Some thoughts on the issues with Sylas' ult: an argument for hybrid Sylas

I've been playing with Sylas since his release and I wanted to list my thoughts on the good and bad aspects of his ult, because the rest of his kit doesn't have enough synergy to work with on its own so his ult ends up being really important to his playstyle.

The Goods:

1. Having an AD conversion ratio effectively makes his full kit based off AP, so there's no confusion on what to build to do more damage
2. Each game on Sylas has really unique interactions because of the ults he has to choose from
3. Lategame you can borrow a really big ult for a teamfight and your own ult's low cooldown will mean that you'll still be able to skirmish like you have an ult

The Bads:

1. You only steal the ult itself so any other integral parts of a champion's kit that are used to interact with that ult are gone (Illaoi w, Darius passive, Vel'koz passive, Twitch range, Kennen passive, etc)
2. In any particular game most ults are going to be hard for you to fully utilize, so you build to use the best 2-3 and hope that build doesn't clash with what your team needs.
3. Early game your ult cd is so long that you need to take big ults to equalize for the fact that you can only use it every 80 seconds, but you also can't throw around big ults without a good setup so it's hard to use them.
4. Late game your ult cd is so short that you're more restricted by the enemies cooldowns than your own and you can't get good usage out of most bruisers ults if you built assassin and vice versa so you feel limited.
5. There's no consistency- Sylas himself isn't viable if you don't have a good pool of ults to steal from when you lock him in since he could potentially be countered by a comp revolving around champions with ults he can't use well, likewise picking him into a comp of 3+ supports should be a near win.
6. The conversion ratio in Sylas' kit removes any chance to build an itemset that can take advantage of the AD bruiser items that he wants.

This is all I can think of atm but I think I covered the biggest points I wanted to make.

Summary: Not gaining access to the parts of a champions kit that interact with their ult really hurts how good that ult is. At best you get a fully functioning ult and at worst you get Illaoi without the ability to slam tentacles. Sylas will probably be good in proplay because every team is more likely to have teamfight based ults but he will definitely suffer in soloplay where his enemies have less incentive to give him good ults to use. He is severely limited in build options because all his ratios are AP, but AP does not have access to some of the items that make really good bruiser builds possible (steraks, tiamat, righteous glory). He does have access to ROA which I think is his best item- offering AP to synergize with ratios and and HP to synergize with ults that require you to get up close and duel. The lack of consistency in what ults are available to you makes a really interesting dilemma for the player where, over time, the items you build from game to game can be decided by what ults you want to use late game, but being locked out of so many items by AP ratios kills the fantasy.