 What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and we finally got our first look at one of the flying sky junglers of ethereal, Leia, Era of the Jungle. Right off the bat the video production quality of this one was a step up from the others, they kept Leia in frame throughout the lore portion of the spotlight and provided several very good angles of her character model. They also dispensed with all the diagonal white transitions and that made everything look much cleaner and more professional. However, there were some visual glitches and anomalies that needed ironed out, and dying themselves warned us that the second ability doesn't look like it's supposed to, and we'll get an upgraded video for that when it's fixed. The rest I'll talk about later on. My first overall impression of Leia after seeing her abilities and especially her passive is that she'll function a lot like Crunch from Paragon, but with wings. Add a dash of Sareth in there and you've got Leia. Her arc types are Disruptor and Diver meaning she'll pack some CC and have the ability to get into the backline. I mean, she flies so imagine any Sky Slayer will be able to get into the backline pretty easy, but she does have some ground combat abilities that will let her get into the squishy targets fairly easily without having to dive them from the air. Before I get into her abilities I want to talk about the flight a bit. She goes high, like really high. I was expecting something like being able to skim the treetops and fly over to the elevated side lanes, but she's freaking up there. I kind of wonder if she'll have vision of the enemy team like that. Seems a little busted when you have Dante with his Global Snipe Ultimate and a Sky Slayer just hovering above spotting for him. The wing flap animation is good, but it kind of looks like she's posed under the wings. You don't see her weapon or legs move at all. I guess we'll find out more about what she looks like when we get the player. Now the abilities, starting with the passive. Wisdom of Yahime is much like Crunch's passive in Paragon. You get a stack when you cast an ability. After four stacks your next ability is empowered in some way. I love the hell out of Crunch, so I'm sure I'll love Leia. Leia's special ability is Tailwind, using this speeds you up a lot. But the downside is that you take increased damage across the board. Out of all the risk-reward abilities this one seems to be the most balanced upon first glance. They didn't mention if this works well in flight, but I'm guessing it will. That's just my hypothesis, nothing official. Her first basic ability is Galebound Thrust. You poke with your trident and then some wind shoots out. The trident deals one instance of damage and the wind deals another, but you can't hit someone with both the trident and the wind. Empowering this ability with Wisdom causes it to echo for reduced damage. I'm guessing this will be her left crunch, the most damaging ability to empower. Also of note, this was a welcome surprise for me, but we get Grognarch as her opponent. Grog is a berserker that is slated for the pre-alpha, however he isn't going to be in the initial seven myths that are released. Undying has stated that he's pretty big and while he doesn't look much taller than Leia here, he is hunched over on all fours. If he stood up, he would tower over pretty much any other myth we've seen. Her second ability is Sacred Plumage. This is the one that was bugged and looks pretty bad. Not as bad as they made it out to be, but it does need fixed. You shoot out feathers and a cone in front of you dealing damage and slowing anyone on the edge of the cone. Wisdom will cause the ability to heal yourself and any allies within the cone with the heal becoming stronger per enemy hit. It really doesn't look that bad from the side, but that overhead view, it is pretty wonky. I don't think that just this ability will make Leia into a support or anything with the heal aspect of it, but wise usage of the empowered cast may make the difference in a team fight. See what I did there, wise usage. The third ability is Crashing Dive. This functions much like Sarath's Ascend. You leap into the air, hover a bit, then choose where you come down. When you land, you deal AoE damage and knock people up. Empowering this ability causes you to dive faster and gain a shield per enemy hit. This looks way too slow as it is. I wasn't sure that it's going to be sped up, but the normal and empowered version. The animation kinda looks bad, but I think it's mainly because it's so slow. I checked Sarath's animation for Ascend in the Unreal Engine and she really didn't have much special going on with her dive animation, but it looked far more impactful than this. I believe the difference is the speed of the dive and the particle effects of the landing. A few minor tweaks and this will be one hell of a cool ability, especially if you can cast it from the air. Gameplay wise, I think good usage of this ability is going to be her bread and butter for engage or peel. It always does the knock up, empowered or not, so no need to try and set it up. You do get the shielding when it's empowered though, so that'll make for a great engage tool. Her ultimate is Windstorm. You shoot out a boomerang tornado that deals damage and knocks people up. Enemies hit by the return are pulled towards Leia. You can reactivate this at any time to make it return early. No empowering this one, but it seems like it's already powerful enough. This shit is crazy. Damage, two forms of CC and it's huge. I hope this has a long cooldown because it's going to make fighting against Leia a nightmare. The next part is her flight and suggested items. I've already covered the flight. My only problems here are the quick dip to black transitions that they make. It makes it look like the video is cutting out and you can see some visual glitches with her in the background. Her back animation with the Desert Queenskin is pretty cool and the Desert Queenskin itself is freaking awesome. Overall, I'm really impressed with Leia. She looks to have an incredibly fun kit even without the ability to fly around. She looks really good, minus a few things here and there, and dying seems to be improving at their video editing which is nice to see. It was also great to see them telling us straight up that they had some problems with their second ability and were going to be fixing it. While nothing will ever keep me away from my waifu, Malaya or my side piece Marina, the spotlight did a lot towards making me want to give Leia a try. Let me know in the comments below what you thought of Leia's spotlight like the video if you enjoyed it. Sub for more ethereal content, but for now this is the Mangoo signing off, you guys have a good one. Mangoo!