Formerly OP #6: Season 6 LeBlanc

She burst you down. Then more Leblancs appeared and did anything they wanted.

Season 6 LeBlanc was versatile, tricky, and extremely good at clearing waves safely. Her ultimate let her pick any one spell in her kit and cast a second, supercharged copy of it whenever she wanted, on a cooldown of its own, plus a second ultimate spell riding along for free. It took a full year and a half before Riot gave up trying to tune that idea and just deleted it instead.

Formerly OP

Season 6 LeBlanc

Season 6 · Ended Patch V8.8

She burst you down. Then more Leblancs appeared and did anything they wanted.

Season 6 LeBlanc was versatile, tricky, and extremely good at clearing waves safely. Her ultimate let her pick any one spell in her kit and cast a second, supercharged copy of it whenever she wanted, on a cooldown of its own, plus a second unique ultimate spell riding along for free. It took a full year and a half before Riot gave up trying to tune that idea and just deleted it instead.

You survive her first all-in. Barely, but you survive it, and her spells are all on cooldown, so you push back. Then she vanishes for a fraction of a second, and whichever piece of that combo mattered most lands on you again, at full strength, from a spell that by every normal rule of the game should not have been available yet. Somewhere on the map, a second, harmless copy of her is also strolling toward your bot lane, just to see whether your support panics and flashes at a shadow. That was LeBlanc for most of Season 6 and well into Season 7, and it is the reason Riot eventually stopped trying to patch the idea and threw the whole redesign away instead.

When, And For How Long

This version of LeBlanc launched in Patch V6.22 at the tail end of Season 6 in 2016, as part of a full visual and mechanical rework. It was strong enough that Riot hit it with an emergency hotfix within weeks of release, then spent most of Season 7 cutting pieces out of it, most notably a patch V7.5 nerf that took a blade to Distortion's damage in one pass. None of that was enough to fix it. In Patch V8.8, in 2018, Riot reverted almost the entire rework, undoing a redesign a year and a half after shipping it, which is not something that happens to a kit unless it was never actually brought under control.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the actual archived art from this specific version of LeBlanc's kit, not the modern versions standing in for them. Every one of these designs, including the entire alternate kit built around Mimic, has since been removed from the game.

Innate: Sigil of Malice

Any ability LeBlanc landed marked the target for several seconds. If she hit that same target with any other ability while the mark was active, it detonated for bonus damage. Because the mark was baked into every spell instead of living on one specific ability, there was no fixed combo order to learn or punish. Whatever LeBlanc threw out first primed the target, and whatever she threw out second cashed it in.

Q: Shatter Orb

An orb thrown at a target enemy. On its own it just dealt damage, but if it detonated Sigil of Malice, the spell chained onward to the nearest other target already carrying a charged mark and hit that one too, including minions. That bounce carried its own bonus damage against them, which meant LeBlanc could clear an entire wave from max range with Q -E and never walk within reach of a trade to do it. She could shove a lane by herself, safely, and still have her W up in case the enemy jungler showed up.

W: Distortion

Works the same as it does on current LeBlanc, a dash in with a free blink back a few seconds later. Nothing unusual by itself. What made it dangerous here was everything else on this list riding along with it.

E: Ethereal Chains

Same as current LeBlanc's E, a chain that tethers and roots. Just another way to trigger the mark on the way to the rest of the combo.

R: Mimic

This was the part that broke the game. Casting Mimic primed LeBlanc for a few seconds, and during that window her next spell, whichever of Q, W, or E she chose, came out as a completely different, harder-hitting spell in its own right, one that scaled up with her ultimate's own rank and outdamaged the real ability it was copying, all while costing no mana and summoning a decoy clone to sell it. It was not tied to whatever she had just cast, the way the ultimate is today. She got to pick, live, which piece of the combo to trade up into a bigger hit, on a cooldown that had nothing to do with her other spells.

