Any help for our boy Yasuo?

I would like to preface this with one request. If you didn't get a Victorious Skin from the Solo/Duo Ranked ladder this season, don't even bother responding.

Preseason wasn't kind to literally any non-tank/non-poke top. Talking about the fighter picks in particular. While these champions do have buffs on the PBE (in particular Black Cleaver and Tiamat), we still see ZERO buffs for Yasuo, who seems to have been neglected by Riot.

All of this data is from Yasuo's champion page on OP.GG Patch 7.22 led to Yasuo's winrate dropping by more than three percent. 49.72% on 7.21, down to 46.28% on 7.22. This winrate ALSO dropped slightly on Patch 7.23, where his pickrate fell a full 1 percent. We also observe a 1 percent pickrate drop from 7.21 to 7.22.

Not only is Yasuo struggling, as shown by a very significant and alarming drop in winrate, but this has also reached a point where some people no longer find the champion fun or enjoyable to play, as shown by the drop in pickrate.

OP.GG takes data for Ranked KR Soloq in Platinum and higher. Now, let's look at high elo solo queue.

First, we observe that Yasuo players in high elo tend to main the champion. Second, we have a single player with immense dedication to the champion to use as a little bit of a case study.

http://www.op.gg/summoner/userName=%ED%94%84%EC%A0%9C%EC%A7%B1

Here is his OP.GG profile. In Season 7, he played 1314 Ranked games on Yasuo. His next played champ was Rengar with a mere 102 games.

He managed a 55% winrate over 1314 games, which is a very high winrate given the number of games played. He finished at 465 LP in Korean Challenger. I think this was between Rank 90 and Rank 110.

Over Preseason, he dropped OUT OF CHALLENGER, all the way down to 100 LP Masters, a 365 LP drop. I don't know how much of this was decay, but his Yasuo winrate shows a significant difference, only 46% out of 130 games.

This all proves Yasuo needs SOME form of help from Riot. Where though? I'll try and explain the drop in winrate in terms of what was lost due to preseason.

1. Loss of Fervor of Battle (duh). This really doesn't need any additional explaining. Most Fervor fighters just suck right now. Press the Attack is NOT adequately compensating.

2. Attack Speed. Yasuo players (at least anyone who wasn't just messing around) would run full attack speed marks and quints with the old runes. This yielded 29% attack speed. Add 4% from the Fury mastery, and Yasuo starts off with 0.89 attack speed at level 1. Now, he only starts with 0.84. Okay, .05, what's the big deal here? First, champion feel. If you play a lot of games, you get accustomed to that feeling. This is especially important on Yasuo as the lower attack speed means a higher cooldown on Steel Tempest throughout the game until you reach that sweet cap of a 1.33 sec CD. This makes Yasuo feel clunky to seasoned players. Now, a counterargument would be, "Get used to it," but you would think 130 games would be enough for a player to adjust, as would two patches (four weeks) be enough for Yasuo's playerbase to adjust. The statistics clearly disprove the counterargument of adaptation. Yasuo gets 22% attack speed now, compared to 33% at the start of the game, which means he lost 1/3 of his starting attack speed. This will COMPOUND later into the game as the stat scales. This early game nerf segways perfectly into...

3. Shorter game times, more early game focus, and loss of Armor/Magic Resist (grouped together because they all build into each other). First, shorter game times mean games are usually decided before the 2-item combination of Phantom Dancer and Infinity Edge is even completed. Note that I say the word "decided" instead of "concluded." Sure, Yasuo can still REACH his 2-item core, but it won't be in time to keep a deficit from becoming insurmountable. This is why I use the word "decided," to convey that even though neither Nexus has fallen, the probability for a comeback for the team that is losing would likely be astronomically low. In other words, the lead built by the team which is winning is significant to a point where that team losing would be considered a massive throw. Sure, this could happen in Bronze or Silver, but once you reach high elo, these throws are VERY rare. Note: Yasuo's pre-25 minute winrate is 42.86%, meaning Yasuo loses nearly 3 out of every 5 games that end pre-25 minutes. Because games are shorter, early game is more important. Yasuo's early game got nerfed by the loss of 11% Attack Speed from runes/attack speed @ level 1. Lastly, Yasuo LOST around 3 armor due to preseason and 12 Magic Resist. This is really bad because the top lane meta is poke/tanks. Most poke/tank champions deal magic damage, so the loss of MR really hurts him. This is also exacerbated in the mid lane, where most matchups are magic damage dealers. The ~3 armor nerf also hurts against AD assassins, but I believe the Magic Resist is a bigger issue. Now, there are more matchups (again, mostly mid lane) where Yasuo would need a Hexdrinker rush to probably just not look like he's inting. This DELAYS that PD+IE powerspike by 1300 gold, which is massive in the early game. Furthermore, Yasuo may need to get early defensive items such as Ninja Tabi, Jaurim's Fist, or hell even Bramble Vest (yes people built this on him vs Fiora). I think you can see the problem here. But look, there's armor and MR in the Resolve tree, but wait...

4. Resolve Tree sucks if you're not a tank. Squishy champions really get nothing out of this tree. What, 6 Armor, 5/6 MR? 8 MR/Armor at 10 minutes, near the end of the laning phase? A bit of health regen that honestly doesn't do shit against poke damage given how oppressive poke is right now? Not to mention non-tanks probably aren't speccing into Resolve because it sucks for them and the trade-off clearly isn't worth it.

The item buffs on the PBE don't do anything for Yasuo, because you don't build those items on him.

What do you guys have planned for Yasuo? If that mini-rework thing is actually a thing, now would be the best time to do it. I would say give back the 12 MR (tbh just do this to all melee champs, maybe ADCs) and give him better tools/stats to survive the early game, maybe even slightly nerfing his late game (even though his late game is fine statistically, it's just the early that sucks). Lastly, I'd give the Resolve tree a pass and give some options for non-tank champions.