a former yasuo mains hot take on what makes him fun and unfun for me

i used to play a crap ton of yasuo, i stopped when i realized i would never be good enough to make the champion work consistently and im a bad laner in general (jungle main) but i did love me some yasuo, my favorite thing about yasuo was his E, i didn't care about anything else, it was just a ton of fun to dash around through the minion wave, i like to press buttons a lot and yas E is a button you press a lot.

the things i don't like about playing against yasuo is that as a sustained damage champion his primary success condition is to get in range of his opponents, something that yas can very easily do, and if yasuo has a lead your only real option is to sit back and wait for him to shove the wave under tower or bait him in for your jungler, and i don't really like his item curve at all, it's kinda unreasonable that he gets such a mid game power spike with crit itemization (a stat that generally doesn't start to turn on until 4+ items) and has the insurance of a strong late game, if you do beat him hard enough in the early game it feels kinda irrelevant, he's still gonna get 2 items, i appreciated it when i played him (made my 0/4 laning score irrelevant) but it's very lame to play against

and the worse part about the crit line is that it trashed his base stats, yasuo players want to fight in lane because his kit is super strong in lane (no resource, no downtime on his offensive spells) but they can't even approach melee champions like pantheon or darius, yas can rush down squishy ranged champs no problem, but it's the melee dudes of top lane that really punish him

i feel yasuo should be more of a early-mid game champion, and his combat power should be a bit more windowed, maybe add a cooldown to E and then when it's cast he can keep casting it within 4 seconds of each cast (so that theres times you know he can't dash in and out) and up his base stats while changing/removing his crit passive would it really be a bad thing for yasuo to build cdr like any other champion? you could make his windwall have a flat 24 second cooldown since it'd scale down with his itemization

i dunno this is just stuff i've been thinking about a lot, crit on yasuo does do one thing good, it stops him from ever getting to build tanky sorta, but historically yas has always gone for builds that allow him to bypass his need for infinity edge (frozen mallet yas, triforce yas) so he can get actually defensive stats,

TLDR

things i like about yasuo: -dashing is fun and will always be fun -the E-Q combo feels great

things i dislike about yasuo: -no downtime on offensive abilities makes him hard to fight, especially with a lead -base stats conflict with the nature of his kit built for aggressive laning -late game scaling makes beating him in lane irrelevant

im no yassuo or even a yasuo player anymore, nor am i like super high rank, but im a passionate player and i used to love the champion, and sympathize with players who want to play him, and riot asked for feedback. heres my feedback

thanks for reading!