League of Legend’s newest Marksman brings us away from a lot of the recent creative gimmicks Riot Games has brought out, instead giving us a more traditional style right-clicking marksman with a ton of damage and teamfighting potential. For those who favoured the hypercarry right-clicking action that defined the role for many of its older Champions, you might find Yunara a familiar yet welcome pick. Even for those who love Riot Games for putting basic attacks on Qs and 200 years of collective gameplay design may find Yunara a particularly fun pick among the cast due to her unique interactions with items. We’ll get straight into the gist of it with Frank “Tomo” Lam on his first impressions of the pick, her favourite items, and what the future holds for Yunara.

Item/Build Impressions

Tomo: “I would say my first impression for her is she seems like a really dominant laner, especially in lanes where she can get away with level 1. But yeah, I think Yunara, she's definitely an interesting Champion, she abuses the ADC items better than any other champ right now.”

When Tomo mentions abusing the current ADC items, it is that she happens to cover many bases. Let’s consider current main items that ADCs build from archetype to archetype. As of 25.19, crit ADCs tend to favour Yun Tal Wildarrows as a starting item, often complimented by either rushing straight into a crit amplifier like Infinity Edge or the more utility-focused Flickerblades. On-hit Champions rush Guinsoo’s Rageblade or Blade of the Ruined King. Collector is also a favourable rush for many lane-dominant ADCs who want to snowball. It tends to be pretty homogenized to the point where there is some discontent over builds being very much the same across the board.

Yunara is a bit, well, built different.

She has AP scalings that amplify her critical damage. Her basic attacks abuse on-hit to the extreme, proccing the multiple times spread out like a weird Runann’s Hurricane built in. She loves critical items and benefits from all of them. She can even build Nashor’s, if you feel silly enough. In some ways, she's kind of like Twitch, who has found himself with on-hit items and crit items depending on the situation. Or Kayle, who similarly scales off every stat in the game.

Tomo: “She has a lot of really unique interactions with how the items work, for example if you build Kraken Slayer, and you press Q, you pretty much just proc Kraken slayer off every auto, the same goes for Hurricane.”

Pictured above: Yunara’s interaction with Runann’s proccing a gazillion numbers on the jungle camp due to each individual spread attack applying Runann’s Hurricane.

Yunara’s unique interactions come from her Q – Cultivation of Spirit, where once she’s at maximum stacks of Unleash, she enhances her autoattacks to spread around and hit nearby targets (kind of like Runann's), increases her attack speed, and act like additional attacks. Normally, Champions that abuse on-hit well tend to simply spread on-hit effects around really fast and efficiently. The key difference is that Yunara also spreads on-attack effects. On-attack is usually reserved as a balancing check for items to prevent cases where you proc it multiple times, because that’d be completely broken, right?

Yeah, Riot Games’ design team just broke that rule to let her proc Kraken instantly and give her spread-attacks the ability to use Runann’s Hurricane. To put it shortly, she’s rapidly proccing what normally would be limited to usually every three hits on attacks in an instant because she’s on-attacking multiple times in an auto if there are multiple targets available.

Currently as of 25.19, her build path tends to vary based on what opponent she’s fighting. For first items, Kraken Slayer is strong overall against squishier Champions. Blade of the Ruined King is favourable against bruiser/tank heavy compositions, where Tomo mentions that the on-hit applying lifesteal will also apply to her spread attacks, giving her a lot of extra sustain. Yun’Tal is also a generically strong option to start off with if you want pure damage stats and don’t have a specific target in mind.

Follow-up items include Runann’s Hurricane (especially as a second item) due to the spreading attacks from Yunara’s enhanced auto attacks all individually spreading their own bolts, and Navori Flickerblades for more frequent casts on her dashes during her enhanced state. After this, her build typically follows the more traditional AD carry route (Infinity Edge and a Armor Penetration item) to maximize the damage you push out into the late game.

What kind of ADC is Yunara?

Tomo: “I think Yunara's more of a traditional hypercarry, if she's allowed to do damage, she'll do a lot of it. And honestly right now, it feels like Yunara can exist in most games, I think even in traditionally hard matchups for hypercarries, I feel like she is allowed to get away with it and survive these lanes. She'll get to a point where they can't really bully her anymore. She just does so much damage. I think with just Kraken the amount of damage I can do is crazy.”

A hypercarry is basically the dream fantasy of every AD Carry main out there, being able to dish out massive damage in teamfights with consistent and high damage that shreds through squishy and tanky Champions alike. Champions like Jinx, Twitch, and Kog’Maw all fill this fantasy, with their late game often giving them the damage to delete targets and spiral out of control quickly. Oftentimes, your team plays around your damage and tries to keep you alive as much as possible, as hypercarries also tend to be the squishiest targets to account for how much damage they’ll push out.

