Yorick should be reworked again

Moody P··2 votes·1,021 views

Current design - or at least, the way the balance team has handled him - is atrocious

Yorick is almost routinely punished in patch notes for doing the things he was specifically designed to do; beat you with ghouls and split push. Yorick being shackled to minion waves in order to get his spawns out at all means he is forced to be a side lane pusher and thrive in side lanes almost exclusively. Him having the longest set-up time of any pet/summoning champion as well as the laughably low durability of said summons means that they have to be able to get damage out quickly. It takes him at a minimum 28-16 seconds of last hitting with Q before he has CDR, based on Q's rank, to get enough ghouls to be a threat. This means that you can zone him from waves and fight him for the entire time before he has ghouls ready and you will absolutely win every trade. On top of that, his trade isn't guaranteed; he has to then land a very small, slow skillshot before the ghouls actually do anything. _This _ means that when he does get those ghouls, and he does land that skillshot, he will punish you very hard.

Naturally, like any Juggernaut who has high intrinsic counterplay that requires more thought than "dodge the skillshot," he's disproportionately strong in ranks where players are simply bad and do not understand these weaknesses inherent to his kit. This has caused him to get nerfed, over, and over, and now we're at a point where his ghouls are scarcely a majority of his damage and quickly become irrelevant as Yorick buys Trinity Force and additional AD.

I think it's safe to say that Yorick will not end up in a position where he can be actually worth picking in higher levels of play and not pub-stomp Bronze and Silver. For this reason I'd like to ask, humbly, that Yorick be given another rework that fixes the following issues, which I think would solve his high/low rank discrepancies

  • Reliance on creep waves to summon ghouls
  • Squishiness of his summons forcing Yorick to not rely on them for success despite being designed and intended as THE summoner of LoL
  • Yorick disproportionately obliterating immobile champions while being useless vs champions who can dash out of his setups (extremely lopsided matchups based on generic traits and not specific qualities)
  • 'Invisible power' tagged onto Maiden (namely the huge amount of % damage he gains while attacking whoever Maiden hits)

I think these are the core issues that should be addressed when rebalancing Yorick, if you want to fix him in the long term. Thanks for reading.

5 Comments

l MrD l2 votes

yeh im kinda disappointed with the kit ... it was very fun at first but i dont like how hes just a niche split pushing champ ... i kinda wanna see teh ghouls and yorick be there in a team fight just seeing dying corpses help win fights .... even the maiden although strong but you cant just leave the maiden alone while you go join a fight it never works or is very hard to do ... shes mainly there to spawn to kill or help you push a wave

ZT Xperimentor1 votes

Yeah the rework removed a lot of the silent personality of how his kit worked. He's very one note in playstyle, which is what they said they were trying to avoid, lol.

Sauronkaiser2 votes

Yorick has been the funniest and more adictive champ in the game since the rework. The point is that riot just fucked him up with their incompetent balance, but that happened to a lot of champs. To fix things i would aim to make riot take care of the actual game again.

Critmaster Garen1 votes

the problem isnt current yoricks design. his kit is really fun with clear windows of strength and weakness.

the problem is that it was nerfed into the ground for no fucking reason at all.

i remember when yorick was able to fight darius head on early game with 4 ghouls and hitting his w and e. now id be suprised if he can 1v1 soraka even when he hits all of his abilities.

Moody P1 votes

I don't think I would describe him as fun

Current yorick suffers the same issue as illaoi imo; too much setup reliance that is also unreliable on payoff. I don't think riot can make that design "work" unless they're happy with yorick being relegated to pubstomp status

But I like jungle yorick a lot more than lane yorick and they killed that, so I'm salty about it

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