Aatrox: My thoughts on what makes him a weak champion

Q is a 13 second gap-close, W empowers autos, E is a pathetic slow, R empowers autos. From what you can see, autoing is clearly what Aatrox is designed to do, although his kit has some major flaws which really hold him back.

Firstly, well, mainly, the champion design itself (lol). If you look at adcs, who are also auto-attack dependent, you'll notice most have ither far range and/or have an engage/disengage ability. Now obviously all adcs are ranged, and when you think about why, it makes complete sense.

Adc are DPS (damage per second) champions, meaning they can consistently pump out damage, although it's not burst damage from what you'd see from a mage. With this in mind, adcs need to be ranged because without the range between them and their opponents, the opponent could shut-down the adc with ither CC/burst before the adc can apply the DPS.

Now when looking at Aatrox we have a similar situation only, it's a bit backwards. He's melee and because of this to get onto his opponents Aatrox must Q in, now this is where everything can go wrong, if you hit the Q, you have a decent chance of a kill, you miss the Q, you are the sitting duck of League of Legends. The reason? Unlike most ranged adcs who can kite and damage with just their autos, Aatrox NEEDS to close that gap before doing the same, and unless you have opponents running literally into you, I doubt you'll close the gap.

Now I havent addressed this and it's what 'defines' Aatrox, it's his passive and lifesteal. So, just to be clear, Aatrox is a dps champion, meaning a fight needs to last maybe over 3 seconds for him to get the advantage, now when you Q to close that gap (which is necessary), a lot of the time you will immediately be perma-CC'd or get bursted, clearly you can surprise opponents by jumping in from jungle, but you still need that time to deal the DPS damage. Now Riot has that covered by giving you AN EXTRA LIFE! OH BOY I HAVE A FREE !! THIS CHAMPION MUST BE OP!!!!! Sadly no, his passive is actually much worse than most 'revive' passives, the reason is because your passive depends on your Blood Well, the higher your Blood Well, the more you will heal when you die, as well, you gain attack speed for every stack of Blood Well you collect, which can give you a good amount of attack speed which is actually quite strong. Although this entire concept is dropped when your passive goes off because, you absorb all the blood in your Blood Well, meaning not only are you sitting wherever you just died with half HP (at most half HP), but all that extra attack speed is gone, nullifying his entire passive while also crippling him since now getting W autos takes that much longer. With Anivia, Zac, they just simply need to come back to life, once they do, nothing has been taken away but the passive itself.

You might be thinking 'Well you could build tanky to counter burst', ' Just build a bunch of Lifesteal', etc. The thing is Aatrox needs sooooo much to actually make him viable, that you literally can't fill in all his weaknesses. You build tanky, then you have no attack speed to apply W, you build lifesteal, you are too squishy to do anything, you build dmg/tank, then you don't have attack speed or lifesteal lol. He's just a mess and Riot needs to take responsibility and fix whatever this creature is they call Aatrox.