Master Yi as a Champion

He is dogshit. He doesn't provide anything to his team, his damage is crap, he is gated by ridiculous cool downs and his E still removes the measly 10% bonus ad steroid. His ult his trash and everything about him is utter garbage. I love having to build Guinsoo's rage blade if I want to do damage and if I go crit yi I just get one shotted by ADCs before I get into auto range.

Here's what other people have to say:

Cowsep:

" I'll respond to this point by point.

Point 1:

Yi cannot control the game in this meta the same way he used to. He does not control objectives or control the enemy jungler so he does not control the pace.

Objectives: Other than maybe Dragon you control no objectives better than any other jungler. But even the dragon is a toss up. You have no escape and often suicide if you plan to do it alone. The only benefit Yi has over others is that he can kill it quite quickly, without any blink ability to in or out of the pit after hes done. If hes blue team he can use the blast plant to get over. Red team tough luck. He could gank and kill bottom and then do dragon with his bot lane... but the chances of getting a good gank bottom are less than if you had played a meta jungler and therefore the meta jungler does this better. Also he only clears the dragon faster after Bloodrazor (usually minute 8 or 9).

Riot removed solo Barons, your Alpha will also reset the dragon and the baron and since you rarely get successful ganks in higher elo, towers never go down. Rift Herald is arguably a bit easier on Yi but even a support can take that.

Crabs are considered objectives as well, have you tried killing one of those as any other jungler with CC?

Point 2:

Splitting: In regards to splitting Yi does not get to split anyway near as much as he used to. Post 20 you cannot split bot lane or lose the Baron. With constant team fight skirmishes 5v5s are meta and your team will either lose a player or a Baron if you go bottom. Do you want to split top? Good luck taking that from the TP top laner who actually has a tool to get into the 5v5s.

Lets assume that you do manage to solo split a lane, congratulations, you've found an incredibly rare thing in diamond+ elo. However we're now at the next stage, can you even 1v1 their top laner?

With the changes of Highlander even tanks can beat Yi now since he has no duration on Highlander, and if the tank can outlast your E duration you're done. Ekko can literally drain out your entire Highlander time. Good luck hitting Akali. Irelia stuns you for 2 seconds. Jax just dodges everything.

On top of that his tower clear speed is not even the fastest. With an on-hit build a lot of your damage is gated behind your on hits or true damage. Neither of which work on tower. With crit build you can push slightly faster (on minions and tower) but even then you don't get the crit bonus on tower. And dear god do not use Highlander on that tower or you're useless for the next 85 seconds (less w/ essence reaver build).

Point 3:

Yes, you do handicap yourself to have fun. Not even with champions like lee, vi, ww. You literally play Sejuani and if you somehow fall behind no one cares because you're still useful. Imagine if you fall behind on Yi.

Point 4:

Yi no longer excels at 1v1 and 1v2 situations. Several champions now have the ability to beat him 1v1 w/ equal feed mid-game (which is actually hard for Yi since jungle is essentially second support). Out of the top of my head - Tryndamere, Fiora, Kayle, Jax, Akali, Ekko, Kha'zix, Irelia, Graves, Jayce, Vayne, Yasuo w/ minion wave. This is literally just out of the top of my head. Late game the list gets a bit shorter but he still suffers. Any CC bot support player will mess you up 2v1. Good luck with an equally fed Kallista + Braum, Leona, Blitzcrank.

No, you cannot burn your ult to escape a fight you cannot win. All champions now have movement steroids that rival Master Yi. Ever tried to run from a Fiora? Even with level 3 ult it will not happen. Ever seen a Graves proc Stormraiders? Later Yi. Irelia? Black Clever? Yasuo dashing through minions? Camilla double dash and then deals more true damage in one hit than us over an entire E duration? Taking a look at the list of new champions that came out, all of them except Ornn and Ivern (who are never in games) have a move speed boost or dash that can be used to capture Master Yi. Taliyah's wall slide is faster than level 2 Highlander. The ult CD is also not that short, it is actually longer than most team fighting ultimates that aren't Amumu or Karthus.

