Azir needs some serious tweaking.

Before going off on how he is a high skill camp champ and all that hear me out.

Yes, his kit is definitely full of excellent pieces to make amazing plays. Yes he has a lot of utility and his ult can be devastating if used correctly. But to me it feels like he has no place in the game as it is right now. First lets talk about his kit.

Arise! (W): The fact that you basically lock your level 1 to do nothing leaves you extremely vulnerable until at least level 2. If you are playing mid the enemy jungler will almost always grab red then head mid to try and get a FB. (More on this later) So he kinda just sits under turret until level 4.

Conquering Sands (Q): What a joke. Step slightly back or side ways and you are good to go. Half the time you toss your soldier at the enemies face and all he needs to do until you get a crystal scepter is walk away and you just threw 110 mana to do about 200 damage. Even with Crystal Scepter the burst damage is all you will get on them, and your soldiers will just sit there waiting to vanish.

Shifting Sands (E): Only use offensively if there is a yasou on your team. Unless you build lots of health this is pretty much useless in team fights. You throw your q, e behind their adc and ult get ready to just get locked down with cc and die almost immediately. In a coordinate 5v5 this initiation is great half the time. Mostly though it just gets you killed

Emperor's divide (R): O yes the wall that can seal teams for 7 seconds without being able to touch you. Lies. Every relevant dash move gets over this wall. Ez? Check. Leblanc? Check. As long as its a pseudo flash it will go through, meaning you only really use your ult to disengage and E away. And since almost everyone runs flash, this wall is useless most of the time.

His kit sets him up to be a great duelist, but he just falls short most of the time, specially early to mid game.

Now my real concern is how he doesn't seem to have an actual roll. His Q would seem suitable for a mage type, but his W is clearly geared to abusing health items. His passive says okay, get cdr and get attack speed, so am I a marksman? I have seen many builds on azir and no matter how I think about it, there are champs that do his job better. His CDR passive always gives me a headache. If you want to capitalize on it, you have to be committed to getting that 40% CDR, be it through runes, masteries, items, or w.e combination of the three. The thing is most CDR items do little more than give you that, CDR. Nashor's is a popular item on him, but it is so expensive and you don't actually get to proc the passive from it, since his soldiers only do on-spell effects. Which means you spend what would be a Deathcap simply to have a higher attack speed on your soldiers. If you don't get Nashor's your choices for CDR and decent attack speed are severely limited. So okay you build a Chalice, the MR is nice, the mana regen is nice, and wow CDR plus more AP? Except that again it is expensive, and by the time you finish it, the enemy ap will have a Deathcap or a Zhonya's. Which means they can just burst you down since the MR from Unholy Grail isn't that good, and Azir is not naturally tanky. TL:DR Azir sacrifices too much damage to acquire CDR, early CDR items leave him extremely vulnerable

His E is another thing. If you get RoA for health, and mana problems, your E is really strong, but your soldiers still suck. You Q, you E, enemy just needs to step away and wait a bit and you will deal little to no damage. Most of his problems come from his complicated itemization. You never really know whether to get that Crystal Scepter over that RoA cus you might need Lyandry's for those tanks. Or do you get Zhonya's and a Nashor's with Veil and and a bunch of CDR items. The fact that all your abilities only seem to agree on the fact that they scale with AP, makes it really hard to be successful during the laning phase. Their jungler will almost always come mid if you are Azir, he just needs for you to pop your q for harrass and he will almost always have an 4 second window to wreck you with their AP mid. Most AP mid picks right now will counter Azir on sheer range. Most meele champs counter Azir top, and as a support you are terribly outclassed by champs like leona and morgana.

I doubt it is worth it to spend months trying to perfect a high skill champ just to get a few knock up initiations right, when most players just face roll on their keyboard and get pentas with basic champs. To me the one thing that could make azir much more playable is maybe have his shield scale with AP instead of health, and make his soldiers more versatile. Because once you move them with your q they just kinda sit there. I can never tell if he is supposed to burst people, or do damage over time with his soldiers. Maybe have them fade faster but deal more magic damage, or have them be like Yorick's ghouls and follow the target without being directly controlled. Either way something needs to be fixed to make him more relevant.