League of Legends: Riot teases exciting new mechanic for Volibear

League of Legends’ Volibear is currently undergoing a VGU and while it won’t arrive until 2020, Riot Games has some exciting plans for the Freljordian demigod.

Back in May, Riot Games hosted a fan poll to determine which League of Legends champion would be the next to undergo a graphical and gameplay update. The results were actually much closer than expected, so Riot decided that both Fiddlesticks and Volibear would undergo a VGU.

We haven’t heard much since that announcement, but this week Riot Games lifted the curtain and provided a brief status update on the both of them.

Fiddlesticks seems to be a bit further ahead in terms of his VGU, having moved from ideation and into early production. As the “most horrifying champion” in League of Legends, Fiddlestick’s reworked kit is designed around Crowstorm, and it sounds like he’s going to be “one of, if not the best, ‘ambush’ character in the game.”

Volibear is a bit more difficult to figure out it seems. Riot gameplay designer Nathan Lutz revealed the team hasn’t yet settled on a direction for Volibear just yet, but it seems they are on a promising path — one that will introduce an exciting new mechanic for the Freljordian demigod.

“‘Feeling unstoppable’ was one of the first goal statements I wrote when outlining the Volibear VGU. After trying several iterations which attempted to capture that feeling, the team encouraged me to push the envelope and really go for it,” Lutz revealed.

The result is a concept in which “Volibear refuses to be stopped by immobilizing effects.”

More specifically, “he converts effects like roots and stuns into self-slows, which scale based on the strength of the crowd control that hit him.”

It’s a promising concept and while it sounds a bit overpowered, Lutz added that playtesters have deemed it “surprisingly fair.” Right now, Lutz is working on figuring out its “specific rules and balancing levers.”

Volibear’s chain lightning ultimate has also been changed to a passive effect to allow for a more exciting “R” ultimate, and Lutz is exploring other abilities to help modernize his other mechanics, such as health regeneration and lightning roar.