League of Legends Lillia Abilities: Does Lillia Need Buffs?
The ‘Bashful Bloom’ hit live League of Legends servers with Patch 10.15, overshadowed by the Yone hype. Now that players have had a couple of weeks to experiment with her, the player consensus is that she needs some buffs; at least in her intended role of jungle.
Lillia is the first new jungler for three years, with Kayn being the last dedicated jungler. While there have been jungler reworks in the meantime like Fiddlesticks and Volibear, neither champion is exclusive to the jungle, and both retain core elements of their old versions. For the jungler community, Lillia’s reveal and release was one of the most exciting events of this season, and her design and lore ticked the boxes for a lot of fans.
Unfortunately, many players found her AP skirmisher kit to be unwieldy and awkward, especially with the poor itemisation options available for AP junglers. Lillia’s short-range, reliance on items, lack of hard CC and squishiness make her a difficult champion to use effectively.
Now that she has been tried in the LPL with little success, it’s time to take an in-depth look at the problems Lillia players face.
Kit Breakdown
Lillia players can have a hard time finding success in the jungle, and her stats and kit certainly aren’t helping. Despite having an almost melee range auto-attack, Lillia’s stats are balanced as a ranged champion. To make matters worse, Lillia has a very low base armour stat of 20 at level 1, putting her in the bottom ten of all champions. While her armour scales up to a decent 88 by level 18, she is extremely fragile in the early game. Any AD jungler like Lee Sin can invade and shut her down easily pre-6.
Her passive applies Dream Dust to enemies damaged by her other abilities, dealing 5% of their maximum health over three seconds. This makes Lillia great at gradually whittling away tanks and higher HP targets. Still, in this lifesteal and healing meta, the DoT damage can actually give targets time to regain their health.
The DoT is also capped on monsters, scaling with level from 40-100 magic damage. While her clear is by no means limited by this, some players have suggested increasing this cap in exchange for lowering her base armour slightly. This could increase the need for kiting camps and skill expression in her clear.
The problems start with her base abilities. Lillia’s Q ‘Blooming Blows’ is her bread and butter damage ability, but like Darius’ Q it requires you to hit the enemy in the outer circle to make proper use of it. Hitting an enemy in the outer circle deals true damage rather than magic damage, making Lillia even more effective against tanks. Q’s passive also grants up to five stacks of Prance when Lillia hits an enemy with an ability, each granting a small movement speed boost.
It should be easy to hit Blooming Blows with the passive movement speed she receives with this ability. Still, the inconsistent hit-box has been causing trouble for players when clearing the jungle and fighting enemies.
Making the hitbox more consistent with the range indicator should be a priority for Riot, and seen as a QoL change rather than a buff.
Her W though suffers from a more fundamental problem. With such a long and telegraphed windup animation, any enemy not locked down by CC can move out of the way and avoid the sweet spot at the centre. Since Lillia doesn’t have any hard CC without her ultimate, she often has to rely on allies or burn her ultimate to hit the full damage of this ability. As a 0.75s ‘rush’ ability, the W is also easily interruptible by other CC but doesn’t allow her to cross terrain. The animation can make you so vulnerable that often it’s worth forgoing the W damage to wait for your Q to come back off cooldown.
Lillia’s E ‘Swirlseed’, while a fun mechanic to play with, does not offer the consistent CC Lillia needs as a jungler. The ability is hard to hit while ganking, and missing it leaves you with no CC or extra movement speed to catch up with the enemy. The long 12-second cooldown doesn’t decrease with level either, making it unlikely for you to get it off more than twice even in a late-game team fight.
While the three-second slow is a nice reward if you hit it, it’s only a 25% slow at rank 1, scaling to 45% at max rank. Swirlseed pales in comparison to other slows like Nasus’ E ‘Wither’, which goes from a 47% to 95% slow for 5 seconds, while also crippling the enemy’s attack speed. Not only that, but it’s a guaranteed point and click ability with an 11-second cooldown at max rank.
While Swirlseed has the advantage of being able to hit multiple enemies, in reality, it’s tough to hit anyone. More experienced players often try to avoid bunching up in tight spaces if they know Lillia is around, and at long range, the velocity of the seed is low enough that enemies can simply move out of the way. Even in melee range duels the awkward throwing and bouncing animation makes it difficult to hit a moving target. Imagine trying to hit Graves as he dashes around you, or a Kha’zix as he uses his R move speed and invisibility to avoid all of your abilities! In such situations, reliable hard CC is sorely missed in Lillia’s repertoire.
Many junglers rely on hard CC to gank lanes, but Lillia’s only form of hard CC is locked behind her ultimate ‘Lilting Lullaby’. Activating this ability causes enemies affected by Dream Dust to briefly become Drowsy before falling Asleep, causing the next ability hit from an ally to deal extra magic damage. While this is a big power spike and makes Lillia a big threat at level 6, the 130-second base cooldown gives the enemy team a lot of time to make plays after its use. Using it for a gank sacrifices her ability to contest neutral objectives like Dragon or Herald, and makes her a much lesser threat in team fights. In the late game a big Lillia ultimate can be game-winning, but without it an early game Lillia is little more than an annoyance.
