I'm worried about the nerfs Yorick will get

Yorick will get nerfs sometime soon, there's no doubt. While I can attribute it to Riot hating him and to him being utterly incapable of "flashy plays", the honest truth is that Yorick has two things that make it rough to allow him to stay above a global 50% winrate:

1. Yorick has a moderate skill floor

2. Yorick has a reliable play-style

In much the same way Darius functions, you can potentially pick up Yorick very quickly and click with him, but at the same time his strength and playstyle are not immediately apparent. This is speaking even before the QoL changes to his ultimate functionality: Yorick sat at a comfortable 49-50% winrate and honestly, that was probably for the best. Kind of like how a high skill-cap champion like Azir would raise a lot of eyebrows if he ever hit 50% winrates again, Yorick's at that middle point where going above 50% is something to wonder at, but sitting at 50% isn't something so bad - it would just mean he's relatively meta or strong.

We're reaching the point where it's not just a simple "Oh he's meta", though - more people have started picking him up (I've seen Yorick in at least 5 games I wasn't playing him the past couple days) and going through their profiles, I noticed that before this season, they hadn't so much as looked at a Yorick. And considering this was one of the least popular champions in League not to long ago, seeing him suddenly jump to over 2% winrates in toplane may not sound like much, but to those who play him it's definitely a weird sight.

So obviously what changed was Yorick's reliability - now that he has the utmost control of his ultimate, Yorick's free to choose his fights all the time and doesn't have to feel "tethered" to her in the worry that his ult will go to waste (and that thing has a 160 fuckin' second cooldown, it's pretty nuts). This makes it so Yorick's engagements require less dancing around the fine details and much more pummeling people to death with a shovel.

So before these QoL changes got introduced, here were just some of the considerations going into ulting with Yorick:

1. Can I stand to go without this?

2. I am facing X champ. Will my wall keep them in long enough to make this worth it?

3. Should I wait for them to engage or engage on them?

4. What are the odds that during this timeframe I'll get ganked?

5. Will I be needed elsewhere and need my ultimate there instead?

While these seem like normal run of the mill questions, this is the part that differs for Yorick: The amount he gets out of his ult is only as much as the amount of time it's out, lowered drastically when Yorick isn't with it. So whereas other ults you get the immediate PAWNCH out of it, you have to let Yorick's ult simmer for a bit before you start getting some real mileage out of it. This can mean that it has far more power than any other ultimate in the game... or that it's more useless than Rek'Sai's """""execute"""". As such, a two minute cooldown is the price we pay to have this kind of power, so if we whiff our ult, we get to really feel that whiff. This resulted in a great many disappointments where a champion such as Riven or Renekton would hard engage only to yeet right back out once you ult, leaving you at their mercy for the next two and a half minutes trying to keep them just low enough to not try it again (except they would because why wouldn't they what are you going to do, spit on them?). This was because once your maiden was pushing a lane, she kept going until death or she destroyed everything - usually death was what stopped her.

Now we don't have to ever worry about that. The maiden stays leashed until otherwise told to head somewhere else, and that's magnificent - and an issue, because the maiden working with Yorick is arguably worth a champion in and of herself, so to say that "Yorick can 1v2 people" is misleading because Yorick practically becomes his own 2-man team like this. Having the ability to keep the Maiden up almost indefinitely with no down time basically turns Yorick into a much douchier Tryndamere - push, baby, push, and you better send two people because one isn't going to cut it ever.

This leaves us with the issue that a once pretty unreliable champion has finally had his most frustrating mechanic brought under his control - meaning that while Yorick was fairly balanced before, he was more or less gambling whereas now he just gets to decide what the numbers are on the dice and place them down. To address this, we now have to do one of the following:

1. Revert the changes, returning Yorick to a state in which he flat out didn't feel as great to play as he does now.

2. Nerf Yorick's power outside of his ultimate, gimping his laning prowess and placing him into a "late-game carry" role that he never was geared to pull off due to his relatively weak team-fighting.

3. Nerf Yorick's ultimate, paying the price of power in exchange for reliability.

The issue with these is that first of all, number 1 just can not be an option because holy shit was that infuriating to work around and would probably be one of the leading reasons any would-be Yorick players would just not even bother - but numbers 2 and 3 directly harm Yorick's dueling capabilities, meaning hitting those directly affects his ability to actually do his primary job and harshly - Yorick's already not particularly strong without his ult, so shafting his power outside of it further will likely make him near unplayable.

But a nerf has to happen, and we may have to hit his ult since of all the options, it's the one thing that can stand to take a hit right now. But I want to plead here: please, Riot, use discretion. Yorick's ultimate has a number of weaknesses already, from being killable/shutdown-able very quickly to being kiteable and still relatively imprecise (since to get it to attack who you want from a range you have to peg someone with your E). Nerfing the maiden's health will end up making it almost impossible to keep alive long enough to do anything while nerfing its damage too much will make it a completely moot point and nothing more than a meat shield.

If I had to choose a nerf, I would go with the Annie treatment or something of the like: the maiden can only stay on the field for so long. Maybe even throw in an aggro mechanic: the maiden can only go so long without fighting someone or something, meaning you can't just ult under turret and sit there for eternity daring the other player to get just close enough to get trapped in your W. Before hitting his power directly, we should look first at his ultimate up-time versus down-time.

#The TL;DR here is: please don't Olaf Yorick. Put some effort into fine-tuning Yorick before just taking a sledgehammer and smashing away at him.