Forgers,

For a while now, we have teased quite a bit about our next Forger in AetherForged. From the teaser in Nazarah’s spotlight to the constant work on stream, as well as being shown off on Discord and Twitter, you should all know that the Yeti will be the next Forger to soar into the Forge. However, you should know what his real name is as well.

Meet Jaromir. The strong-man Felian, formerly of Honvarj, makes for a brutal wall to try to break through to reach the squishier members of his team… and, more importantly, he makes for the strongest spear to pierce through the frontline. His kit revolves around preventing his enemies from being effective, as long as he stays in the fray and remains a nuisance to deal with. Disruption with ample amounts of crowd control, reasonable amounts of damage, and tenacity in his passive makes him a powerful ally in your front-lines to win any team fight.

Jaromir’s utility cannot be understated. He is best played as a strong initiator, using his ultimate, or in lieu of that, a strong Frigid Lance and Frozen Squall combination to engage on the enemy team or create picks. However, these spells can also prevent enemies from engaging upon your team and save a teammate from death. Good Jaromir players know how to do either. Great Jaromir players can do both. The best Jaromir players will be able to do both at the right time.

An exiled warrior from Honvarj who rediscovered his purpose in life when he met the heir of Alvkhret. A master of survival in the harsh Honvaran wilderness and an expert in hand to hand combat.

If you haven’t already read about Nibra’s first meeting with the former Honvarj warrior, you can read about it here in the last lore release, Blizzard Haven. This week, Jaromir’s spotlight lore piece is released! Read about true might and strength in Blood on the Snow here. One thing is for sure, though… Jaromir doesn’t need a weapon at all to deal with your entire team.

Passive: Stone Cold

After a short amount of time, while Jaromir remains in combat, he gains a large amount of tenacity against the next crowd control that would affect him. This ability goes on cooldown after blocking a CC.

o7 design notes:

Jaromir’s passive is built, like most of his kit, around encouraging him to wade into fights and stay there for long periods of time. This passive helps him remain active throughout the fight so that he can continue to control the enemy team for the full duration of it.

Q: Breathtaker

Jaromir punches the target enemy, dealing a flat amount of damage to the enemy, plus a percentage of their bonus health. The enemy is knocked back a tiny distance and is heavily slowed for an extremely short amount of time.

o7 design notes:

This is Jaromir’s basic damaging ability. The slow and knockback are both very minor, and there as a quality of life effect to make the ability FEEL like it’s really (pardon the pun) packing a punch. The meat of the damage on this ability is in the bonus health damage, as the ability already has an effective “floor”, due to the flat damage. In having additional damage based on the bonus health of the target, the ability has a notably clearer use case of being best against enemy front lines and bodyguards while still giving him respectable damage once he reaches the enemy backline.

W: Frigid Lance

Jaromir hefts an ice javelin then throws it in the targeted direction. Upon hitting an enemy unit, it deals damage to the enemy, stunning them, and the javelin explodes in a small cone behind them, briefly slowing, crippling, and damaging all other enemies in the area.

o7 design notes:

While this ability won’t provide as strong of initiation to Jaromir while his ultimate is on cooldown (on multiple fronts – both in terms of the stun duration and in terms of the effect), it will allow good Jaromirs to get good picks off for their team. While the ability is definitely best landed on a target in the middle of their team, it also can work quite well for simply catching someone that’s apart from their team for yours to pile on to. In many situations, it will be optimal to hit the front line so that your team can walk past them to reach the enemy back line.

This is not built to pass through minions, as we wanted to avoid giving him too strong of lane harass. As such, a laning Jaromir will need to make sure that they thread the proverbial needle when throwing their W for harass purposes.

Frozen Squall

Jaromir expels a blast of freezing cold air in the area around himself, damaging and slowing enemies hit. He then gains a movement speed buff for a short amount of time that increases in strength over its duration.

o7 design notes:

This ability is intended to give Jaromir an ability with multiple play patterns – sometimes, he’ll want to activate this ability early on, before reaching the enemy team, so that he can use the speed boost as a form of soft initiation. Other times, he may want to hold on to this ability so that he can use it to make sure that he’s able to stick to high priority targets that he’s already sitting on. In either case, it’ll be possible to play around by CCing him during the latter half of the speed boost, as doing so will make the speed boost notably less effective.

Skarstind Onslaught

Jaromir leaps to the targeted location. If he lands on enemy forgers, it deals damage to them and stuns them for a short amount of time. If he does not land on any forgers, he begins charging forward until he hits an enemy forger, at which point he continues charging forward a short distance further, stunning and damaging all enemy forgers that he hits.

o7 design notes:

This is Jaromir’s premium initiation ability. When this ability hits the enemy team, it is incredibly devastating. The design of this effect allows him to bypass the enemy frontline to get directly to the vulnerable backline.

In most situations, Jaromir will want to use this to force a team fight to start by getting behind the enemy front line in order to create an opening for the rest of his team, but on occasion he may also use it as an escape method (since it can go over all terrain), or as a way to leap to the aid of an ally that is about to die.

General notes:

We expect that Jaromir will most commonly be played as a traditional jungler, using the Poacher role. However, he will also have the ability to trade with opponents in lane very effectively, so he may be seen in lane as a harrier or saboteur as well. His ultimate in combination with his E and W will often provide Jaromir with incredible ganking potential, so he’ll usually be most useful when coming out of the jungle at the enemy team, however he can also utilize these abilities to a decent effect to assist an ally jungler in their own gank. As such, Jaromir will most commonly be the primary initiation for his team – diving into the enemy lines ahead of his allies to lock down their opponents so that they can safely attack the targets that they need to focus. While his damage output is merely respectable, particularly when focusing lower health targets, the potential lockdown that he brings to allow his team to effectively reposition on the enemies is incredibly strong.

Lead the Charge

Jaromir is the first true tank we have shown in the AetherForged world… but the wildcat will not be restrained. We know that you’ll probably do some incredibly strange and wonderful things when the game comes out, though. Maybe you’ll take advantage of that power scaling and make the Q chunk out literally half of an enemy’s health. Perhaps someone else will build haste Jaromir and forget about that ult as they charge in with the E. Whatever it is, we want to hear what ridiculous things you’ll do with Jaromir or any other of our Forgers! Let us know on our social media channels!

Tespis

Lucan

Nazarah

Cheers,

HeroicTechnology