League of Legends' 171st champion Yunara was released a couple of days ago, the first new character since the release of Mel in January. Yunara is an Ionian Shrine Maiden, exiled to the Spirit Realm to protect a powerful Darkin artifact. She attacks with the Aion Er’Na, a set of floating balls that she pushes at opponents to deal damage.
It’s a cool concept for an AD Carry, and has the potential to feel as smooth as Lucian; still the smoothest auto attacker in the game after a decade. However, Yunara’s auto-attack animation doesn’t take advantage of her concept.
Yunara’s Auto Attack Animation Is Unpopular
The current animation has Yunara sort of pushing these balls towards enemies with a burst of air, and the number of balls remains static around Yunara despite her expending them during her auto attack. This came as a disappointment to players who were expecting the number of balls Yunara has stacked to be visible around her model, rather than a static texture.
In anask-me-anything on Reddit, the team behind Yunara acknowledged player feedback on her auto attack animation and said they’re looking into adjustments they can make to the animation.
“Right now we’re tweaking the beads so that they wave a bit during the auto-attack animations to make them feel more alive and use her floating beads a bit more,“RiotPehrek writes. “These changes are actually on the [Public Beta Environment] right now, and we’re targeting to have them out next patch!”
The animation changes can be seen in the video above. A wave now goes through the balls, adding the illusion of a new ball being slotted back into rotation after Yunara fires one. However, this animation still doesn’t seem like it’s taking full advantage of Yunara’s high-quality model and her concept.
It’s rare for Riot to make changes so quickly to a champion, which illustrates the amount of negative feedback they’ve been getting on Yunara’s auto-attack animation since the champion was released on PBE.
Yunara is currently hovering at around a 44 per cent win rate in Diamond+ ranked, which isn’t uncommon for a new release.
