"The following is the opinion of only those involved in its writing. It is not officially endorsed by Rooster Teeth Productions or necessarily representative of the views of the Death Battle staff at large."
Harley vs Jinx Q&A
Before we get started…
KirbyKid: Hello everyone! I have to say, out of all the episodes this season, I was most excited for this one. Especially with seeing the development process of the episode, and the look of the final product. It’s hard to explain but to see something I worked so hard on come together like this has been really rewarding and it’s cool to see that (generally speaking) the episode itself has been pretty well received.
How do we know Jinx and Vi scale to each other in Strength?
Through an old post directly from Riot themselves, they’ve listed Vi’s total weight at 8,140 pounds. This is with her gauntlets on, and if you subtract what would be her total weight, that would mean Vi is lifting over 4,000 pounds on each arm. The gauntlets have been described as extremely heavy before, and nothing of note has shown that their weight is anything lighter.
Jinx and Vi have repeatedly been shown to be comparable to each other. The reason we know this is because the two have constantly gotten into fights with each other in their backstories and in the Arcane show. Jinx in Arcane also has no issue fighting up close with her weapons. While Vi is undoubtedly stronger, even knocking Jinx down to half her sister’s strength, she’d still be at about 4000 pounds in comparison to her sister. Harley meanwhile is at 1000 pounds with that in mind.
Even then, shimmer boosted individuals like Sevika have proven to be more than a match for Vi and her hextech weaponry. And that’s in short bursts. With Jinx having shimmer constantly coursing through her veins, it makes sense she’d at bare minimum be on her sister's level.
How can you be sure Hextech and Chemtech scales to Lux’s or others magic?
The entire point of Hextech is to place the power of magic under technological control. It’s pretty much stated to level the playing field with natural mages in lore. Likewise in arcane we see Jayce and Victor recreate previous spells on much larger scales than the original, such as them making massive hexgate warp spells. And in-game lore also shows and states that chemtech has the same destructive properties to that of Hextech.
What material do you consider applicable for the League in Death Battle?
League's canon is fairly loose and subject to revisions and rewrites. It also doesn’t really have much of a cohesive ongoing narrative, with most characters only having one introduction trailer and a few unconnected short stories. So we kinda approached it from an angle of using anything that we felt represented the “normal” variations of the characters.
Obviously any official “canon” short stories, comics and videos for a character were on the table. Likewise Arcane was also “Mostly congruent” with the game lore(with many aspects of that adaption clearly having been alluded to in the games), and thus was included despite it clearly having some retcons. Outside of that, any spin-offs, promotional trailers, or interviews that portrayed the LOL characters in their standard form without any unreasonable deviants like the “alt universe” skins were included.
For example Wild Rift is confirmed to have the same “base lore” as normal LOL, so depictions of characters in its trailers were included, as there’s no reason to think the characters powers or abilities should differ greatly given that. In contrast, trailers like Star guardians were much more distinct from normal LOL, so they were excluded. Obviously we also didn’t scale characters based on who you can fight in the gameplay itself.
The exception to this was cases where the standard characters were still clearly supposed to be from the main universe, and the skin is just a costume(say Jinx in a christmas costume). Additionally since LOL does have a multiverse, most of its side content could still be rationalized as valid timelines. The developers also make it really clear that when it comes to cinematics they do everything they can to represent the characters as faithfully as possible, so it’s unlikely abilities even in misc promotional trailers were portrayed abnormally.
Conversely it’d probably be important to point out that soft composites are not unusual. Harley had material from the DCAU canon, the very loosely connected side comics to the DCAU, her post-crisis incarnation and her new 52 incarnation. It would be a double standard to allow her that and not do the same for Jinx.
Why are Lux’s light beams considered light speed?
The VP of Game/Product Direction for League of Legends calls Lux’s Final Spark a laser. Lux herself also calls it a laser, and Lux is smart enough to describe the science behind how a rainbow works, so it's safe to say Lux understands how her powers function and knows what is and isn’t a laser. It’s also described as burning enemies to death and has no physical knockback in the game. In the Lady of Luminosity backstory for Lux, it says that “She began experimenting in secret, playing with sunbeams in the courtyards.” And Lux even compares the sun warrior Leona’s powers to her own. The same Leona who can fire beams of light directly from the sun.
