Although Lissandra is a very solid League of Legends champion that is often a big part of the meta, however, one aspect of her kit feels extremely dated. Her passive is probably one of the dullest and least imaginative passives still left in the game. Currently, Lissandra’s passive lets her cast a spell without using mana every so often. The duration between free spells can be reduced when hitting enemies with movement impairing abilities. This does synergize with her kit somewhat but it’s just really lame.
Luckily Riot has decided to give her a completely new passive. Back in July they already announced that they were working on a few new ideas for the Lissandra passive and in October they briefly mentioned it in a Gameplay Thoughts update as well. Now they’ve finally revealed what they have been working on and it’s glorious. When enemies get killed in the vicinity of Lissandra she turns them into exploding ice zombies.
This new passive brings so much more flair to Lissandra. She really feels like an ice witch right now that’s raising armies of frozen monstrosities in order to combat the other factions of Freljord. This passive also feels very much inspired by George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire
Lissandra’s new passive will be live on the PBE sometime this week so we can find out what the damage numbers are and how the passive exactly works. It will probably also give us some brand new bugs that we can all collectively laugh at. A Redditor by the name of u/SeeDeez101 already came with an interesting idea of Morde ulting a Sion and Lissandra killing the Sion. This would, in theory, raise three zombies, one from Morde’s ult, one from Lissandra’s passive, and of course Sion himself.
The removal of Lissandra’s old passive also marks yet another uninspired ability being removed from the game. Recently, Riot is stepping up the effort of removing boring abilities from champions and updating them with something new and flashy. These aren’t really full reworks but rather small updates to champions who’s kits are quite good but contain one ability that’s out of place. Another recent example would be Ezreal who received an update to his W and his model and particles but besides that was left untouched.