Alternate R: Shadow of the Rose

While the empowered kit from Mimic was active, LeBlanc also had access to a second, completely different ultimate. Shadow of the Rose dropped a harmless decoy anywhere on the map, global range, no exceptions, and sent it walking toward the nearest enemy champion to fake a copy of her last spell. It cost her nothing to send a fake LeBlanc to threaten a lane she was not even in, and using it refunded Mimic's cooldown on top of that, so scouting the map for free also paid for her next real combo. That decoy was also a real body, and dropping one in the path of a piercing shot like Caitlyn's ultimate could block it outright, even alone in a side lane with no teammates anywhere nearby to do it for her.

Why It Was OP

Every one of these pieces is gone from the game today, and it took several different problems layered onto the same champion at once to force that outcome:

The recast was not a repeat, it was an upgrade. Every other version of this ultimate, before and since, casts a plain copy of a spell she already used. This version turned whichever spell she chose into a genuinely bigger hit, one that scaled with her ultimate's own rank rather than the base ability's, on a cooldown that never touched her other spells. A lane opponent could not plan around which piece of the combo was coming back, only that whichever one it was would hit harder than the original had.

Any spell could set up any other spell. Sigil of Malice being an innate instead of living on one ability meant there was no fixed combo to scout for. Punishing a Twisted Fate or a Karthus meant learning their specific rotation. Punishing this LeBlanc meant assuming that literally anything she cast could be the first half of a burst sequence, because it usually was.

Poke and burst were the same button. Shatter Orb's bounce to the nearest marked target meant this was not purely a dive-and-burst kit. LeBlanc could sit at range, spread marks across a wave or a group of laners, and cash in several of them with one cast, which meant there was no itemization or positioning answer that covered both threats at once.

The map itself was not safe from her. Shadow of the Rose let LeBlanc apply pressure to a lane she physically was not in, at zero risk, and get her main combo tool back for it. Most global threats in this game cost a long cooldown and real commitment. This one was closer to a side effect of casting her ultimate the way she was already going to.

The Fall

Riot moved fast the first time. Within about a month of Patch V6.22 shipping this kit, a mid-December hotfix was already cutting into Shatter Orb's wave-clear bounce and Distortion's damage. That was only the start of it. Patch V7.5 followed with a much larger cut to Distortion's base damage and its scaling, gutting the empowered version's numbers along with it, and smaller nerfs kept coming through most of Season 7. The champion that came out the other side of all that trimming was noticeably weaker than she launched, and still nobody was happy with how she played.

That is what makes Patch V8.8, in 2018, unusual. Riot did not just nerf the kit again. They reverted it, wholesale. Sigil of Malice went back to being an active ability instead of an innate mark, Shatter Orb was removed and replaced with the old targeted Sigil of Malice cast, Mirror Image came back from retirement, and Mimic went back to simply recasting LeBlanc's last spell. Shadow of the Rose, the global decoy ultimate, was deleted outright. A year and a half after launch, Riot concluded the redesign itself was the problem, not the numbers on it, and undid nearly the entire thing in a single patch.

Where She Stands Now

Modern LeBlanc runs on the kit Patch V8.8 reverted her back to, and it has stayed that way since. Sigil of Malice is a targeted mark-and-detonate Q again, Mimic just recasts her last spell, and there is no alternate kit, no global decoy, and no Shadow of the Rose anywhere on her spellbook. She is still a real pick and a real burst threat in the right patch, but the specific nightmare this article is about, a champion who got to choose any one spell and cast a free supercharged copy of it whenever she wanted, plus a second ultimate on top of that, does not exist in League of Legends anymore in any form. Riot tried it once, spent a year and a half trying to make it work, and walked away from the idea entirely.

Nominate The Next One

Season 6 LeBlanc belongs right alongside the rest of this series, the kits that made an entire era of players dread a specific champion select lock-in. Catch up on the others below, then drop your nomination for the next one in the comments.