With the Lunar Revel winding down, the next big news story for League of Legends is a new champion teaser. “The Wonder Above” is a chunk of lore with its own micro-site, which is teasing a new champion, but little is truly revealed. There’s some text and pictures of constellations, but the only picture is of an older man sitting around a campfire with some younger folk. Contemplating the words and the images had me feeling like I should do a little research and see what I could dig up. There’s a pretty lengthy discussion over on the official forums, and sprinkled among the posts are bits that make sense. My first thought was that the new champion would be a support, just because the name at the end is “Bard,” and because Mount Targon is mentioned, which happens to also be a similarly named tanky support item in the newer meta. This could mean Bards in LoL lore are a race, and then the tanky aspects could be translated properly, or this could be more to do with the more typical bard aspects of lorekeeping, storytelling, and/or musical talents. The latter seems more appropriate, but there were further discussions about whether or not Sona is a bard, and really, this discussion is going nowhere fast.

Somewhere along the line I read about Ao Shin, which is a champion that was announced over a year ago, and had some concept art leaked:

Looks more like a mage, but the Ionian and storm cues in the text and on the forum leads me to believe that Ao Shin is a distinct possibility, though the name Bard being there seems to point away from that. Further inspection lead me to a video of some rare footage of Ao Shin, and since we’re talking about him, I’ll share the video despite the fact that he’s probably not the new champion.

It does seem that Ao Shin actually is in the works, an article on PCGamer dating back to November of last year confirms that the champion is still being worked on, and “early 2015” is mentioned there. So will this new champion be Ao Shin? Or a tanky guy called Bard? Or perhaps a typical bard with buffing abilities? That still seems like it would take too much away from Sona. This is a tough nut to crack. More lore on Ao Shin was available on the LoL Wiki, and that sheds more light on the correlations, but no matter how much I look around, I’m not finding anything that sounds exactly spot on. It doesn’t seem that whatever the champion is has made it to the PBE yet, so I’ll keep tabs on this and report back when I know more.

#leagueoflegends #championteaser