User blog comment:Ozuar/Don't Insult Anti-Meta: AP Leona vs. Fizz/@comment-5266525-20131213040010

I'm not someone who terribly likes to throw around numbers in a situation where it seems like there's something fundamentally wrong instead of just being different shades. I had difficulty putting my response to this into words, but I think I managed it.

"Picking Leona as your assassin mid is like picking Ashe as your ADC. You get less damage for significantly more utility. She is just as viable (and therefore just as niche) as Ashe is, just for a different role."

How would I reconcile this?

At first, I thought of the argument that picking an assassin for their crowd control was illogical. That's not what assassins do. But immediately, I asked myself, "But why can I pick Ashe for her crowd control? It would be hypocritical of me to claim you can't play Leona for her CC and turn around and say that you can play Ashe for the same reasons.

Here's the kicker - you don't. You pick Ashe for her crowd control with the condition that she still deal heavy damage as part of her role as marksman/AD carry. Lategame, with few exceptions, no ADC is going to really deal much damage with their abilities; it's all autoattacks, so Ashe can exploit the heavy utility in her kit with no real sacrifice to her damage output.

Logically, that makes sense. If you actually were only picking Ashe for her crowd control, why would you not just go Nautilus? In a similar vein, if all you picked Graves for was his early burst, why wouldn't you just go Xin Zhao and call it a day? Because in both cases, you're both doing so with the intent that you be a ranged damage dealer later on in the game. This is your primary goal, you have to fulfill it before specializing to fit any further tasks you might need done. It's pursuing a second goal within the boundaries of the first.

Leona cannot do this. Her burst is far lower and harder to bring to bear than any dedicated assassin out there, to the point that she is not able to do the job of bursting down opponents before they can react in the first place. You can buff her crowd control or tankiness all you want (within reason), but if she can't burst people at hard or easily as Fizz or LeBlanc, she can't be a good assassin because that's exactly what assassins are supposed to do.