Locke, the Ashen Exorcist, arrives in League of Legends with Patch 26.13 on June 24, 2026. He's LoL's 173rd champion and the only new champion Riot plans to release all year — so if you're a mid lane assassin player who's felt ignored lately, this is your moment. A melee AP assassin built around stacking Soul Nails and executing weakened targets, Locke rewards preparation over reaction.
His kit won't let you just press buttons and delete someone. You set up Soul Nails with your Q, close the gap with W's movement speed, and then spend those stacks with autos and E to burst your target. Purgatory does the rest. If that sounds like your kind of chess, read on.
Corvin Locke is a nail-slinging occultist from Demacia raised in a family of forbidden-rite practitioners. His core worldview: demons aren't the cause of human suffering — they're the result of it. So he hunts the people who create the darkness, not the demons that reflect it.
Riot connected Locke directly to Vayne's story arc through the cinematic Back from the Brink, which shows a possessed Vayne and ties into the Pandemonium season's broader demonic threat. Players first glimpsed him in Vayne's Pandemonium opening comic; this reveal is the full payoff. His launch skin is High Noon Locke, which leans hard into Dante-inspired energy — the long coat, the glasses, the supernatural swagger. It looks exactly as good as it sounds.
🧥 The High Noon Locke skin is one of the cleanest launch skins Riot has released in years. If you want to play him on day one with the skin included, check out LoL skin accounts with the High Noon collection already unlocked.
Every ability in Locke's kit connects to a single idea: stack Soul Nails, then spend them for burst damage. The passive and Q apply stacks, the auto attacks and E consume them, and Purgatory finishes whoever survived the opener.
| Ability | Name | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Passive | Silver Stake | Auto attacks deal bonus on-hit magic damage. Damage scales with the target's missing health. |
| Q | Ritual Nails | Throws three Soul Nails forward, dealing magic damage, marking, and slowing enemies hit. Attacking a marked enemy consumes stacks for bonus magic damage per stack. Unspent nails refund cooldown and mana. |
| W | Soul Ignition | Grants decaying movement speed, but costs true damage per second from Locke's own health. On recast or expiry, Locke heals based on damage taken (including self-damage), missing health, and duration. Can be recast while crowd controlled. |
| E | Ashen Pursuit | Blinks to a target location, dealing magic damage on arrival. His next basic attack then dashes to the target, dealing magic damage to all enemies in the path. Each hit consumes Soul Nail stacks. Cooldown resets on takedowns. |
| R | Purgatory | Throws a binding artifact that fires chained Soul Nails, damaging and slowing enemies in an area. Marked champions brought below a health threshold are dragged inside and executed. Each execution resets the effect duration on remaining marked enemies. If a champion is sealed, the artifact stays on the ground — Locke picks it up to permanently raise the execution threshold and refund cooldown for each seal. |
This passive turns every auto attack into a finishing blow against low-health targets. The bonus magic damage scales with the enemy's missing health, so it's strongest when you're already winning the trade. It synergizes directly with Purgatory's execute threshold — the lower they are, the harder every swing hits.
Ritual Nails is the engine of his kit. Locke fires three nails in sequence, and each nail that hits a target applies a stack that also slows based on total stacks. Three stacks on one target means a heavy slow; the nails also pierce, so you can stack multiple enemies in a line simultaneously. The mana and cooldown refund for unspent nails means you're punished for wasting shots, which is good design — it rewards aim and timing instead of spam.
Soul Ignition is the ability that will separate good Locke players from great ones. You gain movement speed to chase, but you bleed health as true damage every second it runs. When you recast it (or it expires), you heal back a portion of all damage you took — including the self-damage — scaled by your missing health and how long the ability ran. The longer you let it cook, the bigger the heal. That's a high-risk, high-reward window every time you activate it.
Critically, you can recast Soul Ignition while crowd controlled. If a Lissandra or Malzahar shuts you down mid-fight, you can still trigger the heal and survive. That's not nothing. Think of it as a riskier version of Dr. Mundo's W: you pay health up front, you recover it on demand.
