Aatrox's rework reiterates something about immobility

It's not like this is anything new of course - the pain of immobility on champions has been felt for a pretty long goddamn while, with the only escape from this being 1) season 5, when tanks mattered enough to be able to actually peel for immobile champions (and as many of them were also pretty immobile, they themselves had strength to stand their ground as such) and 2) being an immobile hypercarry in seasons 6 and 7 when you had an enchanter on your side (yay juggermaw, that certainly never got old [coughsarcasmcough]). Having to "burst or be bursted" isn't a super good feeling, especially when your life relies upon positioning against 4 different melees with immediate dashes and blinks to your location - sorry, but you're staying behind if you fall behind.

This has basically been what makes laning against shit like Yasuo, Zed, Ekko, etc. just utterly frustrating whenever they're ever strong - because what do you do? Run away? Yeah, all right, good luck matching the speed of a dash without homeguards. Stand and fight? Not against the meta on top of overlapping meta - mobility on top of their strength is just going to see you get destroyed.

So is this post about how they're overpowered? No, not really. Let me reiterate: whenever they're strong, that is when they're just outright infuriating. When it comes to things like Lux or Morgana, though, they may be overwhelming at some point, but there's always that idea that "Well at least I can reach them" (even when you couldn't, thanks Luden's release and your 10% MS increase) because once you got to them, chances are they weren't just going to blink away from you laughing.

So this isn't a post about how mobile champs are broken right now or that immobile champs desperately need a buff - it's about things that can be frustrating or make you feel helpless, and immobility as a champion always feels rather stifling.

Aatrox's rework basically reinforces that yet again - because Aatrox is dogshit versus mobility. Who'd have thought that having a massive wind-up on your main source of damage would make you pretty helpless against champs who can actively just avoid them? "Oh but TC, Aatrox is also mobile. He has a dash on his E that lets him pass through terrain even. How does this reiterate anything?"

Because Aatrox absolutely feasts on champions who're immobile. Yes his Q is still the most telegraphed and dodgeable ability in the game only outmatched by Sion's literal "hold Q, mother fucker" stun or Sion's quite literally screamed ult - but "unreliable" doesn't mean "will never land", and Aatrox's dash does give him all the tools he really needs to land his Q on immobile opponents - mobile opponents can still freely fake out Aatrox or just dash out of the way as he's moving, scott-free no issue.

Immobile opponents don't have this option. In fact, immobile opponents don't really have any option as Aatrox's early damage and ability to dive is a bit absurd, especially when that's what he's made to do - his highlight video literally throws this into the limelight. As Aatrox, you go ham, no questions asked - so unless you sit a good 800 units back from Aatrox and just pelt him with spells non-stop (most top laners can't do that), you're probably all set to eat shit.

This pretty much highlights the primary issue with being immobile in this game - if you can't overpower the enemy, you have no defense. Of course most immobile champions come packing CC - but in most cases it's unreliable and in Aatrox's case, unless it's quite long and activatable from a range, it still doesn't stop him from swinging his sword. This issue isn't exclusive to Aatrox, either - a lot of champs pack a ton of power at the cost of being quote on quote "kite-able" or dodgeable, when in reality this kind of exploitation is mostly only accomplished by champions who have some form of mobility. Try kiting a Skarner as Jinx for example, or see how long you can keep Shyvana at bay even without her ult. On paper and in the mess of teamfights, sure, that's really not such an insane thing to ask for - in laning and any small skirmish situation, those odds are dropping drastically.

All of this gets clearer and clearer when you go from an immobile champion to a mobile one. All the avenues open up - how you attack, defend, kite, escape, make your way across the map - all these opportunities and options open up for you and give you such insane control over a situation that going back to immobility from it just feels helpless.

I like to play Kayn a lot. He's fun. He's versatile and challenging. I feel like trying to get at who I want is an actual strategy. But I can recognize that his E and Q - walking through walls at will and being able to dash over them as well in a pinch - give me so many options to go about things that immobile champions feel more like a feast than an actual opponent. And when I'm barreling down on them from the fog of war, they have so few options besides flash or pray they hit their CC (in most cases they don't).

What I'm saying is that immobility a lot of the times is such an enormous drawback that it can far outweigh the pros given to them in return - Brand packing enough firepower to turn Nevada into a glass floor really doesn't mean much when I can wall walk behind him, nail him with my W from the same range as any of his spells, and then immediately ult inside of him as he whiffs his stun on where I would have been. Being the unstoppable juggernaut Sion, charging down mid and slamming into the enemy and proceeding to beat the shit out of them, really isn't particularly impressive when you're so far behind because you tried fighting a hyper-mobile champion in lane who just avoided every one of your Q's and wailed on you as you helplessly tried to shout at them. There's not a lot of options for immobile champions in lane and that tends to leave a lot of our immobile friends in the dust, especially when we're talking about tanks.

So how about this. There are some tanks that do better on the move, and some tanks tend to try to act like an immovable fortress - but we have basically no up-side to option two that the first option can't also just do. In fact, going option two gives you next to nothing better in your power budget as a trade-off for being immobile - at least not right now.

If we had a defensive rune - one that gave bonus damage reduction while standing still, a kind of "unmoving wall" for our immobile friends to let them take advantage of their lack of movement - that would open up a world of opportunities for champs without any innate dodges. Come up with some balances against champions with mobility that would try to abuse it and I think we may be able to see some of our walls come back instead of getting torn down by every bruiser with a dash.