It's pretty versatile since it's either mobility, more damage, or cc in one ability which all do deal good damage. And on top of that, it starts with a low cd that eventually goes down to 24 seconds, which is further reduced by the abundance of 20% to 10% cdr available on a lot of mage items now. Anyone have an opinion on why it at least doesn't have a mana cost? Just wanna hear some other people's thoughts on her.
Before her mini-rework, it did have a mana cost from Mana/Mana/Free.
They realized that it was very costly for LeBlanc to do W>Q>R>E in the early game because she basically used up her entire mana pool, leaving her helpless if the enemy survives. So they removed it to allow her to still be present in teamfights even if she failed to assassinate someone.
It's free so they can justify her other spells costing as much as they do.
I'm pretty sure if Riot made it cost mana, Leblanc players would think twice about freely blowing their ults.
It isn't. She's cheating by using her clone's mana pool.
because leblanc is pretty weak like other ap assassins
I always thought it was because her basic spells are pretty costly, and she doesn't/wasn't supposed to build a ton of mana.
While what she can do with it is flexible, when she casts it it is inflexible. Stuck being the last skill she cast. Timing is more important than management on her, and having a cost associated with her ultimate hurt her a lot when it was there.
LeBlanc used to be a very weak pick until she was touched up some part of which was her ultimate being stripped of its cost. At the time, that was really necessary for her to function. You may have a good point that it may no longer be needed for her to compete, as she's pretty strong at the moment. But then you have the question of the amount you tag on to it?
100 mana would be steep, and would heavily affect how often she would be able to use it. If that's the case, her basic skills would have to be more impactful in order to compensate for the loss of usage she gets from her ultimate. Otherwise, she'd be pushed back in to her joke pick state. An amount based on the mimicked skill would be steep as well, as W alone reaches a cost higher then 100 mana. And then your other choice, to go lower, say with a 50 mana cost may not impact her much at all assuming she has something like Lost Chapter/Morellonomicon and the change wouldn't do anything like what you wanted.
Personally, I don't think her ultimate being free to cast is what's making her as strong as she is. I think her prominence at the moment is more about the meta game as a whole, which sort of requires high mobility and high damage from a mid laner, pushing towards champions such as LeBlanc, Ahri, Zed, Yasuo etc. especially when they can reach those values without snowballing (of which LeBlanc is probably the least consistent of those four). I do find her a lot more frustrating to play against than I used to, but her ultimate's availability isn't really what bothers me, it's more her high damage values in laning phase that makes it easy for her to poke and kill pre-6.
