What's up with the prevalence of Pyke and Leblanc?

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I am Diamond II.

Again, Pyke's Survivability has never had anything at all to do with his tank build; It's had far more to do with what champs he's vs and the proficiency of those players playing those champs:

Can stalk Pyke to the ends of the earth, and a good one can eliminate Pyke's Counterplay (As Pyke I have beat Ahri, but it's with different rune trees than the meta, including Nullifying Orb) Can mark and one shot Pyke and follow him after any mobility skill, which will then be on cooldown. Creates an environment where Pyke can't reliably assassinate anyone in Bot lane, or anywhere Alistar exists, on risk of Stun, heal outs, and tankiness. Can out skill Pyke's mobility, and usually can win every engagement. Pyke has no actual way to win this without help. If he attempts to skill in on Anivia, Anivia responds with a Frost wall, Point and click R, and line of sight stun/massive damage. Usually can solo Pyke in one combo, and her R reasonably prevents Pyke's R, in Pyke's damage pace. 1 shots Pyke and Pyke generally has no counterplay. Even with Nullifying Orb, Mag Resist, he cannot get his tankiness high enough to mitigate her raw output. Furthermore, Pyke is a single target auto attacker, so he can't both juggle Tibbers and Annie at the same time. He kills her..... Tibbers kills him. R literally pubstomps Pyke. He's dead before the stun is over. And she doesn't even have to try to hit it, because for Pyke to do ANYTHING, he creates windows of guaranteed hits.

I'm not going to go through the entire list.

1. E/W has NEVER actually been strong at getting him out. Literally half the champ roster counters it, and so does good warding, , champs with faster move speed, and low cooldown skills which gap close.

, even though she has no movement speed utility..... destroys Pyke's E/W's. Why? Because her Q outranges the distance Pyke can travel in the time it takes her to set it up, reveals him, and allows her to R to him and displace him/1shot him. And that's if Pyke is running in a straight line. If he's weaving, she can just directly R him.

There are a LOT of matchups like this. And they don't boil down to skill. They boil down to basics of the champs.

2. There are MAJOR differences between the reasons Irelia/Akali have a low win rate and why Pyke has a low win rate. Irelia and Akali are technically challenging champions to manage/perfect. Pyke is not.

You can grab Pyke out of the bag and do his job, because it's a linear job. The fine tuning is just in trying to die less.

Irelia has a clunky and easy to abuse lane phase, and is pretty easy to counterplay if you know her kit. Her skill order requires training and discipline as a player.

Akali suffers the same problems: She has two ways to gain energy, but most people don't use them correctly right out of the box, and don't properly conserve. Her E's proper use is complicated to learn, and getting used to auto attacking when your kit is 90% skills is hard for new players. Some old players don't even auto attack on Akali correctly. To date, she is probably the highest skill cap champion released/reworked.

What I'm getting at is, if a champion's kit is simplistic to begin with, it does absolutely reflect his capabilities to cite win rates, especially when one is as POPULAR as Pyke was.

3. People didn't pick AD Pyke because it had even worse performance than Tank. "Better" is a very subjective word, your premise is laughable. If AD Pyke was better than Tank Pyke, people would be playing it? lmfao. If AD Pyke was better than tank Pyke, tank Pyke would be running about a 38%-42% win rate. No one would be playing him. They would be throwing him in the heap with 90 other champs no one plays. People don't just have a choice between playing one meta and playing another. They can also choose to substitute and NOT play.

4. Counters are NOT irrelevant, especially when so many TYPES of counters apply to one champ's interactions. The only champs who generally are not countering Pyke, are SOLO ADCs WHO GET CAUGHT OUT. And some of them, like Jhin, Kalista, Draven, actually can solo Pyke. The rest of the game, he's more or less a cleanup crew when built AD. He can't skirmish.

Tryndamere and Jhin can literally 1 shot Pyke with an auto attack. Kai Sa can literally 1 shot Pyke with a Q. And 2 of these are champs he's supposed to lane against.

Pyke is part of the reason Kai Sai is so popular now. She can 1 shot him.

If I see a Pyke pick other than myself, I go , and game is over. After lane phase, Pyke will never get another kill if I Karma, at all.

Well, this account is in Silver so that's what I'm going with. It has all to do with tank build. That is literally what tanks do - Survive. Tank items give survivability. I mean, come on, it's basic stuff.

None of the champions you mentioned, apart from Alistar and Ashe have any interaction with Botlane Pyke so those arguments are irrelevant. If you are making those examples because of Mid / Late game then we can have a discussion about that later. You just need to clarify whether you are mentioning them as a Early game matchups or Mid / Late game counters.

Alistar: Tank Pyke does not function as an assassin in the botlane. He functions similarly to Thresh - Hook into E into Ult. If Alistar tries to disable Pyke the fight is already won as ADC has free reign to do whatever he wants. Besides that, Pyke doesn't really have to engage Alistar lane because of how Tank Pyke functions.

Ashe: Depends on the way the initiation is created. Again, if she ults Pyke, the ADC is allowed to do whatever he wants. If the arrows cc isn't long enough, Pyke can simply disengage. I don't really see how it serves your argument though as mentioning only half of a matchup in botlane does nothing. Same for the Alistar example.

