Riot confirms Teamfight Tactics is here to stay, adding 4 new champions

Good news, everyone: Riot Games has confirmed that Teamfight Tactics is going to be a permanent League of Legends game mode, which isn't that surprising considering its enormous success. In a press release, Riot Games said it would continue supporting Teamfight Tactics with patches, new champions, synergies, and ranked seasons—and already a whopping four new champions are going to be added to the game next month.

Though they'll be live two weeks early on the beta servers, Camille, Vi, Jayce, and Jinx are all coming to Teamfight Tactics on August 14. These four have a new origin called Hextech that can randomly disable enemy items. If you have two Hextech champions on your team, you'll randomly disable two enemy items. If you manage to grab all four Hextech champions, you can disable up to four items. "Random here [means] randomly select a unit from all units that have items, then randomly disable one of the items on that unit," Riot explains. "This means it actually is generally more reliable vs players who are stacking all their items on a few units."

That should make Hextech champions good at shutting down item-reliant characters like Volibear.

Here's a breakdown of each new champion:

Camille:

• Class: Blademaster
• Ability: Hextech Ultimatum - Camille roots and damages her current auto-attack target. Camille's abilities that can attack that target will switch their current target to do so.
• Meta: Ideally, Camille can single out an enemy and help her team focus fire them down. Explicit external control over AI's targeting is a new effect, and we'd like to see players consider who they want to target on the enemy team.
• Tier: 1

Jayce:

• Class: Shapeshifter
• Ability: Thundering Blow + Transform Mercury Cannon - Knock back his target then change to ranged, gaining max attack speed for a few attacks.
• Meta: Jayce is able to break up the enemy frontline fairly early on in the fight, a premium and rare effect in TFT. Jayce has particularly low mana cost for a shapeshifter (50).
• Tier: 2

Vi:

• Class: Brawler
• Ability: Assault and Battery - Vi targets the furthest enemy and launches towards them, knocking aside everyone else while knocking into the air and dealing damage on impact with her target.
• Meta: Vi provides backline access on priority targets. Something we particularly wanted for Brawlers.
• Tier: 3

Jinx:

• Class: Gunslinger
• Ability: Get Excited - Jinx gets more excited as she scores takedowns. After her first, she gains attack speed. After her second, she pulls out Fishbones for AoE damage on Autos.
• Meta: Jinx is a ramping AoE AA carry (opposed to Draven ramping single target AA carry). She's a particularly squishy, high risk/reward carry.
• Tier: 4

Again, these new characters won't be available until July 31, when they'll be on the test server, and August 14 when they'll be added to the live version of TFT.