The latest addition to the champion roster has already been announced: Trundle, the Cursed Troll. Aside from the fact that he is a troll and almost as ugly as Urgot, some LoL players have noticed that his name closely resemble the word grundle, which I would gladly not post its meaning on this blog. One thing we do know for sure is that, sadly, his chest will be flat :( Does this mean Riot will switch the trend of designing champions from horny female champs with F-cups to ugly, male humanoids? oh noes...
Trundle's abilities are listed here, thanks to a post from LoL EU council member.
Abilities List
Rabid Bite: Trundle bites his opponent, dealing damage and sapping some of their attack damage.
Contaminate: Trundle infects a target location with his curse, gaining attack speed, movement speed, and crowd control reduction while on it.
Pillar of Filth: Trundle creates a plagued beacon at a target location, which becomes impassable terrain and slows all nearby enemy units.
Agony (Ultimate): Trundle immediately steals his target’s health and a percentage of their armor and magic resistance. Over the next six seconds the amount of health, armor, and magic resistance stolen is doubled.
Decompose (Passive): Whenever an enemy unit near Trundle dies, he heals for a percentage of their maximum health.
From what i have gathered, Trundle seems to be a self-empowerment/CC, AP but Melee focused champion. He has some skills that are brand new in design, which i think Riot is getting better at after exposing to some public dissent about the lack of creativity of LoL champions compared to DoTA.Without a doubt Trundle's difficulty rating will be at least medium, likely hard, and mastering him would take some time. I have also heard that currently he is a cool champion to play in PTR, but requires adjusting. we will have to wait 2-3 weeks to see what he is capable of. in the mean time, i have 7k+ IP ready in my piggy bank =)
In this regard, Riot seems to follow a new trend when designing champions. As we can see starting from Irelia, a new line of CC-reduction/Melee hybrids will be released. The reason for this new trend could be that Riot wants to give players the opportunity to counter the current metagame, which players identified to be teamfight, AOE, and tanky-based style. Although Irelia has not proven herself to be a great counter to this metagame, whether it be tank killing or raping in teamfights (fail in comparison to the release of Xin, who was nerfed), be certain that this is only a part of Riot's trial-and-error process. In other words, Irelia is just a prototype for many more to come.
The next patch also shows Riot's attempt to continuously adjust the game play. Without going into details, i can say that currently its not the time to pick up a jungler :)