Ashen Pursuit is two abilities in one. First, Locke blinks to a target location and deals magic damage around him on landing. Then his next attack fires him in a short dash toward his target, dealing damage in a line. Both the blink and the dash consume Soul Nail stacks, so landing the Q first makes this hit much harder. The cooldown reset on takedowns turns Locke into a teamfight nightmare if he gets going.
The ultimate throws a skull-like artifact that chains Soul Nails at everyone in range, dealing damage and applying a slow. Any marked champion who drops below the execute threshold gets dragged inside and killed outright. Each kill resets Purgatory's timer on the remaining marked enemies, giving Locke a cascading chain-kill window in messy teamfights.
The stacking execute threshold is mostly flavor, not broken scaling. Each seal permanently raises the threshold by a small amount — likely starting around 10-12%. It builds a feeling of escalating threat over a long game without becoming a one-button win condition. Note: Purgatory's execute does not stack with Elder Drake's execute — whichever threshold is higher takes priority.
Locke's gameplan is linear but demands execution. Land Q before you commit, use W to close the gap and sustain through the trade, spend your Soul Nails with autos and E, and finish low-health targets with Purgatory. Never open with Purgatory. It's almost always better used after your target has already taken significant damage.
In lane, three stacks of Ritual Nails on an overextended enemy is your all-in signal. The slow from three stacks is substantial enough to negate their escape, especially if you've already activated Soul Ignition. Manage your W timing carefully: activate it early enough to benefit from the movement speed, but let it run long enough that the heal returns enough health to matter.
The E reset is where Locke's snowball gets scary. One kill in a messy teamfight can cascade into three. Use Ashen Pursuit to dash through the first target, reset it on their death, dash through the next. Purgatory resets its own timer on each execute, which means both abilities feed into the same chain-kill loop.
🎯 Riot recommends Electrocute as his primary keystone, though auto-attack-focused builds using Phase Rush or Lethal Tempo are also viable thanks to Silver Stake. Suggested team comps include wombo-combo setups with Amumu and Brand support, or dive comps that can follow up his AoE engagements.
Locke's biggest structural weakness is his AP item pool. He can't access Duskblade, Edge of Night, Death's Dance, or Umbral Glaive — the core AD assassin tools that patch up fragility. His AP alternatives are more expensive and less offensive, which means falling behind in gold hurts more on Locke than on most assassins. If he's down 30 CS at 15 minutes, he has a shitty slow on Q and a W that barely moves him. There's no escape hatch.
The flip side is what happens when he gets ahead. A fed Locke with an E reset and a stacked Purgatory threshold is a genuine 1v9 threat. He doesn't go invisible, doesn't cleanse CC, doesn't heal to full on command — he just kills you before you can react. That's a fair tradeoff: easy to shut down if behind, hard to stop if ahead.
Hard crowd control is Locke's clearest counter. He needs to weave auto attacks between abilities to activate his Soul Nail stacks, and point-and-click lockdown interrupts that loop before he can burst anyone.
Ganking Locke from multiple angles also neutralises Ritual Nails effectively. The nails travel in a line, so approaching from different angles forces him to pick a target and stick with only partial stacks.
Squishy, immobile mages and carries are Locke's dream matchups. Champions like Jinx, Aphelios, Xerath, Vel'Koz, and Hwei lack the tools to prevent him from applying Soul Nails and following up. Anyone who relies on surviving at low health for healing or shields is especially vulnerable to Purgatory's execute.
Locke hits live servers with Patch 26.13 on June 24, 2026. He's available for purchase the moment the patch drops. His only launch skin is High Noon Locke. He won't be eligible for competitive play at MSI 2026, which begins shortly after his release.
As an AP assassin with blink resets and a chain-kill ultimate, expect tuning within a patch or two once players find the optimal combos. Picking him up early is the right call — just don't build your ranked strategy around launch-day numbers. If you want a ranked LoL account ready for climbing the moment he goes live, or an unranked LoL account to practice him without pressure, now's the time to get set up.
