Let's keep a few things in perspective regarding Lee Sin...
He's unpopular on boards so it's really easy to straight up just make shit up even when it's not true and still get jerked/upvoted. So I'd like to set a few things straight before I present what I think would be a good, healthy fundamental change on him while keeping his entire kit in tact.
Let's look at some common complaints:
"He doesn't fall off late game..."
Wrong:
https://na.op.gg/champion/leesin/statistics/jungle
You can see even by 25 minutes his winrate drops 3%~ and continues to drop as time goes on. His kit runs into several problems late game. If he builds full damage, he explodes. If he builds tanky with 1-2 damage items, his damage falls off pretty hard, or at least the potential application and consistency of it certainly does.
Shout out to LankPants for showing me OP.ggs data is more reliable
"Lee Sin is innately tanky"
That's actually not true.
http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Base_champion_statistics
You can see that Lee actually has one of the worst base HP pools of any melee champions excluding unique cases like champions with shield passives or insane healing. His HP/Level is average, as are most of his base defensive stats in general and that's average at best. His shield hardly gives him much durability but I'll touch on this a little further down.
"He's the most mobile champion in the game"
I hear this one a lot and frankly this one is obviously relative. But I would personally argue that while mobility is his identity, he's not the most mobile champion in the game. Frankly, I'm not even sure he's top 5. I'd easily put the likes of Yasuo, Riven, Kassadin, Leblanc, Ekko, Fizz and Fiora above him in terms of mobility. Now, I will grant that his mobility certainly feels less gated than all of the above with the exception of maybe Riven but to say he's the most mobile? Nah, I'd argue that's not true.
"He's not even that hard to play."
I hear this one a ton. I'm going to put it like this: it doesn't matter. A champions difficulty should have no bearing on their balance with very rare exceptions. Lee is what I'd consider moderately difficult but you delve into skill floor/ceiling discussions then and frankly there's no need to. In 99.9% of cases, a champion shouldn't be allowed to be broken because they're difficult. So it's not something Lee mains should use as defense and it's not something anti-Lee's should point out because in both cases it dilutes an important argument and that arguement is Lee's balance.
So that's well and dandy but what do we do about it? I honestly don't think Lee needs the polarizing changes that people think he needs (giving him mana, remove wardnhopping etc). I think Lee has had so much taken out of his kit - and rightfully so - that it's a bit unfair to state he's overloaded now; that is especially true in regards to today's league of legends.
In fact, I think Lee has a very simple and manageable problem. I think too much of his damage is tied into his Q. And as a result, you have this very binary style of play where if he's ahead or frankly, if it's just early game, upon landing his Q it's flash or die. But if he's behind, in terms of damage only, getting hit by his Q is laughable. This leads to this really ridiculous level of burst followed by moderately decent sustained damage that should never be paired together in such a binary way. It's what allows him to dictate so much in terms of gameplay. And that would be fine if he wasn't so burst oriented. I like that Lee gets an advantage when landing his Q but the advantage shouldn't be so large. And when he's behind, you still have to respect his Q not because of the damage, but because he can insec you. This gives him consistency so that element of his Q is good.
I think the simplest fix is this: shift power from his Q into the rest of his kit. Give him more damage for landing his Q but take away the initial damage from the Q when going in, force him to commit and give him a small window of damage amp once he goes in, something like 3-4 seconds. This means it's not upfront damage you can't deal with but you have to play around his sustained damage and not burst and that would feel much more reasonable because you're not instadying to an early Lee or fed mid game Lee. This power shift wouldn't be that complicated and potentially gives you room to buff his late game so he's not just an insec on a stick after 30 minutes.
So that's what I've got. Love me, hate me or whatever but at least say "u rite HateDaddy"
