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To Those Working on the Leblanc Rework, Please Read

Avanyali·5/8/2014, 8:13:47 PM·4 votes·1,049 views

I recently saw this post by Pwyff:

"LeBlanc is an interesting problem space. If we were to 'remove' aspects of her, we effectively remove what makes her... unique? Interesting?

Also really fucking strong.

One suggestion, as an example, was to add a delay on her W snapback. That would be fine for opponents of LeBlanc but would make LB players around the world (yours truly) cry tears of absolute sadness. Remove the silence? Then LB can be bursted before she bursts you because she has like 200 HP.

It's a conundrum when a champion is defined by its super mega high burst and mobility. Go that far down the rabbit hole and any meaningful change will be a hard fast punch to the nether regions.

We're looking heavily into LeBlanc (reallly really are) but it's a fun case."

and would like to talk about a possible solution.

Leblanc is one of my favorite champions, and I don't want anything about her to go the way of Skarner or Rengar. She's fun, has a high mechanical skillcap, and is one of those toolbox champions that can alter how she uses her skills based on the situation. And while I agree that her q allows for too much point-and-click damage and her w currently makes her a little too mobile, I think there is a way to preserve that high burst, high mobility playstyle that I know most Leblanc players have come to love.

Give her something similar to the Ahri treatment. What I mean is that the chain, currently an underwhelming damage skill that is mainly used for rooting and popping the sigil, can have damage from the q and w shifted over into it. Maybe even remove raw damage from her burst and give Ethereal Chains a damage amplification, so she HAS to hit the chain, just like Ahri has to land charm. That would also draw a line between the non-mana gated, mobile, waveclearing Leblancs that build Athene's, and the incredibly bursty, mana-hungry Leblancs that build DFG. Not building DFG would be losing part of the advantage of her full burst and risk running out of mana. DFG would be the high-risk, high-reward build of full burst Leblanc with obvious drawbacks (losing mobility and having mana problems), and Athene's would be a safer, more utility oriented, waveclear build. Currently, building Athene's offers almost no drawbacks, as it allows for increased mobility and the abuse of high base damages to still pull off easy burst kills.

Making Ethereal Chains a necessary part of Leblanc's combo will also separated the good Leblancs from the poor ones. I know that in today's Allstar's game, C9 vs. SKT T1K, Faker missed well over half of the chains I saw him attempt, but still got solo kills constantly. If Ethereal Chains were necessary, the game would have been slightly less of a stomp. It adds to Leblanc's skillcap, takes nothing away from her as a champion, and provides the drawbacks that she heretofore has lacked in S4.

So PLEASE, don't remove anything from Leblanc that makes her Leblanc. Just make the difficult to land chain an integral part of her combo.

8 Comments

Earl Eulrich5/9/2014, 12:56:13 AM1 votes

Well, it quite obvious LB has some flaws right now and is just too strong as a 1v1 laner in almost any matchup, offering almost no counterplay to her Opponent if he didn´t pick a very specific Champion like Fizz or Sivir to stop her CC-Chain.

So my solution would be to Focus on her combo-casting, increasing her skillcap a fair bit and reducing the amount of CC and dmg she can put out the same time:

-Change the q Trigger, so the dmg (But not the silence!) proccs if it´s followed up by another q or w; if it´s followed up by the e the silence proccs (but not the dmg!).

-Similar for the chain, nerf the base-duration of the chain to 1sec, but if it´s followed by the w or another e while the chain is still attached but did not procc the root yet it should still be 1,5sec.

Right now laning against LB is very toxic, as you cannot really leave your turret unless you have clear Vision at her jungler - because it´s damn easy for her to just lock you down at lvl 3 without any counterplay (silence->root->jungler jumping at you), while the supposed counterplay to her during laning should be to push her at her own turret and Keep her there. Changing her Combo so she either does apply full dmg or set sth. up with a heavy cc chain would offer way more counterplay to her, without really denying her strenghts (high versatility, very good at catching People out) - and it would LB Players to really think about in which order they use her spells instead of just throwing everything they got at the Opponent.

Limakoko8085/9/2014, 7:08:52 AM1 votes

Honestly LB isnt even that big of a problem anywhere except for pro play. Her winrate is really low, and while that doesnt reflect champion strength, it is something everyone should keep in mind.

The fact of the matter is people are only complaining about her because they dont like dying so fast.

She has very clear weaknesses and strengths, but instead of capitalizing on her mistakes like ppl in high elo do, most just play right into her strengths and whine about dying.

The only reason Pros are so strong on her is because of her enormous skillcap. When pros master LB, unless the opponent is even better than the LB player, there is very little you can do to prevent LB from killing you in lane.

But thats how all champions should be in my opinion. If you master a champion you should be able to wreck with them. But in pro play its mostly always a skill matchup, its just with the amount of time the better player/team gets LB and then win with her, everyone thinks she MUST be op. I mean Bjergsen demolishing mancloud with lb must be because LB is too strong and not Bjerg being better.

She is designed, as an early to midgame single target burst assassin. When she is ahead she is basically a delete button for 4/5 of your enemies for at least until 25 minutes.

But with every game going into late game in soloqueue, even an ahead LB(unless she is like 5-0 before 10 minutes) can be dealt with. When it comes to sieges, its very hard for that lb to kill anyone without diving like the chinese. And when everyone starts buying banshees, it gets even harder to die from her(unless for some reason as the adc you decide to facecheck alone, but of course its cuz LB is op).

I agree that she needs changes but with LB it is so easy to completely murder her with just a tap in the wrong spot. And i swear to god if they decide to just lower her damage and her cds i will kill myself because then she is basically no longer an assassin.

ChaosThief5/9/2014, 3:29:39 PM1 votes

Removing silence, if you do realize, wouldn't be THAT bad. She has heavier burst than any other champion and an escape. They would have to react fast to respond properly.

Penguin Eclipse5/11/2014, 4:13:27 AM1 votes

You can make her more dependent on her chain, but I think it would hurt her too much. Forcing her to be reliant on landing a line-of-sight skillshot that can be blocked by minions and the like would be problematic. It isn't reliable enough and has too long of a CD. If she can't simply jump in and burst late game or misses, she really won't be able to do anything.

I really don't know what can be done for LeBlanc. And I play her a lot and have for a long time. She has weaknesses, but people are not willing to use them so she remains a problem. Riot could do more to exploit those weaknesses or perhaps even open up new ones, but I don't think it will ever be enough to make the community happy.