Yasuo - An Honest Discussion

It's been two years since release and nearly a year since the biggest set of nerfs, can we as a community finally sit down and talk about where Yasuo sits in this game? Because no matter what Riot does, he's always going to be strong; I am absolutely fine with that. But he's the new Riven, where he gets a whole bunch of early power and snowballs into a lategame terror without any real compromise along the way unless you already counter him. This was frustrating enough before Warlord's Bloodlust.

For the uninitiated, Warlord's Bloodlust gives 15% lifesteal on crits, as well as 20% attack speed for 4 seconds afterward, with an internal cooldown of 2 seconds. This is, by and large, a pretty solid ability. It's an amped up version of the old Frenzy mastery, where crits gave you 5% stacking AS up to 15%, reworked to sit in its new place as a keystone mastery. For adcs like Vayne or Jinx, it's a really cool ability. For an assassin like Talon, it gives him that little nudge more in terms of survivability to successfully remove the target he wants.

For Yasuo and, to a lesser but still visible extent Tryndamere, this nearly trivializes laning for champions that already had pretty decent laning to begin with. I'm going to focus on Yasuo, though, and the areas I think he can use work so that the mastery itself can stay. Yasuo is meant to be a mobile fighter, and he does that well. His dash can be frustrating to deal with at times, but ultimately he can't use it defensively in a lot of situations - I think ultimately this is balanced. Could it use tweaking? Maybe, I don't particularly mind one way or the other. His Q is relatively balanced, it's easy enough to avoid and is essentially just another auto-attack in lieu of rightclicking. The tornado is pretty easily telegraphed, and generally if you get hit with it there's a good reason, whether that's poor play on your part or good play on his. Windwall is cool, it's on a cooldown where it can be impactful, but also baited.

Where I mostly have issues are where all of these things combine into one of the most overloaded kits in the game. A champion with conditionally unlimited dashes, a knockup, a potent shield, no mana to worry about, objectively one of the most game-changing ults there is, or a way to block all projectiles for a time isn't broken, and I don't a champion with some of them would be either. But Yasuo ticks all of those boxes and he's frustrating to play against, even if it's great fun to play as him. He's one of my favourite champions in the game, but enough is enough.

Enough bitching though, this is meant to be a suggestion box. Yasuo's dynamic is early game dueling, lategame lategame skirmishing. His lategame REALLY isn't a problem in my books, he's like Vayne or any other hypercarry. If he gets too fed it's on your team to live with the consequences, and you can always just gang up on him if need be. So in order to do that, his early game should be tweaked but his lategame left mostly intact.

I think the easiest way to accomplish this is to force him to make compromises during the lane phase. Much like Thresh got with his passive damage, I think the shield potency and recharge rate should be tied to his rank in Windwall rather than just something he gets by levelling up. Overloaded kits aren't the healthiest to begin with, but at least with someone like Lee, he only has access to certain parts of that or at certain power levels for most of the game. If he wants to be aggressive with damage and CC, he can do this by focusing on Q and E, even if W is somewhat neglected. Yasuo makes no such compromise, and as such really has no incentive to level anything but Q. Windwall is a one-point wonder, and even E pales in comparison to Q during lane phase, as E is primarily used for mobility over damage anyway. Bake shield strength into Windwall as a passive, and now Yasuo players have to decide if they want to prioritize damage or their sustain. This opens the door for meaningful counterplay, especially for burst mages who either risk their life to trigger his shield early, or lose their kill potential outright.

Secondly, it feels fair to nerf the penetration portion of his ult to lower numbers at lower ranks - as top of my head numbers, 0/25/50% at ranks 1/2/3 feel safe. This way he can contribute to fights lategame, but this also allows for someone to mitigate some of his damage specifically while laning. This is by far a lower priority than the shield suggestion, but I think it would make his counterplay much healthier.

If you got this far, thanks a lot! I don't post a whole ton, but I think this is one of the times where speaking up is important, since this is what Preseason is for. If anyone else has suggestions or concerns, obviously feel free to share them below. Have a great day!