Talon

Talon doesn’t bother with lanes. He’s a melee mid laner who runs on mana, leans hard on attack damage, and has little in the way of defenses. Everything he does hinges on Assassin’s Path, which lets him hop over any terrain or structure on a brief cooldown. Where other roamers have to go around walls, Talon clears them and shows up on side lanes from angles that wards seldom see. The trade-off is that every piece of terrain he crosses puts that particular spot on a lengthy personal cooldown, so he has to plan his routes carefully instead of spamming them.

His kills follow a pattern built on Blade’s End. His abilities Wound enemy champions, and after three stacks, a basic attack on that target causes heavy bleed damage over time. In practice the combo runs like this: Rake sends out daggers that apply stacks and slow on the return trip, Noxian Diplomacy either stabs for critical damage up close or leaps at targets just out of reach, and on a kill it returns health and cooldown. One basic attack then sets off the bleed. Done properly, the whole sequence takes apart squishy targets in about a second.

Escaping the scene

Shadow Assault ties it together. It scatters a ring of blades while Talon goes Invisible with bonus Move Speed, and when he reappears the blades pull inward and hit everything they pass through. It serves equally well to start a fight, to reset between kills, or to make a clean exit.

Talon suits players who see the map as a puzzle: opportunists who push their wave, slip over a wall, and turn an empty side lane into a double kill before the enemy team notices mid has been abandoned.