So Lux’s beams are confirmed to be made from actual sunbeams. Meaning, being made of natural light. With that said, she does indeed also have the ability to construct light into physical or explosive constructs. And the move description for her powers make note of this difference between her beams and standard attacks:
From the League of Legends Lux page:
Light Binding: Lux releases a sphere of light that binds and deals damage to up to two enemy units
Prismatic barrier: Lux throws her wand and bends the light around any friendly target it touches, protecting them from enemy damage
Lucent Singularity: Fires an anomaly of twisted light to an area, which slows nearby enemies. Lux can detonate it to damage enemies in the area of effect
All the above moves are described as non-traditional forms of light. As for how Final Spark is described -
Final Spark: After gathering energy, Lux fires a beam of light that deals damage to all targets in the area. In addition, triggers Lux's passive ability and refreshes the Illumination debuff duration
The in-game description: Lux fires a dazzling ray of light, dealing 381 magic damage to all enemies in a line
Non-traditional light attacks are described as bending, spherical or an anomaly. Her Final Spark attack has a traditional description as a ray or beam of light even going so far as to describe it as firing in a line.
And there is plenty of evidence to support Lux’s beams as being light (outside of just character and developer statements). In the You Really Got Me music video, Lux’s Final Spark reflects off of Malphites rocky body. In the URF Wild Rift trailer featuring Ziggs, when Lux fires her Final Spark attack on the ground, it burns on the ground.
There’s only two things that have been used to contest Lux’s final spark being a beam of light:
“Lux fires her Final Spark to the ground and it explodes the surrounding area”
That’s literally not what happens. She very clearly right before firing her laser, places a lucent singularity down on the ground (You can clearly see the design of it being the swirling ball of light) which explodes, because Lucent Singularity itself is an explosive attack and is already described as an “anomaly” that you can “detonate.” There would not have been an explosive force if it weren’t for her firing directly at her singularity. It’s equivalent to saying that Lux fired a laser at a gas pipe and it exploded.
“Her Final Spark explodes some rubble in the comic”
So this one requires a bit of context, since the time when Lux did this, she was super new to her powers. In the Lux comic book, Lux helps a group of mage refugees escape a conflict between mages and demacians. Long story short, Demacia hates mages, which is obviously awkward considering Lux is one. But while she helps these refugees, one of them gives her their staff which she remarks she has never used one before:
What you see later in the comic is an inexperienced Lux using Final Spark for the first time. And this is really important to note, because there is a complete contrast between how Lux in this comic (who is new to her powers) uses the move in comparison to how she uses it after having clearly more experience with her abilities.
To drive home how different it really is, look at how Lux for the first time fires her Final Spark in this comic vs every single other time it is animated or portrayed:
The first time she uses the Final Spark she’s holding the staff in her hand and doesn’t even charge the attack. Every other future instance of her using the attack, she levitates her wand in front of her, charges and fires. There is a very clear contextual and visual difference between how she uses her move in every other media outside of the comic. This also extends to when Lux uses her finger beams to break cage doors, which has clear visual differences in how Lux uses her Final Spark with her wand.
Also keep in mind that Lux has the ability to turn light into a physical force when she wants to. Even if her first time using Final Spark was when she was inexperienced, in that moment in the narrative she wanted to use all her power to bust open a way to safety.
The issue with Final Spark no longer became “Is it actually light?,” because that ended up becoming clear that it was. It now became:
How can Lux’s beam scale to anyone when in-game Final Spark is one frame?
A great question to be sure. The answer? We look at the animated portrayal of the attack!
In the Just One More animated video, Lux’s laser moves in multiple frames (In tandem with Jinx’s very own rocket no less!)
In the Duo Lux & Ezreal animated video, Lux’s beam moves in tandem with Ezreal’s Trueshot Barrage attack in multiple frames.
In the URF Ziggs Wild Rift trailer, Ziggs dodges both Jinx’s rockets and Lux’s Final Spark which again both move side by side in multiple frames… at the same time! And in the same video he also dodges Ezreal’s Trueshot Barrage as well! And Jinx fights evenly with Ziggs! Across multiple videos around the same 4 characters, this light stuff is exceedingly consistent!
