Time to Talk About: Leshrac

Lesh's your fav hero eh?

Leshrac actually got a major buff in this patch, which is the fact that Split Earth went from a completely unreliable and impractical stun to an almost 100% reliable stun. Now that Lightning Storm can set up his stun perfectly...it's very hard to juke the stun, and it allows Lesh to get solo kills VERY easily...even as a support.
Lightning Storm -> Split Earth -> Pulse Nova on just a level 6 Lesh is an almost entirely reliable combo that deals 380 magic damage instantly and follows up with 100 magic damage per second, all for a mana cost very easy to sustain with Arcane Boots as only item...ez solo kills.

He's just a top pick in this patch. I don't think dealing with Lesh has gone anything close to "pick him first or counterpick him" like it was for the 6.83 meta picks...but it may come pretty close at some point.

I, for once, welcome Rainbow Dash owning pubs because he's far more fun than the previous meta heroes.
Besides I was playing Lesh before it was cool :)

More seriously...if you want to play against Lesh, magic resistance/magic immunity is the way to go.
While a decently played Lesh can probably outplay your Huskar or Lifestealer simply by buying a Ghost Scepter, a forcestaff or a Euls...a badly played Lesh will just feed these heroes over and over. Any hero with high physical damage like Ursa also works.

Anti-Mage sounds great on paper, but besides the fact that you just picked AM in a pub...you just picked AM into a pushing lineup. Your call.

I don't find him that hard to deal with tbh. Although I haven't seen a ton of him in my games yet, I know his winrate in the qualis was pretty impressive.

Physical damage and burst is still really good against him until he has both Octarine AND Bloodstone. But if you just keep pressuring him then he shouldn't be able to afford them. Pipe is pretty good against him, but the shield melts pretty damn fast from his ult.

Idk I just think he's pretty easy to contain. He's definitely way better in this patch, but he's not nearly as bad as Troll was last patch.

He's more scary in competitive than in pubs, kinda the opposite of the meta heroes last patch.

Like, in competitive there's enough co-ordination to take heat off of him in lane, (Or at least to match that pressure with pressure in other lanes, and given Leshrac is one of the best flash farmers in the game, he catches up better) and to stack for him if needs be. Likewise in team-fights, the better co-ordination often means he can act like somewhat of a mop up hero, rather than having to front-line. And Leshrac is terrifying when he can't be focused.

The buffs he got in this patch with Split Earth being reliable was a big buff to his laning, but not the biggest buff the hero has had, likewise neither was Octarine Core (Because that's usually 3rd-4th major item. You usually want Eul's and Bloodstone, ideally want a Shiva's, and will probably be forced into Sycthe before you can consider Octarine.) Sure, it makes him scarier late game, but it's not the biggest buff to him.

Likewise neither were all the little cast point buffs he's had for basically the last 5 patches.

The biggest was the BKB change which means the heroes damage out-put actually stays scary in the late-game, which could never happen before because BKB durations would get refreshed.

This in combination with favourably meta shifts away from physical damage dealers, and towards somewhat earlier pushing means Leshrac is really scary because it lets him get ahead, and thus means he care less about the initial BKB timings.