Leona the radiant dawn is well known as the support champion with the most crowd control abilities in the game. With her on your team, you can rest assured that the enemy team will always be on the watch for her solar flare. Discover how you can win team fights with the best Leona build in league of legends patch 12.14.
Best Leona Build
Best Leona Runes
Leona support is usually a tank or utility champion, either you stand in the frontline with lots of armor or initiate with your Zenith blade. Being an initiator means you need to be tanky even during the early game.
Best Rune Path | Resolve | Inspiration |
Best Keystone | Aftershock | |
Best Slot 1 (Rune) | Font of Life | Biscuit Delivery |
Best Slot 2 (Rune) | Bone plating | Cosmic Insight |
Best Slot 3 (Rune) | Overgrowth |
Leona support takes the Resolve tree in patch 12.14 simply because it synergizes so well with her kit. The best Leona runes to take are the Aftershock font of life combo that works great during an engage. It provides bonus armor for Leona and font of life acts as a sustain for her ADC.
Bone plating and overgrowth both synergizes well with Leona because it increases her survivability. Bone plating deals with the early game pokes, and overgrowth for her late game durability scaling.
The inspiration tree is for Leona’s secondary best runes because of the utility that biscuit delivery and cosmic insight provides her.
Best Leona Rune Shards
When it comes to rune shards, this Leona build recommends the bonus cooldown reduction for offense, +6 armor for flex, and +90 health for defense.
Best Rune Shards | Effect |
Offense | +10% cooldown reduction |
Flex | +6 armor |
Defense | +90 health |
Best Leona Spells
For Summoner spells, Leona needs a flash and ignite combo. You don’t need to have heal or exhaust because other than being a great initiator, Leona also has great peel potential for her ADC. Her Zenith blade + Shield of daybreak combo alone proves too much for potential gankers.
Best Spells | Icon |
Flash |
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Ignite |
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Flash can be used to surprise enemies with Shield of Daybreak and lock them down for an early kill on an enemy champion in the early game. With ignite, Leona can give a high kill pressure on the enemy champions whenever she initiates with shield of daybreak, the threat of casting ignite alone can be detrimental for other players.
Best Leona Abilities Order
Leona’s abilities as a support focuses more on durability while engaging the enemy team, so maxing your W first is a must as this is what will mitigate incoming physical and magic damage when you initiate a fight with your summoner spells. It can also mitigate turret shots when you decide to tower dive.
This skill order also focuses on Leona’s W because it is also her main damaging ability aside for ignite from her summoner spells. After activating it, Leona gains bonus magic resistance along with armor and damage reduction.
Leona can also give bonus damage to her ADC after applying her passive on the enemy team. Her ADC simply needs to use auto attacks on the affected champion to proc the extra damage.
Best Leona Items
Leona support has great engage potential and can clear a minion wave with ease which also makes her a great roaming champion. For this she needs all the bonus movement speed she can get other than the durability she already has.
Best Starter Leona Items
The laning phase is the most important part of a Leona support. She can play aggressively and chain CC an enemy champion and establish dominance, or play safe and let the other team push to the tower and CC chain them when a jungler comes to gank.
First Item | Second Item |
Relic Shield | Health Potion (x2) |
Best Mid Game Leona Items
During the mid game, Leona can frequently gank mid lane thanks to the bonus movement speed provided by boots of mobility. Leona support should also have her support item almost completed by now and an early Locket of the Iron Solari should work great on small trades.
First Item | Second Item | Third Item | Fourth Item |
Bulwark of the Mountain | Boots of Mobility | Locket of the Iron Solari | Control Wards |
Being a roaming support, you also need a couple of control wards to prevent vision from the other enemy laners.
Best Final Late Game Leona Items
For the late game build, you need all the magic resist and armor you can get because Leona’s abilities and runes won’t be enough to mitigate the damage of the enemy carries anymore.
First Item | Second Item | Third Item | Fourth Item | Fifth Item | Sixth Item |
Bulwark of the Mountain | Boots of Mobility | Locket of the Iron Solari | Deadman’s Plate | Knight’s Vow | Abyssal Mask |
Knight’s vow redirects the damage your ADC receives towards you making him slightly tankier. Your sixth item improves your magic resist as well as reduce the magic resist of nearby enemies letting your mages deal extra damage. Zeke’s convergence is also a great alternative for a late game item.
For the armor, you can swap boots of mobility for plated steelcaps but only do this if you need more armor. Dead man’s plate also gives a huge boost in armor for Leona and the slow from her zenith blade + aa combo is great at picking of carries.
Best Champions to pair Leona with
Leona usually engages with crowd control from solar flare, so champions like Twitch, Sivir and Miss Fortune that has long range follow ups are the best synergies for Leona in league of legends.
Champion | Win Rate % | Icon |
Sivir | 53.8% | |
Twitch | 52% | |
Samira | 51.9% |
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Crowd control abilities also allow these ADC champions to have higher kill pressure. Their long range can also be used to proc the bonus magic damage from Leona’s passive.
Strongest Champions against Leona
Poke or faster tempo is what counters Leona in league of legends. Seraphine definitely out damages Leona in the early game which negates all of Leona’s crowd control abilities if she can’t get near her.
Champion | Win Rate % | Icon |
Seraphine | 54.2% |
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Yuumi | 53.2% |
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Nautilus | 52.9% |
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Weakest Champions against Leona
Champions that get easily shot down by chain cc are the ones that Leona can counter. These champions can’t deal as much damage as Leona simply because she will be up on their faces every trade. Despite her short range, her long ranged engage can easily deal with enemies in the backline such as Vel’Koz.
Champion | Win Rate % | Icon |
Swain | 42.1% |
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Taric | 42.4% |
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Bard | 44.0% |
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Leona the radiant dawn is an awesome support released by riot games way back. Get her on your team and easily take the enemy adc out of the game at whatever phase of the game.