Azir/Background

Champion Insight
Azir, designed by ZenonTheStoic What does it mean to be the Emperor?

More than anything, an emperor has subjects. An emperor does not act; he commands. With that in mind, it made sense to focus gameplay on controlling the might of Shurima!

Internally, we call these champs “minion-mancers”. Once we knew Azir would take on this kind of kit, we knew it was time to look at what does and doesn’t work for these often-problematic designs:

Heimer taught us that auto-attacking, stationary minions tend to lead to defensive play. From the likes of Elise, Malzahar, and Yorick we learned that players do not appreciate minions that run off and do their own thing. Spiderlings ended up on a short leash and Voidlings follow Malefic Visions relentlessly. Finally, minions the player directly controls aren’t a great fit for League’s control scheme and lack the counterplay of “stay outside of this zone”.

Awareness around these problems allowed us to introduce appropriate trade-offs to Azir’s kit. With these weaknesses in place, we could make the soldiers very strong indeed; imagine if I told you that, given the right setup, your basic attack has 1200 range and hits units in an AOE.

Here’s how we approached the core loop of soldier generation and manipulation:

Arise! creates a sand soldier at a target location, from which the soldier projects threat in a circle--so far, so Heimerdinger. However, soldiers require an active input. Azir must right-click and go through a basic attack animation for soldiers to do anything. This makes both Azir and his enemy understand that a conscious command was given to the soldier. This also means that if Azir is stunned or running away, soldiers cease to be a threat. All of a sudden, Azir’s opponent can comfortably aggress.

Conquering Sands orders all soldiers to charge toward a target location, damaging and slowing enemies they pass through. This forces Azir to think carefully about when and where to send soldiers. Can Azir afford to use the spell for damage and slow or (Counterplay incoming!) will this allow the enemy to engage on Azir while his soldiers are temporarily unable to move?

Taken together, Arise! and Conquering Sands form a minion kit that gives enough control to make the emperor feel in control while leaving enough weaknesses to make enemies feel that aggression is an option.

Happy minion-mancing!