You can also get tandem movement with Darius whose arm moves in relation to a beam of light coming down from the sun from another character named Leona summons.
Beam movement: 691.4px
Darius forward movement: 56.1px
Ratio: 56.1 / 691.4 = 0.0811397165x
8.1% sol, sub-relativistic
Darius gets hit by Ahri right after moving in tandem with the beam, and Jinx dodges a kick from Ahri in the You Really Got Me music video. Vi and Jinx also fight alongside Darius in the Just One More animation.
As a further note, Viktor’s laser is powered by a hex crystal. Which is crystalized magic. Which is… what Lux has natural access to. Again, specifically to manipulate light.
In short:
Lux’s entire thing is literally manipulating light. There is visual evidence that she is capable of firing beams of light that are stated by the character herself and developers alike to be lasers. Just because she has the ability to create physical constructs with her light does not mean every instance of her firing a beam is solid or explosive. And there is a clear visual difference in how she fires her laser. Huh, sounds familiar with another character that can fire beams of light that act either traditional or non-traditional with clear visual differences in how it's portrayed and was used to help boost a series speed…
Don’t DC street tiers have some LS feats? Does Harley compare to that and if so, how does Jinx compare?
They have a couple. The big one is Black Canary potentially having Nanosecond reaction times. Granted Black Canary is generally considered to be a bit superior to Batman in raw fighting skill, so Harley would probably downscale from that. There’s also a much more niche character named Alana Strange, who has a light dodging feat other DC street level characters could scale to, but it’s ultimately not far beyond what the LOL light feats already get to.
Doesn’t Harley have meta powers?
Harley doesn’t have meta powers on the same level as say Gwenpool. She largely just makes tongue and cheek references to the camera or pop culture jokes. Even her infamous feat in Harley Quinn 50, is largely caused by context. Harley picked up a comic depicting the events of the comic she was in, because the personification of one of DC’s staff dropped it in her world. Reading the comic about the comic she was in caused a paradox, which she later fixed by rewriting a page in that comic using the authors note pages. She can’t reality warp on a massive scale like that normally.
Does Harley Quinn scale to Static
We would lean no. Static has a much wider variety of powers and clearly has more raw might at his best. Being able to power the JLA watchtower for a time, power a green lantern ring, fend off many members of the JL, help fight superman villains and so on. He does have a crossover with Batman characters in a few eps, but it’s pretty obvious to me he could have killed many of those characters if he actually wanted to(such as when he one shots Joker). The reason why he doesn’t is likely because he has no real reason to attack with lethal intent. The fact he’s a match for Terry who uses tech that’s decades superior to the current cast and is basically a walking arsenal, so be testament to that.
Static approaches fights with characters the same way Spider-man does. He fights as hard as he can without lethal intent. When Static starts putting in the effort, Batman regulars begin to go down hard.
Isn’t Harley Banned from the afterlife?
In one case Harley dies, and when she’s sent to hell she’s eventually kicked out due to being too lovey dovey. In another case she died and then heaven/hell argues about who should take her and they decide to put off collecting her soul for another time(Assuming this wasn't just a hallucination).
So first off there’s no actual clause stating that Harley can’t be sent to hell or heaven if she dies again. She doesn’t have a specific contract stating her soul isn’t allowed to be collected like Lobo. Additionally when Harley does go to hell she also stayed there for a fair amount of time, before getting banished. When she came back to earth, she also didn’t have a physical body, and had to be fully resurrected in a new body by Zattanna. In the second example her real body is still trashed when she returns to it, and it takes her a while to fully recover.
Overall the idea of Harley dying in resurrecting requires a fairly circumstantial set of events to happen. Even if she could do it, it might take her a while and she wouldn’t have a physical body capable of continuing a fight anyway. Even assuming Harley could try to possess Jinx as a ghost or something, Jinx’s sash would likely prevent it. It’s not a good win condition.
Can’t Batman’s explosion feat get to a small town?
Yes if you calc the feat using the damage done by the explosion to the landscape, to get around 1-8 kilotons of TNT. We actually have a version of the calc that does that, though we didn’t use it in the episode.
