
Originally Posted by
Sindele
I mean, you're not using Mesotes when you're out standing alone, you're using it to force the decision of 'team fight us up close now or lose the point'. Your ST burst on its own is simply 'respectable' and not 'instantly lethal' even with Mesotes, but forcing them into a small area ensures extra value from Pneuma, ensures extra value from Phlegma, and ensures your Toxikon targets are close at hand for your melee. Every little bit of the extra value you get from these things counts in a team fight.
I am placing specific emphasis on 'team fight' here because yes, if you are dropping Mesotes solo or in awkward situations and expecting it to do anything, you will be disappointed. Mesotes has a much more limited scope of situations in which it is useful - but in those situations it is substantially more powerful than any other LB in the game. Nobody else gets to close space as hard for nearly as long, and only a few get to inflict such potentially devastating consequences for carelessness. With one button press on a checkpoint or at a pitched battle, you reduce the enemy team's opportunity space to a binary choice between "full engagement" and "full disengagement" for 15 seconds, and you're putting a significantly higher cost on that "full engagement" choice. The majority of the time the enemy team will not fully commit in a timely fashion, and this situation almost always results in a team wipe because it's essentially a self-inflicted power play for your team.
I agree that it's a much more technical LB with much starker limitations, to be sure, and even now I think I'm not really doing it justice - it's hard to explain just how much power it has when that power is much fuzzier and more context-dependent to understand than 'unga bunga 18k potency 2 second stun'. All I can really say is that if you gave me the choice between all the healer LBs and said I could take whichever one I wanted, I would take Mesotes every single time.