User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Lee Sin, the Blind Monk/@comment-5266525-20140919015805/@comment-1330314-20140919031603

1. Strong early game power can be characteristic of a champion, but is not an identity. Conversely, utility was a big talking point among the community when Riot was considering reworking Lee Sin, as was his monster stealing ability (the community expressly objected to turning the missing health percent damage into a flat amount, as it would affect Lee's monster execution capabilities). Overall, Lee's identity in my opinion is that of an assassin who shifts into a utility bruiser as his prime contribution switches from damage to utility/CC. I'm not particularly concerned about his early game, firstly because I'm giving him similar early damage and better situational tankiness, but also because I think Lee's early game can be oppressive due to the sheer amount of abilities and mechanics he has at his disposal. Effectively, his existence invalidates play for a lot of other champions in the early game, which in turn is affecting jungle diversity.

2. Technically, the secondary component to any part of Lee's abilities still count as part of the same ability, and so run on the same cooldown. It would make no sense to reduce the cooldown of an ability that is not itself tied to a cooldown.

3. I was thinking of this when approaching the rework, and considered increasing Lee's attack speed. With his base AS of 0.651, he can land two autoattacks in the space of 1.5 seconds if timed right, which would be largely enough to make use of the full bonus. Granted, this would make Lee's passive a bit harder to use, but considering Lee Sin is already defined by a high skill cap I don't think that's a step in the wrong direction.

4. Considering I gave Lee terrible sustain and shifted damage away from Q overall, I think he can afford to have better upfront Q1 damage. If that becomes a source of abuse, then he could always have his numbers shifted around some more, but I want to make expressly sure that Q2 is used either as an execute or an initiator. I also think it's debatable whether this is a buff or a nerf to Lee's poking power, since Lee's current Q pattern is Q1 -> Q2 -> W1, which deals a lot more damage than my version of Lee's poke while still remaining "safe". Attempting the same combo with the above kit would deal a lot less damage and completely deplete Lee's energy bar from full.

5. I don't think a "stealth remover" niche is a niche worth keeping. Removing stealth implies hard-countering a mechanic and thereby denying a huge amount of your opponent's utility, which is never a good thing in a game that's meant to be about meaningful choices (hard counters make for binary choices, which aren't meaningful). Again, this is one of the reasons Lee harms champion diversity, since he can simply deny stealth champions from using their strongest utility. True sight isn't something I think can get reworked: its very nature is one of the reasons stealth is binary, and it's crippling to the mechanic, so I think it needs to be removed completely (the order in which it's removed isn't relevant).

6. I'd say any negative consequences would have to do with the increased energy cost (100-80 energy for an ability that currently costs 50 energy), but I made sure that the ability still has the same functionality (double-tapping W would produce the same results as current W1, which isn't nearly as drastic a change as, say, modifying Draven's axe travel algorithms).

7. I may have gone a bit overboard with the numbers, but the core intent here is to have Lee Sin's kit focus on damage early and utility late. I don't want to buff the initial slow, since Lee already has enough tools to win over his opponents early, but I want him to provide strong CC late, particularly as an unconditional 350-radius slow still implies heavy risk (he still needs to dive the enemy team and get up close to land the slow).