Elemental Warlord

**Elemental Warlord** is a Canadian clown, best known for his axe juggling skills and his ability to fart in three different colors. His circus acts regularly result in fatalities, both in the audience and among his fellow performers, but because farting is regarded as part of the intangible cultural heritage of Canada, he has been granted immunity from prosecution for all crimes.

The Warlord specializes in farting on the axes and then throwing them at volunteers or expired livestock, who wretch and vomit before dying of their injuries while the crowd cries laughing - in fact, over 20% of the audience-related fatalities are from asphyxiation, as they laugh so hard they can't breathe. This is regarded as the most honorable death for a Canadian; all true Canadians (notably excluding the Quebecois) dedicate their entire lives to laughing at farts, spending many hours of the day and all hours of the night attending buttholes, organic or synthetic, standing by to record new observations into their personal fart diaries.

Oh anyway, about his actual Roshpit Champions gameplay, he's very Canadian in that he technically has everything, but unlike American heroes, his utility belt is less batarangs and more poutine. What I mean to say is that all of his superpowers - and boy does he have superpowers! - come with annoying caveats or conditions, and you'll frequently find yourself in situations where those flaws cause him to suddenly fall on his prize-winning ass.

First and foremost, each time the Warlord here strikes an enemy with an autoattack or with a flying axe thrown by his W spells, he will gain one Elemental Charge stack corresponding to whichever mode he was in when the attack landed (or whichever type of axe scored a hit). Some of his runes grant hefty bonuses per stack, but his all-important R spell consumes half of your current stacks when cast... and it really is all-important, as it grants an astounding 60% damage reduction for a relatively short time. Since he's a close combat fighter, and that's his only source of percentile damage reduction, his life largely depends on it. This leads to Elemental Warlord having an "ebb and flow" to his dance of death, periods of extreme manliness and hardcore action punctuated by moments where he *simply must* take a couple seconds to refresh himself and make sure his buffs are all in order before continuing. This can be difficult to **JUGGLE**, hyuck hyuck, until you grow accustomed to a rhythm.

Offensively, his E4 rune boosts three different elemental damage types, which means he works well with a wider variety of damage-dealing items than his colleagues, but much more importantly, his R3 is far and above the best rune in the game for granting bonus attack damage; by default, you can have 20 stacks of each of the three different Elemental Charges, so each point in R3 potentially grants 40% bonus damage, an astronomical value that is somehow legal in hockey but not in regular civilian barfights. Combined with basically anything that scales with total attack damage, particularly his T7-1 Glyph that gives his autoattacks some truly brutal Magical splash damage (like a free Omega Ruby but better!), he will absolutely fucking lay down The Law. R3 is so crazy that I don't technically even need to mention that his R4 grants huge base attack damage independent of his gear's attributes, or that Q4 grants him big bonuses to STR, AGI, and INT just for diligently keeping his three different Q buffs on. I also don't have to mention that W4 adds some of that insane attack power to the base damage of his W throwing axes, while also causing them to deal additional Pure damage. It would be unnecessary for me to point out that Q2 and E1 give decent defense values, that high investment in W2 can keep enemies frozen for an eternity, or that just the standard 40 points in E2 ensures that our favorite Canuck never runs out of mana. And I strictly shouldn't helpfully whisper a secret to you, which is that Wind Deity Crown is a great way to stay mobile while dishing out a ludicrous number of autoattacks against everything nearby, courtesy of the multiple damage instances dealt by E, E2, and E3. You can decide for yourself whether or not you'll use that or Nethergrasp Palisade, or perhaps even both. That's none of my business. I'm not your friend, buddy!

Defensively, on the other hand, I really struggle to overstate how much the Warlord needs his R spell's 60% damage reduction shield on at all times. His colleague The Red General has plenty of DR effects which constantly enshroud him, as well as very rapid on-demand healing, both things that Warlord would really like to have. Instead, his R1 just doesn't tick fast enough to keep him standing in big endgame brawls, and I guarantee you that your R buff will threaten to expire at the most inopportune times, always waiting until the exact moment you absolutely cannot stand still and channel R for two whole seconds. If you can compensate for this - say, by using Iron Treads of Destruction or the Sapphire effect on Baphomet's Cursed Necklace, both of which completely remove the channel time on R - then you'll be in business, as long as you pay attention to your Elemental Charge stacks and make sure to have them topped off before it's time to cast R again. The reliable healing problem is, like Jonathan Yaniv, a more complicated problem for Canada and, therefore, of course, the world.