Mythic Variant: Breakout True Damage Ekko

Hey everyone, Stephanie “100 pc nuggets” Leung, the product lead for the skins team. A few patches back we introduced Mythic Variant skins. The idea is we take another pass at existing Legendary skins within thematics but with a deeper thematic lens. Now that we’re a bit further out, we wanted to reflect a bit on how we felt Jhin went and then tell you what our next steps are.

So… Jhin?

Our TL;DR is that Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin satisfied the specific needs of players who wanted a cool upgraded fantasy for Dark Cosmic Jhin. This won't be all we have to say on the subject, but we're tying the longer conversation to a broader monetization discussion we're planning for December. We’re grateful for all of your support, and we’re excited to keep exploring this space and making improvements.

One improvement coming with this next Mythic Variant showcase is reintroducing some Mythic Essence to the milestones. We learned that there’s a sizable group of people who aren't interested in completing a showcase track but do want to buy some capsules because they want to get a bit more Mythic Essence in between events.

For this showcase, we’re going to change the milestone rewards to add 50 Mythic Essence and remove a random 1350 skin permanent. We’re hoping this helps counter the feeling that all the value is being solely placed on the final reward. You can see how that reward track looks at the bottom of this blog. In the future, you can expect each showcase and its milestones to be a little bit different as we tweak and account for feedback from y’all to find what feels right when it comes to striking the balance between price and value.

Breakout True Damage Ekko

100 pc nuggets:

The majority of the feedback we ended up seeing was around lack of differentiation between Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin and the original Dark Cosmic Jhin. We felt like this was pretty fair criticism toward our intended stated goals with how we want to separate these skins while keeping them within theme. Jhin was just the first execution of this concept, and as we hope you can see, we put some more effort in setting Breakout True Damage Ekko apart from True Damage Ekko, while staying still within the existing theme of the original skin.

We basically made Breakout True Damage Ekko a cool hip hop PIANO MAN with VFX and model changes to support! We added the piano keys visualization to his weapons and the stairs in his recall, as well as a nostalgic winamp-esque music visualizer on his weapon. And all of that wouldn’t be complete without the accompanying audio changes to add a hip hop piano melody to existing music!

I hope you’re all in the mood for a melody… cause here’s a definitive list of what all we did this time around for Breakout True Damage Ekko:

• Animated music visualizer on his weapon
• Model and VFX recoloring
• Changed VFX elements for his Q and W
• Changed the stairs in his recall to piano keys, alongside some VFX changes to support it
• We also made some SFX changes to add a hip hop melody to his existing W music and a slew of other changes to fit the rest of the VFX changes

One thing we do want to also call out here is that there is no “blueprint” or “list” of boxes that will be checked for each Mythic Variant, so what we do here may not be the same list as the next or any future ones (if we keep doing them).

Okay what does that milestone journey actually look like now?

The milestone rewards will now look like this:

• First Capsule: Exclusive Icon
• 3 Capsules: Exclusive Emote, 5 Mythic Essence
• 5 Capsules: Random 1350 Music skin, 5 Mythic Essence
• 10 Capsules: Random 1350 Music skin, 5 Mythic Essence
• 15 Capsules: Random 1350 Music skin, 15 Mythic Essence
• 20 Capsules: Random 1350 Music skin, 1 Music Grab Bag, 20 Mythic Essence
• 25 Capsules: 2 Music Grab Bags
• 30 Capsules: Breakout True Damage Ekko Mythic Variant

The “Music skins” will be a random skin of any of the musical group related skins, so K/DA, Pentakill, True Damage, and a certain new boy band that’s popped up lately. (Yes I’m totally writing this without saying the name just in case this come out early and someone comes looking for the writer)

The Music Grab Bags will contain: 1 skin shard worth 1350 RP or below and 2 skin shards worth 975 RP or more, alongside a bonus chance at 2 skin shards worth 975 RP or more as well as Mythic Essence.