The Aatrox changes didn't really hit the mark.
As some of you may already know, patch 7.5 shipped the changes to Aatrox that hoped to fix his 'unbalanced design' and bring him into a state where he would slowly move towards the target of being healthy. Currently however, his state is even worse than he was ever before as his kit simply does not even 'work' anymore. His new passive, the stacking Blood Rush mechanism whilst hoping to fix his free steroid access has gated him more than ever before and has highlighted issues Riot may have overlooked when they addressed him.
Simply put, you cannot give him a spell based/caster passive whilst simultaneously ignoring the fact that his cooldowns are WAY too long to make use of this passive. Adding to this, the passive drains way too quickly in and out of combat if there is no interaction and the stats it provides does not really assist in anything substantial (Bloodprice scales off of BONUS attack damage whilst the passive provides BASE attack damage). To clarify, when you're out of combat for more than 5 seconds Blood Rush begins to deplete. You can't even walk from red buff to wolves in 5 seconds without your entire Bloodwell bar completely drying up. You can't even lane properly and last hit without letting your bar completely drying up. The result now is that to get to your 'stages of strength' you have to be permanently in combat which is not always optimal nor plausible. Currently, this is the weakest point I've seen Aatrox become and I hope that this passive becomes optimized in a sooner patch rather than later.
Another grey area Riot seems to have missed is the fact that they completely uprooted the entire Aatrox fanbase in their attempt to push him towards this caster based route. Because C/D is now a must have stat on Aatrox adding on to the abundance of other stats he needs, Aatrox has even less flexibility to build. Previously, Aatrox was a jack of all trades master of none - you could take him anywhere and build him into anything and even whilst not optimal, every Aatrox player had their own unique and special identity/build to the champion. It seems that now, we're being forced to build cookie cutter 'bruiser' as in - Cleaver, Death's Dance, Titanic hydra, etc and honestly, this is neither interesting nor fun. Currently, I don't even feel like playing Aatrox as he does not represent the light fighter / diver he was marketed as before. It's as if they tried to do too much in one go and as a result, placed him in a worse position than before.
I really hope Riot does extra work to him before we have to sit and wait for 6 months+ for divers to be looked at because as he is right now... I'd rather play Galio than Aatrox.
tl;dr - The passive has no chemistry with Aatrox, it's too reliant on spells and Aatrox has exceptionally long cooldowns on his spells and to charge it all the way up on minions he has to be hard pushing permanently as it drains way too quickly. The passive also doesn't do nearly enough to warrant this gimmicky stacking mechanism which replaced his old free AS steroid and better scaling on his blood price. With Aatrox being now more reliant on C/D than ever, he simply does not have the item slots to play like he used to and this is no fun to anyone playing anything besides tanktrox. Also, rip AP Aatrox.
