Champion Update Coming for League of Legend's LeBlanc (Again)

In last week's gameplay thoughts, Riot announced that they were in the process of looking at changes to LeBlanc that would help reduce her dominance in high-level play. Ever since her last rework, LeBlanc has been seen as one of the premier champions in both solo queue play and competitive play thanks to her safety and overall reliability. Thanks to her strong laning phase and strength in the side lanes, there's very little that can go wrong with a LeBlanc pick outside of a Lulu mid counterpick, which is rare outside of the EU LCS. In many ways, she draws comparison to one of the League's old mid lane boogeymen, Azir, in that they are both almost impossible to go wrong within high-level play once you understand their specific mechanics.

Well, what once was going to be a few balance changes has now snowballed into a likely rework, according to Meddler. According to him, too many of LeBlanc's problems are baked into her kit, and number changes will only serve to make her overpowered or useless, with no middle ground in-between. Thus, the team that was tasked with balancing her have instead decided that they will be updating her. While the scope of the update is still unclear, it's almost certain that LeBlanc will, once again, be getting significant changes.

The relevant portion of the Gameplay Thoughts has been copied below in its entirety for interested parties.

"We got a bunch of people together this week to talk LeBlanc. She's been a problematic character historically, both in terms of balance and counterplay. Recently she's also been consuming a lot of designer time without significant improvement that could have been put into other champs. We concluded that there were some core problems that would need to be addressed to put LB in a spot where she's appropriately powerful, fair enough to play against, not universally a great or poor pick etc. Estimation as to what those are below:

-Her risk profile (she gets a lot of assassin traits without the degree of commitment other similar champs take on when going for a kill, both in terms of personal risk and use of long CDs)

-Insufficient counterplay when played well, in particular her safety/slipperiness (combination of W, mimicked W, clones)

-A strong laning early game that, when combined with the above, makes her extra dominant in high Elo and pro play.

We believe we need to do at least a small update to her as a result, not just balance work. Without some meaningful changes we expect she'll otherwise get stuck in a state where she's still dominant in certain circumstances and feels pretty bad outside of those (as a point of reference Azir has similar, though not identical, challenges). An update doesn't feel great, given we put work into her just late last year, but we do think it's necessary.

It's also possible the above analysis may change once we start looking at LB in depth.

In terms of timing, not sure yet, the above's the summary of a conversation we've literally just had. It's possible, though not guaranteed, that we may have to make some balance adjustments to her before we can get an update in. Also not clear yet what scope of update we're looking at, whether something on the smaller side (adjustments like those to Kindred or Heimer recently) or somewhat larger (Rek'Sai scope, with more significant ability changes)."