Why are Lee Sin and friends so dominant despite all the nerfs that have occurred?

GhostStalker·Oct 14, 2014·1 votes·1,095 views

Is it the surrounding champions in the other lanes that dictate the sucess of Lee Sin and friends?
Or is it the strength of Lee Sin and Friends on their own?
Or is it how the current iteration of the jungle is not exposing the weaknesses of Lee Sin and friends (and a reason why the jungle is, yet again, getting remade)?
Is it the itemization allowing Lee Sin and Friends to be so good?
Or is it just a combination of everything mentioned up to this point?
Are non-Lee Sin and Friends too weak?

12 Comments

VentiraOct 14, 20142 votes

I wanna say that it's because of one factor. And one factor only. Mobility

Dominick DestineOct 14, 20142 votes

I wanna say that it's because of one factor. And one factor only. Mobility

What about manaless Built-in sustain Better scaling than 85% of the cast An entire kit that makes it extremely easy to escape bad situations (aka extremely low skill champ) High base stats ?

Removing one or two of those might bring him into line.

Dominick DestineOct 14, 20142 votes

"Nerfs"? more like love taps.

Whenever Riot is about to nerf Lee, some Lee players complain and they downgrade the nerfs to absurdly small levels.

67chromeOct 14, 20142 votes

Is it the surrounding champions in the other lanes that dictate the sucess of Lee Sin and friends?

A lot of it could just do with perception now.

Perception plays a pretty massive roll in performance. If a lot of people think champion X is solid, a lot of people might master champion X. If that champion is seen in competitive play that an continue well into the future.

Unless Riot nerfs a champion so heavily they're completely useless it takes a really long time for people to stop playing them.

Lee Sin and friend's win rates are actually pretty terrible ATM. In profesional play they aren't the most impressive performances. Currently Lee Sin is sitting at the 14th worst monthly win-rate overall according to LoL King.

Elise, Rengar, and Evelynn are also in the bottom 15 win-rates. At least when I posted this.

Sometimes LoL King just sends people to "charts" rather than "Monthly lowest win rate charts", sorry if that happens with the link above.

Also - Lee Sin, from everything I've heard from my friends that play him, is extremely fun to play. Pretty much everyone that plays him reasonably well loves the guy, so he's bound to be a popular champion just because of that.

Given his current win rate/performance in normals, ranked, and worlds - I'm not sure I'd call him dominant in any aspect beyond popularity though.

Some BaconOct 14, 20141 votes

You make it sound like people who aren't lee sin and friends are nerds, and lee sin and friends is the popular clique, and that nerfs are just gossip.

Srsly, not joking.

BACKSTABUUUOct 14, 20142 votes

You make it sound like people who aren't lee sin and friends are nerds

That's about the gist of it, yes.

Some BaconOct 14, 20141 votes

You make it sound like people who aren't lee sin and friends are nerds

That's about the gist of it, yes.

Thing is, who are the nerds though? And who is the clique? Is the clique just all viable junglers? Or the dominant ones like Elise LeeSin Khazix ?

PAULlNEOct 14, 20141 votes

After reading the thread I thought I would just point out that even after the nerfs Kha Lee and Rengar STILL do the most damage early game to snowball lanes, lee and kha also can jump walls early which lets them escape unfavorable or unexpected situations that are common in the jungle, it also allows them to sneak by common wards which lets ganks actually happen since people in the LCS actually use wards AND look at the map.

Rengar after 6 can lane gank with mobi boots while invisible and he does a ton of damage, so similar to lee and kha but with less chance of being spotted. He also scales fairly well into late game.

In solo q since there are not always wards or perfect communication the list of junglers you can pick is increased dramatically. In my opinion nocturne and J4 are still incredibly strong junglers, perhaps the strongest available in soloq.

Also as this is a game I agree with one of the other posters that lee and crew are straight up more fun to play than many junglers and this gives them an increased pick rate.

HayaishiOct 14, 20141 votes

Lee just snowballs everything with how good his ganks are, he has massive outplay potential and does nothing bad.

Infact Lee is weaker this season because it's harder to snowball out of control, and yet he's still a dominant pick in Soloqueue.

12talesOct 14, 20141 votes

Or is it how the current iteration of the jungle is not exposing the weaknesses of Lee Sin and friends (and a reason why the jungle is, yet again, getting remade)?

Are non-Lee Sin and Friends too weak?

These are the main factors, in my opinion. At the moment, the jungle is a home for aggressive, early game champions that excel at skirmishing, securing vision control and taking early dragons. Because of this, champions that naturally have that sort of playstyle in the jungle are sorta artificially boosted. Amumu is still a beast in late game teamfights, and Master Yi still does insane sustained damage with a few items, but their playstyles are maladaptive in the modern jungle, so they look worse than they are.

However, there's also a really big drop off in terms of jungle viability. Once you get past LeeSin Khazix Rengar JarvanIV and maybe Elise , you're left with... not much. I mean, champs like Nocturne, Rammus, Gragas and Evelynn are decent, I guess, but they've got pretty glaring weaknesses that prevent them from really competing with the big five.