Well where to start, LeBlanc is without a doubt my favourite champion. I picked her up around level 15 and dominated with her up until my first ranked games. Then I discovered the magical world of “Flavour of the Month” and stopped playing her seriously. A while later (mid season 2) I theorycrafted her in a “support” role to get around her terrible late game but I won’t talk about that here (I was actually writing the theorycraft blog for this when the new update was announced which put that idea on hold). But you’re not here to read me talking about Support LeBlanc (stay tuned it might still happen), you want to know my first thoughts on her changes, right? Well I hope so anyway.

Before I go any further if you haven’t already done so have a read of the LeBlanc Patch Notes taken directly from the full 3.9 Patch Notes.

Now that that’s out of the way here are the early conclusions I have drawn:

Still max Q first?

Yes. It’s still your primary source of damage, despite all that Riot has preached about flexibility they haven’t done anything to make me do anything different other than in the most situational circumstances.

E has lost it’s scaling root and the utility nerf on it means it’s just mediocre now.

Max W? Why on earth would I do that?

W or E?

This has actually changed now. I used to be of the opinion that E was the skill which differentiated the good LeBlancs from the great LeBlancs. Blowing up one person with Q>R>W>E or even blowing up one person with Q>R>W whilst peeling for your ADC with E. Now E is just lackluster until lategame. I used to max E as it was also her highest damage ability and because the root duration scaled so well. Now maxing it just puts the cooldown back to what it was before and nothing else scales. Now I max W first for the 2 seconds reduced cooldown per rank, since W is so important for harass getting it on a lower cooldown is so much stronger. The only problem with this is that unlike E, W has upward scaling mana costs so by doing so I remove any benefit I gained from the other mana cost reductions.

Level 1.

Start with W. Don’t fall into the trap of taking Q. W does more damage and could save your life early on. All in all with only W at level 1 she is now utterly useless at this level, gone is the “Try and get 1 Q harass in at level 1” now it’s “Try to get to level 2 as soon as possible because she is useless level 1.”

Verdict: Weaker.

Level 2.

Take your first point in Q, no argument here. You need to start your harass as soon as possible. Q>W>W as much as possible, which is not much, once every 15 second or so. Try not to W into minions because the lane will push and you will die because your W will be on its huge early game cooldown, this shouldn’t be new to LeBlanc players though. What is different is that Q harass is a waste of mana, your autoattacks will do as much damage. In fact you are going to need good autoattack harass if you want to be the same bully LeBlanc used to be.

Because you will normally W back immediately the effectively reduced W cooldown is meaningless UNLESS you are able to get free autoattacks in after your first W before you W again.

Verdict: Weaker.

Level 3.

Put your third point into E. Extra points into Q are pointless since it’ll still be a huge harass cooldown and Q-only harass will still be bad. Putting the point into E theoretically doubles your harass with 2 spells to proc Q, at the very least when you get ganked with W on cooldown E could save your life.

You also get access to your basic 3-spell combo. Q>wait 3 seconds>W>wait 1.5+ seconds>E>Q. You need to wait as long as possible before you W onto them to let you Q cooldown tick. After you have W’d wait for as much (if not a bit longer) of the 1.5 second silence duration as possible before E’ing. If you have timed it exactly right your second tick of E will proc your second Q. Before the silence and E nerfs this was merely difficult to do, now it is virtually impossible so props to you if you can do it.

In theory the “reduced cooldown” W is put to use here, in reality, nope. If you go for the difficult “Q>wait 3 seconds>W>wait 1.5+ seconds>E>Q” your W will time out before you can jump back. Sorry folks.

Verdict: Weaker.

Level 6.

You still have big level 6 damage, but your old Q>R>W>E>Q combo is comparatively underwhelming. Assuming you have 3 points in Q, the mimic’d Q is basically just another Q instead of a higher-damage Q whereas it used to be way higher with a rank 1 R. Again thanks to reduced silence and E slow times getting your second E proc to proc your second Q is harder and requires you to actively time stuff when before you could roll your face on the keyboard to do it.

On the plus side her mana cost buffs become noticable here, it’s nice but it’s hardly gamebreaking.

What the changes have done to her at level 6 is drastically reduce her kill potential since you need to harass more before you can kill someone. Because of the mana cost reduction by level 6 harassing may be easier but to actually get the kills your opponent needs to be stupid and stay in lane when they shouldn’t. Relying on your opponent being bad isn’t a good design paradigm in my honest opinion.

Verdict: Weaker.

Lategame.

Basically she has more damage withthe possibility to actually do tonnes of damage in a small AoE. BUT she loses her utility. Riot has taken away the ability to actually peel very well for the carry and said “DIVE IN AND DO DAMAGE UNTIL YOU DIE.” Mimic’d Q now does roughly double base damage (on both procs) and has 50% increased AP scaling. A double-distortion does roughly 700 base damage +1.6AP scaling in a small AoE. Yes that hits like a brick (actually make that the whole wall) but getting it on more than 3 people is very unlikely and the chances of having it up at an opportune time is ever rarer since normally you will already have had a chance to instagib someone.

Lategame she can wipe creep waves well with W but she could do that anyway.

Overall her lategame is stronger BUT the increased “flexibility” Riot talked about doesn’t seem to exist. She gains high damage but mediocre AoE at the cost of what in my opinion was her actual flexibility: her utility. Her problem of dieing the moment anyone looks at her is still there.

Verdict: Marginally stronger.

Passive.

The passive change is the only one I like, right now people fall for it left right and center. It’s awesome early game and mid game but lategame both are normally squishy enough that both die instantly. Right now when no one is really expecting it the change is saving me around one death per game. When everyone learns the new passive however I expect it to become less useful.

Verdict: I love you Riot.

Conclusion.

My final, complete, ultimate conclusion is… that I’m going to sit on the fence. It is still patch day, these are my first thoughts so I’m not really in a position to tell the world that the new LeBlanc is way weaker or way stronger. What I can say is she is weaker if she is played the same. I’m hoping myself or someone else finds and tells the world about a new playstyle, item build or setup which makes these changes click together.

Oh one conclusion I can make… Support LeBlanc got DIRECTLY nerfed. Expect more to come soon from that angle, even if it’s just a Support LeBlanc obituary blog…