Anyway you highball Lux’s explosion feat, as you probably under sold how much rock was there and can probably get the number into the higher double digit kilotons. There’s also a somewhat infamous “Dunkin Darius'' promotional trailer where he causes an explosion that can be calced to 30-100ish kilotons of TNT. Braum punching a mountain is at least 25 kilotons and Viego in the ruined King has an 80 megaton feat of shaking the shadow isles Jinx can technically scale to via Bruam. Any way you slice it, town level league is rather consistent with characters Jinx has direct scaling to.
Why did you give Jinx LOL Items and Runes?
They don’t just show up in the main moba. Runes and various items/equipment also show up in The Ruined King RPG, Wild Rift and Legends of Runeterra. They were recurring enough that we felt they should be included, in addition to the fact they’re obviously pretty endemic to LOL itself and we wanted to represent the entire series. If you’re wondering how her loadout was chosen, it was a combination of what was relevant to the fight, suggested by Riot itself on their Wild Rift pages, and what competitive league players used for the character.
To put it into perspective, official League of Legends character pages have several officially linked character loadout sites. All with official builds to help people hone their character to the fullest. Wild Rift was especially helpful in this regard because it gave official loadouts for characters under a tab literally labeled “Official.”
And to add onto this, Jinx herself had her start as a video game character. Her game counterpart has the same backstory to that of Arcane, which is referenced and confirmed in the card game and voice line exchanges between characters in the main moba. There would be no reason to not use her game arsenal, when there are so many other game characters before her that have used game items.
Why did you give Harley Joker Venom? Isn't it specific to the Joker, who she hasn’t been involved with in years?
I mean it's “technically” true that Harley hasn’t been with the Joker for awhile, but Harley’s still used Joker venom often enough that leaving it out of her analysis seemed like it was an unfair nerf( for the record she’s used it in the comics, Arkam, and various other games). Likewise, in the worst case scenario Harley can reverse engineer the basic Joker venom, so she IS capable of obtaining it without getting it directly from Joker himself.
Isn’t Joker Venom an instant win? How could Jinx survive coming into contact with it, or any other toxins Harley had like Ivy’s mind control.
Jinx actually has multiple levels of defense against toxins. Firstly being a Zaun native in itself, would likely give her a higher tolerance than most, as the Zaun environment is toxic. Which is something you see in the Tv series Arcane when Silco is fairly immune to the most toxic parts of Zaun’s air, while others are not.
Likewise her infusion with Shimmer would probably interfere with most other toxins, including the Joker Toxin. This is especially also evident from Silco repeatedly using eye drop amounts of shimmer to keep his toxically corroded eye from dissolving. Meanwhile Jinx’s veins pump the stuff through her entire body. Having immunity to Joker Venom due to prior biological corruption has also been something seen in the comics. As Poison Ivy is immune to Joker venom due to the toxins in her bloodstream and normal drug addicts have also had immunity due to their bodies already being contaminated with toxic substances.
The Quicksilver sash also removes all disables/status effects (Excluding suppression and airborne) and summoner spell debuffs affecting your champion and lowers the duration of incoming disables. Plenty of champion attacks that manipulate movement or actions, may they be magic, chemical or otherwise will get cleansed from the sash. With that in mind, and with Jinx’s already high resistance towards toxins anyways, it meant that at worst Jinx would get slightly affected with the sash getting rid of any minor effects she might be feeling.
The following disables Quicksilver sash can heal are as follows:
Blind – When a unit has been blinded, this will cause them to miss their basic attacks for a short duration of time.
Character with Blind: Teemo
Stasis – When a unit is in stasis, then means they will not be able to perform any action while being invulnerable and untargetable for a short duration of time.
Character with Stasis: Bard
Drowsy – When a champion is drowsy, they will be slowed over the duration, and fall asleep afterward.
Character with Drowsy: Zoe
Sleep – When a champion is asleep, they will not be able to attack, move, or cast abilities.
Character with Sleep: Zoe
Forced Action – When a unit is under the influence of forced action, this means they cannot control their own attacks or movement, and they aren’t able to use item actives or cast abilities. Consists of Fear/Flee, Charm and Taunt
Taunt: A unit that is taunted will attempt to perform basic attacks on the source (the unit that casted the Taunt spell) for the duration, during which they're unable to perform issued movement or attack commands, cast abilities etc.
Character with Taunt: Shen
Flee – When a unit is fleeing, they will be moving away from the source with reduced movement speed.
