Talk:Leona/@comment-24871517-20140427140901/@comment-8506165-20140529220836

DISCLAIMER: I am a self-proclaimed Leona hater. I may exaggerate points. It is however, my opinion that she is too strong, but I shall endeavour to explain why people hate her in relatively neutral terms with some numbers to back up my points.


 * Her damage. Oda might be of the opinion that Leona "does no damage" but her bases, when combined with her passive which any AD with half a brain can at least sporadically proc, her bases are some of the highest of the viable support pool, which is really what counts for the support role generally but especially in early laning.


 * The fact that she gets ridiculously tanky through W while still increasing her damage by a lot because it gets the most damage out of all her skills by being leveled.


 * The feeling that she lacks sufficient counterplay. Barring some hard counters (Morgana being the ultimate example - Janna a close second) it usually feels like it's Leona's lane to lose - she prevents a lot of offensive plays because her high damage and lockdown will mean that she wins all-ins, even if the enemy initiated them. Poking her down between engages is the intended counterplay, but her ridiculous regen means that just with a Relic Shield and the Recovery mastery, you need to do more than 150 damage to her within a minute for it to stick at level 1 - and that's not including health pots. (This being after Riot admitted this was a problem and nerfed her regen - it was even worse before.) It just gets worse as she levels up, gets higher base stats, more ranks in W and more items. So that leaves playing a defensive lane, but staying away from Leona and playing defensively is difficult given the sheer range of her initiate, and she gets towerdiving ability very early on.


 * Somewhat tangentially to the previous point - Leona's E is a point-and-click skillshot. Countering her dash if it hits, however, requires rather precise timing on a knock-up/knock-back skill. It's a disproportionately difficult ability to deal with skill-wise.


 * With all she has going for her in lane, you'd expect her to fall off. She doesn't really. She ends up tankier than some true tanks when she has her W on, gets a low-cooldown, 1200-range initiate for lategame teamfights and still has very respectable damage on Sunlight at level 18.

Given all of these, her omnipresence (third most picked support currently, fluctuates between that and the most picked) and high winrate (currently second highest of the perceived "top 3" supports - Thresh, Morgana, and Leona, consistently >50%) aren't really surprising, and explain why she's such a polarising champion - people tend to either love her or hate her.