Pyke's popularity is the reason his winrates are low. Generally, the more people play a champion the lower its winrates are. Take the easiest example available - Kai'sa. She is single handedly the most broken champion in the game right now, yet she is sitting on 49.13% winrate. There is no arguing that her kit is complicated as it's as straight forward as it gets. If she's so OP why is her winrate so low, you ask? Well, that's because her pickrate is 18.08%.

In the opposition we have Mordekaiser with 50.84% winrate. His pickrate, however, is 0.15%. So, is Mordekaiser a better champion than Kai'sa? Winrates seem to suggest he is. However, we both know that Pickrate directly impacts a champions winrate which is why I previously mentioned that the statistics aren't clean. They are polluted by people who don't know how to play a character.

Vayne is one of those champions that not only is mechanically intensive but requires a good support to actually be viable yet she sits at a comfortable 49% winrate.

There are tons of examples where easier champions that supposedly are stronger have lower winrates and vice versa.

Now, because Akali / Irelia have low pickrates and low winrates, you could argue that the stats are pretty clean on both of them. However, I won't give it to you that easily. Because of how high their banrate is, I will make the argument that a lot of players would pick them regardless of whether they can play the champion because of "it's open, gotta pick it". If they didn't have the highest banrate in the game, I would give you the argument.

Pyke's complexity is also not so easily determinable. Q can be used as a hook, slow and used in variety of ways to misposition or gapclose an enemy champion. W can be used for zoning, as a decoy or to restore health. E can be used as stun and escape or to reposition. R can be used as an execute or to reposition. Just going by functionality, he is a lot more complicated than Irelia as each of her abilities mostly does 1 thing apart from R and potentially Q.

Yes, people generally play what's better / stronger. That's literally how META is made. If AD Pyke was a stronger champion overall, people would have played that rather than Tank Pyke. Because that wasn't the case, people played him Full Tank. What are you basing those numbers on? Just because you make that up in your head, doesn't mean they exist. Pyke's winrate right now is ~50%. It wasn't 38% and it's not 42%. Because most people played Pyke Full Tank I will argue that Tank Pyke's winrate was also ~50%. If AD Pyke would've been better, there, of course, is no telling what his winrate would be as it didn't happen.

4. I don't really understand why you compare Pyke to ADC's and Mid's etc. He is a Support. He was designed as a support, he is mostly played as support. Most supports would die 1v1 to an ADC. Pyke is one of the few supports that actually can duel an ADC and Mid when the setup is correct. That in itself is impressive. He is not supposed to duel, he is not supposed to skirmish. He is supposed to set up a play and then finish it using his ult. That's his job.

OK, in what world does Jhin oneshot Tank Pyke in a lane? In what world does anyone oneshot Tank Pyke? Stop imagining things, this is getting ridiculous.

Pyke has nothing to do with Kai'sas popularity. Did you watch Worlds?

Karma generally doesn't impact Pyke's ability to CC and execute targets so I don't know where you're going with that.

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Just another update: just did an updated game with Lethality Pyke Jungle

https://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/2906419874/243999882?tab=overview

Yeah. I was pretty much 1v5ing. Guess what? didn't win.

Brand let Malhazar free farm to the point one ult could kill. (Because guess what? It outstrips Pyke's HP growth, and there's nothing Pyke can do about it)

Kai Sa and Soraka...... did NOTHING the entire game..... even though I ganked and killed their lane three times.

Nasus was too busy chatting with the enemy to do anything. I also killed Yi twice in his lane. He won Turret, but then proceeded to get caught out alone in the jungle 7 times...... 5 resulting in his death.

Brand's kills were all pick ups from bad engages where Kai Sa died and I was set up for R's.

Guess what?

-After about 22:00, Voli, Mal, both popped me like a grape. Sion didn't get the chance. Yi generally sucked at predicting what skills/orders I was going to do and would Alpha right into a E... or would meditate into a Q being up. Ezreal only killed me twice, and both times was due to his posse, not him; one at the end of the game, and one mid game where my team wouldn't peel Voli/Sion.

I was literally doing everything right. Still lost. Why? I don't blame my team. I blame the fact this is how Pyke's win curve goes on Lethality:

https://champion.gg/champion/Pyke/Support?

His win rate falls of a cliff to itemization, and the eventual tankiness that shuts down his capacity to do his job, even when he's fed.

Most fed champs..... stay fed. Stay Relevant.

P.S. Most of these kills were solo, not team kills.

I generally do no care about your excuses as to why you lost.

Also, this match has no bearing on our conversation. We are discussing why people generally played Tank Pyke over Lethality / AD Pyke in the Support position. You playing a character in a role he is not designed to be played in does nothing to bolster your side of the argument. Like I said before, his job is to set up a kill and then execute targets using his ultimate. His kit isn't designed to be played in the jungle therefore you obviously will struggle later on in the game as you are playing a sub-optimal jungler.

Arguing that you "literally did everything right" makes you look like a Silver (which makes sense since that's what you are) but please stop being delusional.

Also, not buying QSS against Malzahar is a travesty and makes your "literally did everything right" irrelevant. If you can't even do that, I don't even want to think about what else you screwed up.

Also, looking at winrates few days after rebalancing is useless. Give him time to settle, then we can talk. In addition to that, assassins generally fare worse in late game as their job is to get ahead and snowball. It's the case with Zed, it's the case with Talon and so on. That's one of the reasons Tank Pyke was so prevalent. But I guess it pointless to argue that with you as you've just proven you don't really know what you're talking about.