameplay fantasy for the champion was legit—a weapon-swapping maniac—but when it came to appearances, she looked like a knockoff of Miss Fortune, with a new haircut and fresh ink.

Psycho Arsenal, Jinx’s codename at the time, had a lot of potential, but she wasn’t quite inspiring enough to enter development. Thus she remained on the literal drawing board for months…until a small group of advocates made it their mission to bring Psycho Arsenal to the Rift.

One of those early advocates was champion designer August “jinxylord” Browning, who says, “I’ve always wanted to make a weapon-swapping ADC, like a ranged Udyr, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.” While August worked on Jinx’s arch nemesis Vi by day, he rallied with Katie (and a few others) for Psycho Arsenal by night. Eventually support started rolling in, and about six months after that fateful drawing was first posted, Jinx was chosen for official development.

Psycho Arsenal had the green light, so it was time to tackle one of her biggest issues: her generic-ness. Most of League’s female champions at that time looked pretty similar, with a sexy persona and voluptuous hourglass figure. “My instinct is to diversify wherever I can,” Katie says. “I started thinking it’d be cool if she was more wiry and spunky, like maybe she survives on Skittles because she’s so busy causing mayhem.”
 * DEFINING JINX

Psycho Arsenal became more slender and sinewy while her guns got bigger and bigger. Eventually, her proportions basically reversed; she became a tiny girl carrying oversized, heavy weapons—weapons there’s probably no way she’d actually be able to carry in real life. “That’s when my excitement and confidence really multiplied,” August says. “She felt so much more original and resonant.”

Even though Jinx’s appearance changed quite a bit during development, there were three things that remained the same: her signature floor-length blue pigtails, her manic expression, and guns… lots and lots of guns.


 * COME ON, SHOOT FASTER

True to the name Psycho Arsenal, Jinx wielded a ridiculous variety of weapons during her development: Pistols, rifles, crossbows, tasers, taser crossbows, semi-automatic machine guns, mini-guns, grenades, a rocket launcher, and even a flamethrower. Katie says, “We just put a bunch of different weapons on her while trying to figure out what her gameplay was going to look like.”



In Jinx’s original kit design, each of her basic abilities caused her to swap weapons—much like the way Udyr switches forms—and her ultimate changed based on which gun she was holding. This ended up feeling pretty boring to play because you were almost exclusively right-clicking on things the entire game. “It just didn’t feel like she had enough fun buttons to press,” August says.

The weapon-swapping mechanic was moved to Q, and the focus became creating two stances with distinct strengths and weaknesses. This was done by distinguishing the attack speed and AoE damage of the weapons: For quick-firing, single-target damage, there was a mini-gun, and for slow-shooting, AoE damage, a rocket launcher was the perfect fit.



Now that Jinx’s kit had the weapons, it was time to add the chaos. “Making Jinx’s gameplay feel crazy was probably the hardest part about designing her,” August says. If you look at her without her passive, she feels like a sniper with long-ranged rockets and traps to keep people away, but that’s just not Jinx—she likes to be in-on the action. In the end, one conversation between QA analyst Blake “Squad5” Smith and August (basically) solved everything:

“What if when you killed someone, you went really, really, really fast?”

“How fast?”

“Like, super fast.”

“Blake, that’s crazy.”

“…that’s the point.”

On the first day of playtesting this new passive, Jinx ran into a fight, flashed past the enemy team to kill Xerath, got her passive proc, lost control of the character, and ran into the enemy tower and died. “It was just like, ‘Yep, that’s Jinx,’” August says. “We knew after that playtest that she was finally starting to feel like the crazy girl we wanted her to be.”

And now, hold onto your bullets as we present a list of ults-that-didn’t-make-it, with commentary by August.

Drop the Hammer: Jinx could activate a global cannon floating above the map, causing an oversized bomb to detonate at a target location…after ten seconds. Why it didn’t make it: “People would just walk out of it.” Homing Missiles: Jinx would fire six missiles that automatically targeted enemy champions, chased them down, and straight-up killed them if they didn’t dodge ‘em. Why it didn’t make it: “She’d use it on bot lane and then randomly kill the enemy jungler, so that felt wrong.”

WTF Missiles: Jinx would fire a massive amount of missiles, which would then travel in unpredictable directions. Why it didn’t make it: “This was way too random.”

Circle of Cats: Jinx shot a bomb across the map, surrounding the first enemy hit with magical smoke—anyone who ran through it was then transformed into a harmless, cuddly kitten. Why it didn’t make it: “Although adorable, it felt a little too indirect and impractical for Jinx.”

Super Mega Death Rocket: Jinx shoots a rocket that explodes upon hitting an enemy champion, dealing AoE damage. Why it didn’t make it: Wait a second…

Actually, Super Mega Death Rocket was one of the first spells tested for Jinx, but the team moved away from the idea. At the time, it did flat damage, so Jinx would just fire it at the start of a fight—it was effective but also pretty lame.

The execute damage wasn’t added until way later in development, when the balance team urged for the change. “I felt pretty reluctant about it at first,” August says, “Because it seemed like a Garen ult, but better because it was AoE and ranged.” Still, it was unique to the ADC space and created a condition on when to use the ult—to secure kills. Plus, Super Mega Death Rocket synergized really well with the rest of her kit, where she could make a pick, then use her crazy passive speed to get to the next fight and continue the carnage.


 * RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN, LIKE BUILDINGS… OR PEOPLE

One question about Jinx’s personality lingered throughout development: Just how evil is she? Sure, she was inspired by villainy, but is Jinx out to murder people in cold blood? Or is she just trying to have fun, but her version of “fun” happens to involve a whole lot of destruction? August says, “Even though Jinx has killed a lot of people, we don’t really think of her as a blood-drenched serial killer.”

Jinx is just bored and looking for excitement. Sure, she doesn’t really care if people die during the explosions, but she’s not in it for the casualties.

Community Specialist Robert “Ransom” Lo puts it this way:

“If Jinx were walking past a stranger in a dark alley, she wouldn’t just automatically stab them and take their money. But if she were walking past a stranger in a dark alley near a PILE OF FIREWORKS, she would totally blow up the fireworks and unintentionally light the stranger on fire, because fireworks are freakin’ fun.”

Ultimately, Jinx’s personality and gameplay was about striking a balance between unhinged, dangerous, and crazy while also being fun, approachable, and cute. “The perfect representation of Jinx is probably her music video,” August says. “She’s laughing, having a good time, and blowing shit up, but she’s not necessarily covered in the blood of her enemies. That’s Jinx.”

ORIGINS is a new series where we deep-dive into the development of champions. Feel free to drop some thoughts and feels on the series below and let us know which champs you’re most interested in hearing about!

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 * Related Music