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Recommended Items
Runes: Basic
+8 Ability Haste
+9 Adaptive (5.4 AD or 9 AP)
+6 Armor
Spells:
Flash
Ignite
Items
Ability Order W-Q-E or W-E-Q
Mirror Image (PASSIVE)
LeBlanc Passive Ability
Threats & Synergies
Annie
Annie, aka the no counterplay *&^(, is the only real hard counter to us. There's is just no way (at least that I've found) of playing around her rotation of spells 100-0. Luckily, with the new ban system we can just ban her.
Champion Build Guide
NOTICE: ALL MY GUIDES WILL NOT RECEIVE UPDATES UNTILL FURTHER NOTICE.
At time of writing (patch 11.6 release) the game is so horribly broken and unbalanced there is no point in writing (or reading) a guide, especially for an off-meta pick. Games are a coinflip right now (at least in silver/gold elo), skill does not matter as roughly 8 out of 10 games are decided by "who has the most broken champs". Of the remaining 2 games, at most 1 is decided by the best player in the match....and the other(s) are decided by the worst feeder. Maybe some sense will return to Rito and I'll get to update these sometime, untill then so long...
Let me preface this by saying this guide is primarily intended for support mains that want to have some fun. For that reason, I'm going to assume that, as a support, you know the basics of warding, laning, etc. Admittedly it would be fun to do a comprehensive write up about the support role using LeBlanc supp as an example, but that's not what this is. I might get around to doing that using Ashe support, but right now I just don't have the time. |
So what are we gonna talk about? We'll have a short discussion about the mindset of playing off-meta supports and then we'll go through some LB specific gameplay. That's it, quick & dirty.
GL;HF and see you on the Rift :)
-DutchWolf
PS. If you just want to know the build and start playing (or, you know, if you got auto-filled and panic picked), scroll back up. Got all the items, abilities, etc. explained in the notes. Give that a read and you should be good to go.
Before we go into anything about LeBlanc support, I want to give a quick background about how & why I play LB supp. First things first, I don't actually play LB on my main account. The account I play her on, CHAOS Pyro NL, is my "smurf". Originally, I started this account to play with friends that had not reached level 30 yet (since a level 10 with a Gold V premade makes for pretty terrible matchmaking). Later on when all the noobies I knew had either quit or reached level 30, I used the account to practice the roles I rarely play (at the time I was ADC main with support as secondary, so I rarely got to play anthing else).
Eventually I got bored with this and started to play weird off-meta stuff to see what I could get away with. Since I was an ADC main at the time this led to a few interesting (and very successful) games as Ahri, Lux and Bard ADC. Or Taric jungle. Or AP Pantheon mid. What can I say, Bronze V is a wonderful place. I think I switched to maining support in season 5. Because I enjoyed that very much (and fill at the time always meant you ended up sup) I also started "maining" it on my smurf. More fun ensued, in the form of a.o. Pantheon, Yasuo and Illaoi support. For me, the fun was not the winning, but taking...well any champ tbh...and trying to make them work as a support. That is to say, I tried come up with a "support-y" build, didn't ks, ward properly etc. With this mindset you end up with an off-tanky Yasuo that uses his Steel Tempest knock-up and Last Breath mainly for the CC and his Wind Wall to shield his carry. The basic philosophy was that, as a support, I intended to enable my team to make the plays by providing vision, peel and CC. This tomfoolery resulted in maining Ashe support for quite a while (I build her as a tanky cc & vision machine at the time), until I finally switched to LeBlanc.
Now, in line with the supportive mindset, there was of course no way I was going to go with this kind of "trash":
This "Full AP + Eye of the Watchers" setup is basically playing LeBlanc mid in botlane. Don't get me wrong, if you are a confused mid main who got auto-filled bot and panic-picked LeBlanc this is definitely the way to go as it will be closer to your comfort zone to just do the assassin thing. If that's you, stop reading this guide and...well you know what to do, so get out of here, they are about to remake by now. Should you still need a full damage LB support guide, ningen's one is probably a good place to start. But for us True Support MainsTM it's just not right. The way I build LB is my answer to the simple question "how can I make this champion's kit work in a support role". Of course this is not the only way to build LB support, but this is my way and it works for me (most of the time):
That's quite enough pretentious rambling on my part, let's have a quick look at the support LeBlanc playstyle and call it a day.
