A Level 6 Aatrox Player's Opinion

Okay so as someone who really enjoys Aatrox, and has tried for such a long time to make him work, here's my 2 cents. I originally posted this as a comment, but figured it was long enough to be a thread of its own.

This change fixed a bunch of his problems, such as a counter-intuitive kit and misguided ratios.

Previously, his %HP costs would make it unfavorable to build health items, but his low base health would require him to build health. Now, he can freely stack tank items without losing a giant chunk of HP whenever he wants to engage.

Previously, his Blood Price would never be viable to use because it was less efficient to lose your own health to deal a tad bit of extra damage in comparison to simply gaining back a huge amount of health. Now, it's actually a legitimate choice you have to make, since you won't get your passive off without using Blood Price, but you won't heal yourself without using Blood Thirst.

Previously, he had terrible AD scalings, making it pointless to even try and build damage, as it wasn't efficient in the slightest. Now, he actually gets rewarded for building damage items other than attack speed/on-hit items.

However, this rework didn't fix a few other problems that plague his kit, mainly being an extremely telegraphed engage tool, punishingly high cooldowns on his CC, and a lackluster ultimate that seems anti-thematic when you really look at Aatrox's lore.

Finally, this change added a couple of new problems:

1. His Passive is really awkward to use effectively in lane, and can be countered easily in team fights if people simply wait until his Bloodwell is drained to finish him off; very similar to Zilean if you ask me.

2. His jungle is just stupid. Trying to clear at level 1 without a leash is either completely impossible, or slow as hell. After this, it gets a little better, but for a bandage update, making a change that negatively impacts one of the roles that he's always been fine in is kinda ridiculous.

Overall tho, I think this change does more good than bad. I'd like his Passive to be less awkward, and I'd easily take lower cooldowns on his Q over higher ratios any day, but I think I'm going to be playing Aatrox a lot more now.