Jett

Where she comes from

South Korea. That matters less to Jett than it does to most agents, because Riot has kept her backstory deliberately thin, and the thinness is the point. Where other agents arrive with a country, a grievance and a mission, Jett arrives with a skill.

She is one of the earliest members of the Protocol, and the way she is written inside it is closer to a prodigy than a soldier. She does not appear to be fighting for a cause. She appears to be fighting because she is extremely good at it and because nothing else moves fast enough to hold her attention.

What she actually is

Jett is wind. Not wind as a theme, wind as a movement system. Every one of her abilities exists to change where she is standing, and the one that does not is a set of knives.

The interesting thing about her design is that she has no defensive tools at all. No heal, no shield, no wall, no way to stop anyone doing anything. She is the most fragile agent in the game in every sense except one: she is almost impossible to trap. That trade is the whole character.

What she does in a game

Duelist. Her cloudburst throws a curving smoke that lasts a few seconds, her updraft launches her straight up, and her tailwind stores a dash she can trigger in whatever direction she is already moving. She glides when she holds jump in the air.

Her ultimate hands her throwing knives that kill in one headshot, and single throws restore themselves on a kill while the full volley does not.

The dash is the character. It refreshes after two kills, which means a Jett who is winning gets harder to punish, and a Jett who is losing has nothing.

What it feels like

Playing Jett is the closest this game gets to feeling weightless. You go up where nobody expects a player to be, you take a shot from an angle nobody is holding, and you are gone before the trade lands. When it works you feel unreasonable.

Playing against her is an exercise in patience that most people fail. She will show herself, and your instinct will be to shoot at the place she is. She will not be there. The counter is holding your crosshair where she has to land rather than where she currently is, and almost nobody does that under pressure.

She is also the reason the Operator is a problem. Any other agent who buys a sniper is committing to an angle. Jett buys one and commits to nothing, because she can take the shot and dash out of the punish. Riot has spent years adjusting her around that single interaction.

Who should pick her up

Players with good aim and bad patience. Jett rewards the exact instinct most agents punish, which is entering first and figuring it out on the way in.

Avoid her if your team needs you to hold a site. She has nothing to hold with. A Jett on defence is a player waiting for an excuse to go somewhere else, and if you are not confident enough to take those fights, you are simply a duelist who is not duelling.