Seemingly just to spite Lillia players, effects like Yasuo’s Wind Wall can actually block her ultimate. The activation is coded as a projectile, so if a Wind Wall, Unbreakable or Spell Shield is between Lillia and her target, the ultimate will be entirely negated without compensation. The same goes for untargetable effects like Zhonya’s Hourglass, Fizz E, Maokai W, or Vladimir W.
Combined with the low AP ratios on all her abilities, Lillia seems to be high risk with a mediocre reward.
Ganking, Clearing and Fighting
While in a fight Lillia can start moving at some insane speeds, this does not translate to good ganks. Lillia’s mobility relies entirely on hitting enemies with abilities, and unlike her centaur buddy Hecarim, Lillia doesn’t have the luxury of a movement speed steroid or gap closer. This makes it difficult to close the distance when ganking, and taking Predator isn’t a viable option when her combat ability is already so lacking without Conqueror or Dark Harvest. Unless Lillia can gank lanes with strong CC, she's often better off just power farming to level 6.
Lillia’s clear is nothing special either. Compared to meta mainstays like Olaf and Fiddlesticks, her optimal full clear speed of around 3:17 is lacking, but not awful. Using the good old Talisman multi-camp trick makes Lillia’s full clear extremely healthy. Still, inexperienced junglers will definitely need to spend some time in the practice tool to perfect it. Not making good use of Talisman’s healing can see Lillia finishing her clear below 50% health and unable to contest Scuttle.
Lillia can full clear leashless with full HP and one Smite left by the time Scuttle spawns from r/leagueoflegends
Even if you do come out of your jungle healthy and ready to contest a Scuttle Crab, Lillia isn’t cut out for early game duels. Powerhouses like Rek’Sai and Lee Sin can easily jump on her and avoid her abilities. More confident junglers will definitely take advantage of Lillia’s low resistances to attempt an invade, potentially shutting Lillia out of the game from the get go. Since she’s so reliant on finishing her first couple of items, dying early on or losing jungle camps can be devastating. This is especially bad in the current meta, where junglers have the responsibility of being active early and snowballing their team to victory through kills, dragons and herald pushes.
Itemisation Nightmare
Click to enlargeLillia’s woes don’t end at her kit and base stats though. She is also in the unique position of being an AP skirmisher in the jungle, making her item choices extremely limited.
AD junglers have access to a mountain of item options that can be changed depending on the enemy team composition. Think Black Cleaver, Tri Force, Blade Of The Ruined King and the like. These items offer everything an AD champion could want for a one item power spike; health, attack speed, CDR, lifesteal, and movement speed. The jungle item enchantments also benefit these champions, as Cinderhulk and Warrior are ideally suited to most junglers.
Traditional mages in the mid lane also have quite diverse item builds; defensive options like Zhonya’s Hourglass and Banshee’s Veil, utility items like GLP and Twin Shadows, and offensive options like Luden’s Echo or Rabadon’s Deathcap. They even have access to late game scaling options in Rod of Ages and Seraph’s Embrace.
AP fighters like Lillia fall somewhere between the cracks, forgotten and neglected. No single item offers all the stats she wants, delaying her power spike until two or three items. To make matters worse, Lillia is forced to spend 2500g on the Runic Echoes enchantment before she can start itemising. At best, you can then go for the Liandry’s Torment and Rylai’s Sceptre combination, gaining lots of HP and AP but sacrificing CDR and resistances. If you want armour, you can go for Zhonya’s Hourglass while missing out on health and damage. Some Lillia players have even resorted to taking items like Frozen Heart for the armour and CDR, or Dead Man’s Plate for the tank stats and MS.
No matter what you choose, you always need to compromise. There is no Black Cleaver or Tri Force equivalent for AP champions, and until the long-awaited item overhaul next season, Lillia will likely continue to suffer from this problem.
Statistics Don’t Lie
Click to enlargeWhile all that might have sounded quite grim for Lillia’s future, the reality is not so extreme. Her statistics are steadily improving as players get used to playing her, and she’s now sitting at an average win rate of 46%. We have seen similarly weak releases in the past too; Fiddlesticks and Volibear both had poor results on release, but after being buffed slightly became staples of the meta.
Riot has kept quiet about any buffs, but the main Lillia analyst at Riot ‘RayYonggi’ has let us know he’s carefully monitoring Lillia’s success. ‘We are keeping an eye on Lillia and evaluating what to do if anything :) So far she is trending mostly as predicted’ he wrote on Reddit, in response to a front-page thread highlighting Lillia’s improving win rate as players get used to playing her.
In the next few weeks, her win rate will likely continue to rise, and until it evens out, Riot won’t make any drastic changes. It’s not all bad though - if Lillia does end up receiving a buff, we may see a whole lot more of her at Worlds 2020!
Images via Riot Games | lolalytics