So like I said, we're gonna skip all the where to ward, how to trade, etc stuff and just focus on what makes LB work as a support. In a nutshell, we're mobile, have some CC and deal a bit of damage (if you don't know what CC is, you are in the wrong place). Those are the key elements of LB's kit and stats we need to exploit.
Mobility
So, obviously most of our mobility comes from our W - Distortion. Now, in my opinion, this is one of the most fun abilities of the game. It's very versatile and jumping back to your distortion pad to dodge an ability (or after stealing blue/drake/etc) is sooooo satisfying.
As support we use this ability for 3 main purposes: 1) positioning, 2) baiting & 3) uncopulating yourself. This in itself is not that different from the LB mid playstyle to be honest. The main difference lies in the positioning. While a LB mid will position to get a kill, we position either to get our Ethereal Chains on someone or for warding/vision purposes. That's pretty much it. The great thing about this extra mobility for a support is that it allows us to put down wards relatively safely, whereas most regular supports might have a problem actually reaching some spots unmolested we can dash in and out and Bob's your uncle. When warding it is good practice to try and use Distortion as far from the place we want to ward as possible, walking the last bit. This way distorting back puts the greatest possible distance between us and the enemy. We don't do this if we suspect they know we're coming. If they know (such as in case of a contested baron ward), minimizing our time spent in the "hot zone" is better (i.e. distort right on the edge of warding range and back out immediately). As for baiting and uncopulating (copulating is a nice word for a 4 letter word that starts with F, do the math), simply distort away when they try to kill you/do whatever it is you tried to bait. I personally prefer to use the return Distortion for this, but sometimes that's not up to us. Here's a quick example of using Distortion whilst prepping baron nashor : Might as well use the "mobility" header to briefly mention Mimic and Mirror Image. Obviously our ult allows for another Distortion. That’s great for clearing long distances in at high speed, but this comes at a trade-off since we won’t be able to land two chains. It’s mobility or cc, choose wisely. The passive, Mirror Image,is a bit useless on LB support in my opinion. It can be helpful when we get focused, but that’s about it. It is one of the most passive passives in the game, all I can say is try to act like a bot when it’s spawned. Damage & CC I'm grouping these together because it's all relatively straightforward. Ethereal Chains is our main CC, rooting a single target 1.5 seconds after connecting for 1.5 seconds. For good measure we can use a Mimic'd E to apply a second root (or root a second target). With Everfrost we have a good secondary CC on an amazingly short cooldown. Of course, all our stuff does damage as well (quite a decent amount actually, LB has insane scalings), but that's just an added bonus. Sigil of Malice can do massive damage on a with the Q-R-W combo, even with our low-AP builds, but that's not its main purpose in LB support. In fights we try to use our Q either pop a Banshee's Veil, Black Shield, etc…, do some extra damage on chain-targets..or secure a kill. When the need is high, we can use the Distortion, Mimic combo for waveclear. |
If you are reading this: thanks for going all the way through, please leave a like if you liked or a comment if you have any suggestions. I hope it has been obvious that I'm being half-serious in this guide. Let me put it this way: you can play this and have some great games, but I don't know if it's the best way, it's just my way. Whatever you take away from this don't let it be that LeBlanc is a god-tier support, because she isn't. In Season 7 I used my second account to see how long I could get away with picking LB regardless of teamcomp or match-up. It has gotten me from Silver V to Gold V, with the occasional Ashe support thrown in when the Deceiver was banned or picked away from me. I actually equalled my main, which was Gold V at the time with this trollery.
That all being said, it's time to head out to the Rift and have fun,
Thanks for reading,
-DutchWolf
PS. If you are looking for more off-meta stuff check out my other guides here.
Progress
Season 7 Final rank
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