Talk:Leona/@comment-3471264-20110714122859/@comment-89.167.76.163-20110714193513

PART 2 Next one - durability. I will skip tlking about items and base stats because it's mostly irrelevant, most tanky DPS/tanks will end up with similar amount of HP and Magic Resist and perhaps with more or less Armor and most tanking items are no-brainers so no point to argue here I guess. But when it comes to skills, Leona's Shield provides 70 Armor and Magic Resist for 3 seconds at level 5 (one can safely assume having level 5 rather quickly when building a tank because of it's farming potential, and in most cases it's easy to hit at least one enemy Champion with it to gain additional 3 sec duration) and AoE damage which is very good indeed, no argument here. On this field it's not bad since for example Amumu only has 10 physical damage reduction. As for Rammus' DBC, it's a bit tricky - most people won't attack him in defensive state but the point of taunting an AD carry or a Mage is to *force* them to attack you. And that, combined with a Thornmail, can wreck an AD carry very easily and also it provides much more Armor/Mresist which can be useful in situations other than teamfights (Karthus' ulti incoming, for example). Also, I do belive that Jarvan's flat damage absorbing Shield is better than Leona's skill, since it gets stronger when more enemy Champions are around and also, instead of AoE damage it has an AoE Slow. More so, Jarvan also has a passive Armor gain from his W (not a huge one but still) and can activate it to double it on himself. As for Shen, here he's also quite weak, since his Shield, even if it absorbs quite alot, lasts only for 2.5 seconds so it's more of a defensive move agains huge damage bursts like Nunu/Karthus ultimates etc. In general, I'd say that Leona's W is pretty good but I don't think it's superior to similar skills of other tanks and doesn't provide much utility.

And lastly, passives. In short, yeah, Leona's passive is a very good piece of utility, combined with her ultimate/W and I like it more than Jarvan's or Rammu's. Though there's some nice utility on Ammumu's passive too.

To sum it up - I'm not saying that Leona is a useless Champion by any means. But also I don't think that she can be a better tank than Amumu and can't match Jarvan as a tanky DPS. She doesn't have jungling potential, doesn't have map presence of Shen (though it's the only thing he has at this point), doesn't have Rammus' single target disable/damage potential and can't initiate fights like Malphite, Amumu or Jarvan. But she does have a nice, if tricky, gap closer, useful AoE CC and some nice utility so there is potential there. After some scaling buffs, I would say that building her as a tanky DPS can yield some very good results but as of yet - in my opinion, she is not clearly better than other tanks.