League of Legends: Riot reveals Zeri as new champion
Riot Games accidentally announced their 158th champion Zeri through the game’s official website on Tuesday.
Zeri is a brand new ADC, and she showed up almost like “a surprise” to fans and players. Although the details of her abilities are not revealed yet, the post tells about her backstory and a brief description of her powers.
Who is Zeri?
Zeri is a marksman, and she is “a headstrong, spirited young woman from Zaun’s working class”. She carries the love for her family and her home into every battle she fights in. She is very eager, and unfortunately, it sometimes can backfire. She also believes in one truth: stand up for your community, and it will stand up with you.
Zeri was born with electromagnetic magic imbued within. She honed her abilities into a specially crafted rifle with bullets powered by her emotions. The “conductive” barrel is able to amplify her power directly from her hand. Her complete outfit, especially her jacket, can help better control her voltage to fully charge and fire accurately.
From the description, it is possible that Zeri is likely to be equipped with quick attacks and movement.
With the description, Riot Games also put the character’s art.
Her champion page, which per January 6th has been pulled out, reveals that her only related champion at the moment is Ekko, an assassin with the power of time manipulation and also from Zaun. She might be a key character for Arcane season 2 as well, or at least play a part of Ekko’s life in Zaun.
Electrifying start to 2022
Zeri’s character makes sense to be put together based on the 2022 roadmap, posted back in the post titled “Champion Roadmap: September 2021”, that once mentioned an ADC coming soon, followed by the supporting patches.
In a statement released by the developer, they mentioned “an electrifying start to 2022 with a brand new bot lane marksman who has been charging up and is rearing to finally get on the Rift.” They also said they wanted to create a kinetic marksman who is always on the move and plays the game at a machine-gun pace. This description sounds quite fitting with Zeri’s character.
In the past, the developer has experimented with altered auto-attack champions, such as Graves (a marksman from Bilgewater), Xayah (a marksman from Ionia), and Jhin (a marksman from Ionia). To date, there are around 23 marksmen in the game; 24 now if we count Zeri. With the release of the new marksman, they’d like to re-explore the role of marksman’s basic attack.
Then, they ended the statement by hyping fans and players up to look forward to a “hyper new champion very early next year”.
To open the year, League of Legends has released patch 12.1 with several updates, including balanced champions, items, skins, and many more.
There is no official release date yet for when this marksman will hit the game. Fans predict her complete kit should be revealed in the following days and arrive in the game in weeks.
