Highlights
- Briar is a multifaceted champion with ties to many other Noxian champions in League of Legends.
- Mechanically, Briar shares similarities with Darius and Vladimir, between her stacking bleed effect, health costs on abilities, and emphasis on healing herself by dealing damage.
- Briar also has major lore connections to Rell and Vladimir. She could befriend Rell one day as a fellow Black Rose escapee, while Vladimir is Briar's creator and has a vested interest in recapturing her.
Riot Games has officially revealed the new League of Legends champion Briar, expanding the roster of junglers once again. Briar brings more than enough new mechanics to LoL, including the ability to taunt herself and a complete lack of base health regen, but she's also familiar in a fair few ways. Briar's lore gives her a lot of connections and similarities to classic champions from the nation of Noxus in League of Legends' Runeterra, and her mechanics make her resemble some patterns in Noxian gameplay too. Altogether, she may be one of the most multifaceted representatives of a region in Runeterra to date.
Briar aligns with plenty of broad patterns among Noxian champions -- she has an aggressive playstyle, and she was once a cog in the Noxian war machine -- but she has a lot of individual ties between different characters. That ranges from broad mechanical similarities to characters such as Darius to major lore connections to important people like Rell and Vladimir. Though it's unclear what greater role Briar might ultimately play in the story of League of Legends, she has more than enough potential to make both friends and foes.
Briar's Many Ties to Noxian League of Legends Champions
Perhaps the most basic of Briar's mechanical ties is to Darius. While her lore doesn't closely connect Briar to Darius, both of them are AD fighters who apply a stacking bleed with their passive and get stronger based on the amount of bleed stacked. The self-healing on Darius' Q also makes him feel like a mechanical cousin to Briar. In similar veins, Briar has bits of unique dialogue for interacting with Talon and Sion that imply some relationships with them, although the details are unclear so far. She's neither a tank nor a true assassin in League of Legends, but she imitates some of Talon's mobility and Sion's crowd control effects; between that and her dialogue, Briar has clear if vague ties to all three of these Noxian mainstays.
In terms of more complicated lore connections, Rell seems like an important potential relationship for Briar. The Noxian political cult known as the Black Rose created Rell as a potential weapon to defeat Mordekaiser when he rises again; similarly, the Black Rose created Briar out of blood magic as a weapon to destroy Noxus' enemies. What's more, both Briar and Rell have escaped the clutches of the Black Rose and are now loose in the world of Runeterra, seeking their own destinies. Rell's quest for revenge differs greatly from Briar's wanderlust and curiosity, and so far Briar and Rell don't have a canon relationship of any kind, but it remains that the two have a lot that they could talk about if they ever meet in a League of Legends story event.
Out of all the champions in League of Legends, Vladimir has the most to do with Briar. Mechanically, they're both champions who spend health to cast abilities and sustain themselves by draining health from their opponents. More importantly, Vladimir is a master of hemomancy and one of the founding members of the Black Rose, meaning he was responsible for Briar's creation. Briar's in-game dialogue even includes a line where she asks Vladimir if she should call him "dad". The Black Rose is supposedly watching the escaped Briar closely, and as one of the organization's most powerful members, Vladimir has some of the most vested interest in re-capturing his hemomantic creation.
Every League of Legends champion aims to bring something new to the game, whether it's a new mechanic, an untapped playstyle in a certain role, a major development in LoL's lore, or any combination of the three. Briar is interesting in that she does a little bit of all three while also retreading a ton of established ground for champion design and the story of Noxus. Doubling back in this way can risk feeling repetitive, but Briar succeeds by adding more depth to long-established lore and putting a new spin on tried-and-true LoL champion components. Her combination of past and present opens a lot of possibilities, both for how she'll fit into League of Legends competitive play, and how she'll continue to affect the world of Runeterra.
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