But consider the following advice from Tomo.

Tomo: “I think her biggest flaw is that, come to mid or late game, she's pretty immobile if the enemy team can get on top of you, say a Malphite ult or Wukong ult, a champ that can just dash on you. It's pretty difficult for her to survive unless she presses ult so she can dash. But once she uses her ult like that, and nothing happens for the fight and her ult times out, she's like, maybe three times weaker than when she has her ultimate up, in terms of how much damage she can dish out. It's kinda similar to Zeri where if she doesn't have ultimate, she's not really that great of a champ. But it is a relatively short cooldown ultimate, compared to other ultimates in the game.”

This places Yunara closer to that of the mentioned Zeri, Vayne, Twitch, and Samira whose primary source of power comes from their ultimate. The short cooldown (currently 100/90/80 at rank 1-3 with a 15s duration) does make it a little more forgiving, but without her ultimate, she no longer has dashes, she has to stack up her passive to get her enhanced autoattacks, and loses her funny long-ranged laser.

One of the key weaknesses of hypercarries is that they’re often vulnerable both in defensive stats and in options to evade getting dived/assassinated, which Yunara only solves with her ultimate. Skilled opponents may simply disengage if they can bait out Yunara’s ultimate and re-engage when the duration ends, which makes you have to play very carefully in when and where you decide to use Yunara’s ultimate.

What’s Holding Yunara Back Right Now?

We asked Tomo in respect to professional play around the time when Yunara was 1-7 in professional play globally, which sparked a lot of discussion on her power level and if players were playing and building her correctly.

Tomo: “I think of the games I watched, it seems like Yunara wasn't really the problem to be honest, I think people don't know the limits of Yunara. Once people get better at the champ, she might get a higher winrate, because I feel like people haven't fully mastered the champ, it's difficult to pilot her in awkward situations. Like Kai'sa, back in the day, people didn't know how to R-W for a burst of damage. She became a whole different level of more powerful once people got it down consistently, you know? People aren't really minmaxing Yunara yet and not utilizing her full potential. That's my take on Yunara in pro play right now.”

Of course, unnoticed mechanics and items can sometimes show up simply from solo queue and professional players popularizing gimmicks, as well as OTP players breaking the limits of their Champion. Mechanic wise, many consider Yunara a fairly simple Champion, although she does have certain ways to express knowledge of the Champion through her builds and small things like her auto reset on Q, but things can be discovered or implemented from patch changes.

Some may remember the Ardent Censer meta, where a singular item defined the entirety of a patch and games were decided based on who built it faster and abused it the best. It took months of players playing the game with Ardent Censer at the same (if not more buffed) power level before people realized how strong it was.

Perhaps Yunara has a similar item, whether incoming from a future patch change or simply untouched. As much as I would personally love to vouch for AP Yunara builds, it definitely is something left to arena gameplay as the scaling is only 10% per 100% AP on her passive for critical hits, which isn’t exactly the greatest until we get an item that provides both critical rate and AP.

Any Additional Tips for Yunara?

Tomo: “I think a lot of people don't expect to just like be able to just fight you really quickly, I guess. For example, like, say you just arrived to lane, and you're level 6, and then the enemy team is probably thinking like 'oh this guy needs to stack up his Q autos to get the Q damage', but nope, you can just press her ultimate and just run at them. She's able to stat check a lot of Champions when she wants to, and I think her ult is on a low enough cooldown so there's a lot of angles where she can just press her ult at a random time and dish out damage, and on the next fight, she'll probably have it up again. A lot of people don't or underestimate Yunara's W, because at level 1, it's a 99% slow, and people still get caught off by it.”

Yunara is positioned in an ideal location, where multiple targets are clumped together for her spread attacks. Image Source: LTA North

Although players have gotten more used to Yunara’s power spikes as time passes, you can still catch players off-guard with how much damage Yunara throws out in the early game. Usually, the perspective of a hypercarry is that they need time to scale, or that they’re not at their full power yet, but Yunara only needs her first item to get the ball rolling in a fight.

Also consider how your positioning is spreading your auto attacks, there are small nuances where the target selection can determine who takes multiple hits from Runann’s and her spread attacks, in a similar way to Twitch’s ultimate Spray and Pray. Small things like when you activate your enhanced auto attacks can even determine which target takes damage from Kraken Slayer, which may very well change the trajectory of who dies first in a fight.

Conclusion

Traditional Marksmen and hypercarry lovers will easily find a home with Yunara. While being fairly straightforward to pilot, Yunara has a lot of nuances that can give you the edge in mastering her kit and optimizing her damage.

Thanks to Tomo for his time in discussing Yunara with us. Check out his socials here:

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