Legion Commander, that's... coming? Probably? I don't know, because I don't actually have any desire to play this hero.This column is primarily going to be an opinion piece with some off-kilter sense of quasi-analysis as I ask a question that may be obvious for some, but utterly baffles me like I were a kindergartner asked to do quadratic expansion. Why the hell is
Legion Commander so damn popular?Legion Commander is the third most played hero this month and the fourth most played for 6.87, and will most likely eclipse
Phantom Assassin for third place in that category as well if trends continue unaltered. And like 
Invoker metaphorically and 
Pudge literally, she is a festering, bubonic plague on the pub dota scene: a malignant tumor so thoroughly rooted in one of the team's jungles that it can hardly be compared to cancer since she takes so long to metastasize.Metastasize: a process by which cancerous cells move to other parts of the body. The joke here, for those of you who aren't as scientific and gregariously, embarrassingly intellectual as this moron, is that because your average pub
Legion Commander doesn't move from her jungle for anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes into the game, she can hardly be compared to cancer, which tends to try and move as frequently as possible. We good? Good.Now I don't want to come off as a guy who's fed up with terrible Legion Commanders ruining my games, on the contrary: a Legion Commander on either team is usually such a non-issue, that I tend to completely forget they exist until they actually manage to use their ultimate. The reason I find myself so befuddled by her popularity, then, is that exact sense of non-factor powerlessness: why would you WANT to play a hero with such an absurdly small timing window that if your team loses you're almost guaranteed to get flamed for your actions?
Some of the reasons seem decently obvious: junglers will be always be popular because you can farm and get your items uninterrupted and don't typically have to worry about the enemy messing around with you or one of your lane mates throwing you under the bus. If the game goes south while you're farming your
Blink Dagger, it's because your team is bad and you don't have to shoulder any of the blame for the loss yourself, right? That's totally how it works. It's not like you have a heal/strong debuff in your kit that can help your teammates survive a gank if you were to rotate out of jungle for three seconds.There's also the fact that she's a snowball hero to some extent: as a hero with no cap to her maximum damage, I can understand the rush of adrenaline that comes from watching an arbitrary number on your HUD go higher and higher and trying to break your previous best record while you become an unstoppable killing force. Except... you really don't.
Legion Commander is great at single target pick off to a point, but at the end of the day her teamfight is absolutely non-existent: at least the way that the majority of pubs play her. A Legion Commander is all about blinking in and getting 
Duel off on a weak target and then having their team barrel in, but in the pub scene specifically this leads to a LOT of miscommunicated feeding that gives the enemy supports or, god forbid, carries, free damage and gold.Maybe there's some sort of exhilarating, sensual rush that comes from playing the hero that I've never quite experiences because I've never actually PLAYED her against real people. And maybe jungling Legion Commanders get a bad rap because of how catastrophically a bad one can mess things up, and how ridiculous it can be to watch someone farm the jungle for ten minutes, get a
Blink Dagger, and then immediately feed a kill making all that supposedly hard work meaningless.Maybe it's because a hero that has such a high damage potential seems like a carry to a lot of people, rather than the 4 position jungler with snowball potential that she SHOULD be built as. I don't know. But for the life of me, I do not and may never understand why anyone would want to pick this ludicrously niche hero in every game they play, over something like an
Ursa with strong Roshan taking potential and actual scaling into the late game. If anyone wants to enlighten me please: speak up. Open forum time, let's go.
The thing i most like in LC is the Item builds i can do with her, Blade Mail is legit, bkb is legit, desolator is legit, Armlet is legit, Assault is legit, necronomicon is legit, even bloodthorn is legit on her and you can snowball from that, her cool concept and trap art help it too.
Also she has a tank lifesteal ability, an heal with AS steroid and dispell, also a farming AOE spell that wins TF too, coupled with a One target kill spell that stack damage, this is not a hero to love ?
Yellow journalism needs you but probably won't get you.
Speaking of writing , what do you write again? And what did you read to come this far? I am a person with varied interests but I couldn't fathom what metastasize meant.
Answer mine and I will convincingly answer yours.
As for writing, I've done stuff across the board: wrote a science fiction novel that was patently awful and that no publishing agent wanted, done paid technical writing and editing for data management people, written some copy here and there, and then my guides of course. My guides count because they got me my latest job, which has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, but apparently showcased my attention to detail and effective communication skills.
My education is primarily in biology, computer science, and mathematics, but my extracurricular activities were all musical, theatrical, and literary in nature: stage plays, orchestra, writing club, etc. I still hack on writing fiction in my spare time when the mood is right, and enjoy staring out the window on rainy days with a cup of coffee, pretending I have serious problems.
Oh. And I play Dota. There's that.
Now time to scratch your itch.
Think. Why does Pudge appeal to most of the player base? Just why?
1. He has a skillshot
2. He promotes soloplay
3.one man ganker
4. Gains something of value, every time he stands near a dead enemy
5. Lockdown that the enemy cannot prevent unless you coordinate as a team.
Pub problems:
1. No team coordination
2. Problems with vision encouraging sologanks
3. Uncalculated tradeoffs
4. Insane hooks dub you as dendi.
Point is that is what an average dota player wants! Pay attention to points 2,3,4,5 and you will see how this applies to legion commander as well.
Hero concept is directly applicable there and pub problem no.1,2&3 feed directly to her war machinery thereby aggravating the already big problem that nevertheless was in stasis for very long but manifests a tangible threat due to favorable conditions. No patch can fix pub mentality. Doing it away means tearing at the mortal fabric of the game. Distorting it out of proportion until what was distorted is no more.
She is virulent. She is no cancer. The more you feed her, the more you damage yourself and suddenly an half decent LC will have 200 damage and build 2 hearts and a blademail to finish 5 people off. This is no pipe dream. This is certifiable. And this can't be stopped, unless you want it stopped. Or greed wants it stopped.
Why do I like her? Same reasons I like my other favourite heroes: her spells. I don't play, let's say,
But what do I know. I always fall in love with a certain hero just because I think it's fun regardless of anything else, and I happened to always have had curiosity concerning
You want a jungler that rewards greed? Lifestealer, Ursa, Bloodseeker (especially in this patch!), and Prophet (this one, like Legion depends on the player, but his potential is higher) will serve you better.
If you want a Str hero that is dangerous if they snowball try: Timber, Bristle, Sand King, Tiny, CK, WK, or Huskar. Every single one of those heroes is more dangerous than LC with farm. Plus, this is a hero that gets kited super easily, especially since getting hit without hitting someone puts her lifesteal skill on cooldown.
But mostly, she is really easy to counterpick. Heroes like Riki, Sky, SD, Dazzle, Oracle, and basically any disabler stops her from getting momentum. Her Overwhelming Odds is nice for laning but she has a lot of trouble laning as well because she takes a while to get to her dagger and its still hard for her to get kills due to OO's cd and Duel's cast range. And she's in the place where the frog doesn't really want to buff her since she is a plague on pubs and her becoming pub meta will be to no one's enjoyment.
But you sad it yourself - she is a jungler, and most junglers don't require any thinking really, nor they bear any significant responsibility compared to other farming(pos1/2) roles which lets idiots think they're not the reason they have sub 50% wr. She's a very fast jungler at that, and can potentially snowball to a have an impact of pos 1/2 which also attracts people, and
Also she's a woman. There you go, a recipe for the most popular jungle hero.