League of Legends New Champion Zeri Is Incredibly Underpowered In Clip

League of Legends‘ newest champion, Zeri, deals extremely low damage, as is shown in a clip posted to Twitter. Zeri was added to League of Legends in patch 12.2, which went live earlier this week. Zeri shares a voice actor with Neon, a new duelist agent added to Riot Games’ tactical FPS game Valorant in Episode Four Act One. The two characters also share some aspects of their attitude and fashion, as well as their penchant for electricity.

Despite League of Legends players being very excited about the new champion, the community has largely come to the conclusion that, while her kit is interesting and fun, she is simply lacking in the damage department. Zeri is designed to feel like a character in an FPS game, with her main gameplay pattern being that instead of using her auto-attack as her default mode of attack, she instead uses her Burst Fire ability, which is a skill shot that pierces enemies. This change, though it may seem small, gives Zeri a very different feeling and way of playing the game than other marksman champions.

Team Liquid’s academy ADC player TL Yeon posted a clip of himself playing Zeri to his Twitter today. The clip shows Yeon using Zeri’s ultimate and her in-built mobility to run circles around the enemy team. However, although the video does highlight Zeri’s extreme maneuverability, it also shows her struggling to kill even a single enemy champion in the process. Throughout the clip, Zeri’s Burst Fire consistently deals barely noticeable damage to the enemy team. In another role lack of damage might not be an issue, but for a marksman in League of Legends, especially one that lacks utility, it is quite concerning.

There are a couple of things worth noting about the fight, other than simply observing Zeri’s lackluster damage. Although Zeri does very little damage throughout the fight, she does manage to maintain very high movement speed and is able to avoid enemy champions and abilities consistently. In fact for much of the clip Yeon’s movement speed does not drop below 1000 and even reaches as high as 1524. Yeon has two completed items in addition to his Berserker’s Greaves during the fight: Trinity Force and Runaan’s Hurricane. Those are currently Zeri’s best items to rush, although there is still a lot of testing to be done on the champion before any conclusions are reached about how she can optimally be played.

This clip should in equal parts inspire and dispirit Zeri lovers. Although the Spark of Zaun seems to be lacking in damage numbers, she also clearly has the capacity to be quite fun to play, and, with some damage buffs, be extremely potent. Although it is easy to watch the video and see only that Zeri is an AD Carry that seems incapable of harming enemy champions, it should not be forgotten that if Zeri were killing enemies easily while dodging away from every ability the opposing team can throw at her it would be a significant problem for League of Legends of a completely different kind.

League of Legends is available on PC.

Sources: TL Yeon/Twitter