It also takes time to push lanes, for you and your teammates. It is actually very rare where both lanes can be manipulated at the same time that allows your team to take objectives when you're in position to push waves. Often times people don't even bother to come after Master Yi, 4v5 fights into Baron simply win the game. Since your early game weaks are pretty garbage all the towers are up and there is no need to deal with Master Yi right away.

Point 5:

Congratulations, our champion can "clean up". Instead of being an active part of a fight and winning a straight up 5v5 we force our team to almost win a 4v5 instead. Any other teammate would make a "clean up" fight turn into a "won fight" where your remaining teammates could actually take an objective.

All of my views are from many many seasons of Diamond++ Master Yi gameplay in Korea. 20000+ MASTER YI games played. I know getting pentas are fun (I got over 100 last season) but it doesn't mean the champion is good."

Sekai [OCE]:
"TL;DR - Yi is a handicap champ, there, I said it.

Yi is an objectively shit champ with barely anything in his kit considering 3 out of 5 of his kits (including passive) are strictly AA steroids which are utterly useless unless Yi himself is fed and use the item and level advantage to steamroll with those 3 AA steroids, which it also begs the question about how he even get there especially against any team with coordination and/or have CC given that over half of his kit is dedicated to AA steroids. And this issue is also helped by the fact Yi has ZERO UTILITY, which makes trying to snowball early even harder.

Yi has his bread and butter Q and W and the refresh passive from R that saves him from being literally the worst champ in the game, and those stuff are pretty great. But then they also have high gatings with Q's earlier CD approaches 20 seconds (and 15 when maxed) which fortunately can be reduced by 1 second per AA but it's still pretty damn long practically by itself (note another focus on AA'ing, compound with the previous paragraph), however W ain't so lucky as it's on a fixed 35 second CD which is REALLY long for a normal spell CD, and lastly there is the refresh passive that you don't even have pre-6 and even post-6 you need to kill/assist to use the refresh passive which suggests you already need to be in some kind of lead hence begs the same question mentioned earlier.

Some time before someone mentioned that Yi will only ever be as good as how bad his opponents are, to much extent, they're right. As Yi, while you will not have much mechanical management beyond timing your Q and W efficiently and critically in hot situations (which is not easy especially in higher elos, but I'd be lying to say Yi has complex mechanical plays overall), but you as a player (assuming in any respectable elo bracket) generally have to be flat out better (as a 'player') than your opponent to play a successful Yi against them; Yi is completely useless, as a matter of fact if we just look at his kit itself as a package, Yi severely lacks the "leading power" to be able to direct the game as he wants but rather he can only react to enemies fucking up first as again his kit is totally useless (due to its AA focus and extreme gating on the remaining parts less to do with AA'ing) unless it's already fed for some reason (by capitalising the bad-ness of the enemy team). Hence "Yi will only ever be as good as how bad his opponents are". Well, I guess if you're so good, you can also just bait the opponents into fucking up for you to capitalise on as a Yi, which links to the other point, that you have to be flat out better than your opponent as a player in order to beat them as Yi.

See the point?

In short, like the premise I'd stated, Yi like a couple others on the roster, is literally is a handicap (again assuming in any respectable elo). Maybe not against total fucking noobs, but then again, they get rekt by anything just harder by Yi as he snowballs harder so it's not like it really makes a difference.

You might counter-argue "b-but, using your own logic, wouldn't that just mean every champ is a handicap?" Well, no, because as I've said, due to how his kit is, Yi can not "lead" the game but rather he can only "react" to it. And in order to "lead", Yi has to create a situation for which the opponents are baited or even forced into making mistakes for Yi to "react" to; it's indirect and certainly much harder to pull than leading the charge yourself because you're good at the game, as Yi often has to completely outplay own their opponents from head to toe and play them like a cat playing around with a rat to be doing the "leading". Point hammered.

Here do note, I am completely not considering the scenario of getting carried, because it's pointless to talk about for every champ.

But sadly, Yi is unlikely to ever receive his respect he deserves, as many people continue to ridicule and mock this already very bad champ and pretend that he casually 1 shots the enemy team for breakfast for memes or something, as people will just continue to meme this shit out of him (and his players) even tho the meme train about this guy died 3-4 fucking years ago already. It's very sad."

Feel free to meme on this shitty champion in hopes Riot Games even cares about this guy anymore because he's too "OP" in low elo :^)