Let's talk: Lee Seen

So, I'm working on the scrip for a bigger thread, and while researching around the boards, I've had the.....not pleasure....to see a guy wanting to bring green Smite back so Lee is stronger, and well...while talking with a friend and making jokes, we reached some nice stuff.

First, is that even tho Lee is one of the strongest champs in the jungle right now, even to the point where part of the meta is "can you deal with Lee?", but there are two things that keep him lower on the best junglers list, those being:

• All high rank junglers use their first yellow trinket ward to either ward defensively or offensively right away, then base to swap to red trinket, but Lee can't, for obvious reasons.

• He has to spend a noticeable amount of gold for control wards, especially if he doesn't have a yellow trinket available for a bit.

So, what's the changes that we came as conclusion?

• Increase the base CD of his Sonic Wave by quite a bit, BUT, offer a refund when Resonating Strike is used.

Why this change? It's a nice skill gate to punish random Q's. The refund on Resonating Strike would bring the CD to it's current CD, so if you miss Q's, you got to wait around 10s instead of 4s to throw another, while that also brings a bit more safety to the other side, if they dodge, they got more than 4s to run away or kill you.

• Remove the 0.25s CC on R.

Why this change? This is as the above one, skill gate. Lee can reposition himself during the cast time of the ability, and while true, it shows a decent amount of skill from the player, it offers little counterplay to the opponent, so instead of the opponent being CC'd for the cast time, the kick happens instantly on cast, so good players can abuse this more as there's less time for your opponent to react to if they don't expect you to stun them, while the bad ones....well, we all experienced the Vayne who tries to Condemn the enemy and ends up saving them.

I can hear some of you say "but what about the counterplay you talked about?"

Well, what about it? The problem the skill had is that it lacked counter play while Lee was adjusting his position during the cast time, but since that's removed, if Lee wants to adjust position, he has to do so before he casts it, and if you see what he's doing, you can react to it as you're not rooted anymore, you can actually fight back or simply try to move to the side and force the kick to no longer be as accurate as Lee wanted.

Yes, I know his win rate would plummet as soon as these changes would hit live, BUT, that's because they are there as skill gates. For experienced Lee's, they would need a bit of time to adapt to the new ult, but after that they can pull off almost the same stuff, just a bit less consistently, as there's counterplay from the opponent, while the bad Lee's....well, "spam Q till it hits the KO because it does so much damage and have so much sustain" is pretty much gone, if you miss Q, it's gonna be a bit before it comes back up.

And no, green smite should never come back, that item was toxic and now that we have Umbral Glaive, it would be even more so to anything that's not an AD in the jungle.