Diagonalization of ĤL-PDFT [U ] yields PESs that have the correct topology near conical intersections and locally avoided crossings, a property that is also enforced in other MS-PDFT methods such as CMS-PDFT. Unlike XMS-PDFT, L-PDFT is able to correctly reproduce the PES for the difficult spiro cation. Additionally, L-PDFT does not fail for degenerate states of nearly-linear molecules as CMS-PDFT does. Benchmarking L-PDFT vertical excitation energies for a representative set of organic chromophores showed that L-PDFT performs similarly to MC-PDFT, whereas CMS-PDFT performs worse than MC-PDFT. Further, we note that the computational cost of L-PDFT scales as a constant with the number of states included in the state averaging, whereas MC-PDFT and CMS-PDFT scale linearly with the number of states, making L-PDFT formally a faster method. Lastly, L-PDFT also has the