Character with Flee: Fiddlesticks
Charm – When a unit has been charmed, they will move towards the source, and their movement speed will be reduced.
Character with Charm: Ahri
Cripple – When a champion has been crippled, their attack speed will be reduced for the duration.
Character with Cripple: Malphite
Disarm – When a unit has been disarmed, they will not be able to declare basic attacks for a short time.
Character with Disarm: Lulu
Disrupt – When a champion is disrupted, this means that their charged or channeled ability will be interrupted.
Character with Disrupt: Viktor
Knockdown – If a champion uses knockdown on you, your displacement or dash will be interrupted.
Characters with Knockdown: Yone
Knock Up: Champion is knocked into the air
Characters with Knock Up: Cho’ Gath
Ground – If you ground your enemy, they won’t be able to use their mobility spells for a short duration.
Character with Ground: Poppy
Silence – When you silence an enemy, you will be preventing them from using their casting abilities or item actives.
Characters with Silence: Garen
Root – Rooting an enemy will take away their ability to control their movement.
Character with Root & Snare: Morgana
Polymorph – If you polymorph an enemy champion, you will be turning them into a cute little critter.
Character with Polymorph: Lulu
Stun – A champion that has been stunned will be unable to attack, move, use item actives or cast abilities for a short duration.
Character with Stun: Amumu
Slow – A champion that has been slowed will have reduced movement speed for a short duration.
Character with Slow: Cassiopeia
Status Effects Quicksilver sash can’t stop:
Suppression – If you use suppression on a champion, they won’t be able to attack, move, use cast abilities, or use summoner spells or item actives for the duration.
Character with Suppression: Warwick
Airborne – A champion that is airborne is unable to cast abilities, move, attack, or use item actives for a short duration.
Knock Back – A knockback will cause the enemy to be made airborne in a direction away from the point of cast. The duration depends on how far the champion is knocked back – it can be anywhere from 0.75 seconds to 1.5 seconds.
Character with Knock Back: Thresh
Knock Aside – When a champion uses knock aside, the enemy will be airborne in a perpendicular direction to the cast’s direction. #Weakness
Character with Knock Aside: Vi
Pull: If you use this CC on an enemy champion, it will pull them in the cast’s direction.
Characters with Pull: Zac
Nearsighted – A champion that is nearsighted will have their sight radius reduced.
Character with Nearsighted: Graves
Finally it should be noted that the formula for Joker Venom is not static. The joker himself changes the formula a lot and often makes specific variants for big targets. Harley’s version is essentially a knock off recreation and typically isn’t as potent or immediately lethal when used.
Why did you give Jinx scaling to certain league characters but not others? Why no Aurelian Sol scaling?
The two have only ever crossed over in the game, and it would be silly to assume that Jinx in any way would scale to the literal capital G God of League.
When it came to scaling we obviously only went with characters that Jinx herself had directly crossed over with in cinematics. This extended to any Jinx that had her traditional design and for all intents and purposes was Jinx.
Something that remained consistent within all of the cinematics involving league characters is that they always crossover with characters that aren’t too terribly out of their range of power. Like, there’s never been a cinematic where Jinx fights Aatrox or Volibear because those are some of the heavy hitters in the series. But Jinx fighting characters like Yasuo? Much more reasonable to work with.
In fact, Jinx regularly is interpreted as fighting against a certain pool of characters where scaling seemed incredibly consistent.
In the You Really Got Me music video Jinx fires her rocket onto Malphite, Zed, Camille, Ahri and Braum, all of which get affected by her attack since they don’t immediately recover from the explosion of her rocket. She also fights alongside Yasuo, Blitzcrank, Lux, and Teemo.
Right off the bat, 3 characters that are featured in this video; Yasuo, Braum and Ahri, all share a game together in Ruined King where they fight alongside each other in true RPG fashion.
Jinx has gotten hit directly by Braum in a Wild Rift cinematic. In another Wild Rift Cinematic, Braum had to shield himself and Ahri from Jinx’s oncoming attacks. Not to mention Jinx also blew him up at the start of their fight. This should be enough to justify Jinx scaling to Braum. Braum (While being careful) saved a troll from being locked inside a mountain. The cinematic itself even states that “not even a mountain could stand in his way.” And we visually see the mountain shake as well.
