Let's talk about Ahri.

So, as you can tell by my slightly vulgar name, is my overall favorite champion. I started playing her when she was considered OP during the assassin meta, and I haven't stopped playing her since, because she is so much fun, and I just love the style of play she has. She can insta-gib any squishy, and has a lot of outplay potential and mobility with her ult. Her charm is one of the best single-target CC's in the game if you land it. But, lately I have been seeing a major problem with Ahri.

This problem, is quite simply . Even though I still love playing Ahri, every time I play her I ask myself, why aren't I playing LeBlanc? When I think about it, LeBlanc does everything Ahri does, but better.

I started to create a list of things about Ahri, and compared them to LeBlanc:

• Ahri has high kill potential with her Spirit Dash up.

Well, even without her Mimic up, LeBlanc has insanely high kill potential with DFG. Just use DFG active, Sigil of Silence into either Distortion or Etheral Chains, and finish up with whichever ability you didn't use. On a squishy champion, that's either a kill or 70%-90% of your heath gone. And, one could even argue that the majority of Ahri's damage comes from skillshots, while on LeBlanc you coud even just DFG>Sigil of Silence>Mimic to get an easy kill without using a single skillshot.

• Ahri is easy to farm with her Q.

Prior to recent experiments by professional players of maxing Distortion on LeBlanc, I would say this is true. People tended to max Sigil of Silence, making it easier to get kills, but harder to farm, so an outplay mechanic used by a person facing a lane against LeBlanc was to play a champion that can hard shove the lane, inevitably making her choose between going for a kill, which could easily be avoided if you kept your distance, or farming under your tower, forced to use your Q on the ranged creeps to last hit them, or at least auto them once before and after they get hit by tower. But, since people learned that you could build Athene's Unholy Grail and max Distortion to turn bad matchups into farm lanes (I believe it was Ryu from KT Rolster Bullets who did it first), this is no longer true. While Ahri has the advantage of her waveclear being ranged and not havnig to put herself in danger, LeBlanc's form of waveclear also makes her extremely mobile, making her extremely slippery. This can be very frustrating for both Mid laners and Junglers because it makes her hard to lock down during a gank or a skirmish. And on top of this, LeBlanc during Patch 3.10a received a buff to her Attack Damage per level, making her autos also easier to last hit with.

• Ahri has one of the best single target CC's in the game.

While this is something I do agree with, it still doesn't suffice in my opinion. Charm is a unique ability in the sense that there no other ability that makes another champion walk towards you while "stunned", and also increases the damage done to the target by Ahri by 20%, including the true damage part of Ahri's Orb of Deception. The duration of Charm also scales with level, going from 1 second at level 1 and 2 seconds at level 5. While this ability sounds great on paper, it is a lot more complicated in-game. During Patch 3.13, Riot tried to fix the ever so dominant Mid lane assassin meta by just nerfing all the assassins. While I do agree that the nerfs were merited because Ahri was overall way too strong at the time, Ahri became extremely depedent on her Charm. While not as bad as Diana's dependence on Crescent Strike, Ahri and her Charm are definitely up there. And to make it even worse, Charm is also not an easy skillshot to hit. It travels rather slowly, and its hitbox is medium sized, but is also easy to dodge because of missile speed. Meanwhile, LeBlanc's rework during Patch 3.9 did a little bit of the same thing, and added a bit more dependence on trying to proc the 2nd part of the damage coming from Sigil of Silence. However, they made it a lot easier to proc the damage as well. They massively reduced the cooldown on Distortion by making it so that the cooldown starts as soon as she uses the spell, as opposed to starting when the 3 second duration of reactivating it is over or reactivated early. They also removed the mana cost on Mimic, so even if you are completely out of mana, you can still rely on your Mimic as your last resort to proc the 2nd part of Sigil of Silence. What does this have to do with the statement that Charm is quite possibly the best single-targeted CC's? Charm, while being the most important part of Ahri's kit at the moment, is also easy to dodge, and adds huge counterplay to Ahri. Meanwhile, LeBlanc has Sigil of Silence, which is not only a lock-on spell, meaning guaranteed damage, LeBlanc's kit makes it not only very easy to follow up on, but you don't even have to use everything in your kit to finish a kill. And not to mention that Charm is Ahri's only form of CC, while if you add Sigil of Silence, Etheral Chains and Mimic together, you have 4 forms of CC, 6 if you include the slow on Etheral Chains.

If you are waiting for me to get to my point, wait no longer. Am I asking that Riot make Ahri and easier to play champion? No, that's a stupid request, along the lines of asking Riot to make last-hitting easier. I just have a question about the skill trade-off of the champions right now.

So the general consensus is that if you are playing a harder to play champion, and are good at that champion because you have higher mechanics, higher game knowledge, etc., you should generally do better than another player who is just as good, but on an easier to play champion, right? I mean, if I play Zed or Lee Sin at a very high level, then I should do better than someone who plays Olaf or Xin Zhao at a very high level right? Well, when I look at Ahri, I don't see the skill trade-off. Even if you play Ahri at an extremely high level, a person who plays LeBlanc at the same level will (on paper) be more dominant in a game. The kill potential, the roam potential, easy laning/farming, etc. all outclass Ahri as a champion. Even if you argue Ahri's kill potential when she Charms a target is higher than when LeBlanc snares a target using Etheral Chains, this is only true if either the target is behind and/or has very low Magic Resistance, or you no cooldowns up (Spirit Rush, DFG, even Fox-Fire).

After seeing this problem, I started wondering: What IS the actual problem? Is it that LeBlanc is just simply stronger than most, and needs to be nerfed? Is it that Ahri is weaker than most, and needs to be buffed? Is it item builds? I still for myself cannot figure it out. I would just like to hear you guys (that includes you Riot) opinions on the matter. Hell, my entire article could be completely wrong for all I know. But for now, I stand by my argument that LeBlanc is simply just making Ahri less and less of a desirable pick, and if this continues, Ahri may become to LeBlanc as Talon is to Zed, and that is the last thing I want to see.

Thoughts?

Edit: Sorry if this is poorly written, not much of a writer :p