Zed considers Kayn a successor to himself, rivaling him in power, and Jinx has blown up Kayn and Zed in two different cinematics.
Camille fights evenly with Jhin, who is Zed’s rival. Jinx fights her too.
Jinx and her sister Vi also fight alongside and against Darius in a couple trailers, and Darius is a rival to Zed.
And of course, Jinx scales to Lux in both You Really Got Me and Just One More.
Could Harley mentally manipulate Jinx?
This is actually a very fair question to ask, and something we definitely considered while debating the match.
Harley has manipulated opponents mid fight before, and obviously would be able to dictate how mentally unsound Jinx is. The issue is, Jinx is very difficult to really pin down. Especially for people who KNOW her.
For instance in Arcane, Sevika tried to get to Jinx by telling her how useless she is. And Jinx laughed it off.
Vi, Ekko, Ziggs, Caitlyn and Silco have tried to appeal to Jinx before, with her refusing to listen or just continue being her usual destructive self. It might be silly to make note of it, but she’s referred to as “the loose cannon” for a reason. She doesn’t really listen to anyone when she doesn’t want to. And despite her mental stability, it’s very clear that present day Jinx is a lot more mentally sound than she was at the climax of Arcane. The main plot point to her struggling as hard as she did was because she had to choose between the past and the present, and she made her decision.
Why did you guys bring up the Braum mountain feat if it was stated to be a fake story?
Braum has gone on record to say that the story is true.
Even barring that, the passage in question that calls Braum feat silly also states that there's a bit of truth to each of Braum’s stories, and the feats of Braum video in particular gives a visual of the mountain feat in question. There have been several stories involved with a mountain in Braum’s backstory, with all of them ending up with Braum messing a mountain up in some way.
It should also be noted that if you cross reference Braum’s original “Feats of Braum” video with the “stories” told about him, you can typically isolate what the exaggerations are. In his video he can chop trees with his bare hands, but the exaggeration says he cut down a whole forest. In the video he saves a nest of birds from a wave of lava, while the exaggeration says it was a whole farmshed. Finally Braum makes a mountain shake and tunnels through it, while the “exaggeration” in his bio claims he “reduced it to rubble.”
Regardless, Braum’s mountain shaking feat is meant to be much more of a supporting feat to the episode, not the reason why Jinx wins. Since we didn’t spend time calcing it and there was much more focus on Lux overall. Not to mention that Braum also directly fights Viego who is capable of shaking the entirety of the Shadow Isles with an earthquake which is… pardon the pun… LEAGUES higher than Braum punching a mountain.
That said, it’s not a stretch to say Jinx can scale to his punches, as she’s been shown to be a threat to Braum on more than one occasion in the You Really Got Me trailer and its sequel trailer. Not to mention Urgot is portrayed as being able to beat Braum in his character trailer, and Vi beats up Urgot in another cinematic. With Vi and Jinx regularly being shown as equals, this makes their scaling rather consistent.
Why did you give Jinx her teleporting tablet and not give Harley her Lantern Rings?
Jinx would have a mobility advantage regardless of if the tablet was added, thanks to her intangibility and various rocket and speed boosting attacks and items. With that said, as we mentioned before, we gave Jinx items and arsenal specific to her and the tablet was a part of that list.
She’s used the tablet in 2 separate trailers, and is known for making hextech creations. If it sounds OP to give her something like a teleporting hextech tablet that uses 1 hex crystal to power, that may be because a single hex crystal is capable of insane things, with teleporting being the least bizarre ability they’ve showcased.
Ekko’s device to rewind and control time is powered by a hex crystal. Camille’s own heart was replaced with a hex crystal, saving her from death and giving her a slew of new abilities. Hex crystals have been shown to bring people back to life, power lasers, create storms, and again, that’s with a single stone. Jinx would have at most 2 crystals, one for her launcher and the other for her tablet.
The lantern rings, on the other hand, are not something Harley would easily have access to and doesn’t even entirely understand on how to use. They belong to their respective lantern corps and have story and contextual reasons on why they would never be used in a traditional fight. It makes considerably less sense to say Harley would have access to something that gives her the power of a DC high tier when Jinx has reasonably worked with hex crystal’s on her spare time.
