Azir's balance issues, problems and possible solutions.

Azir is an awesome champion held back by design problems. He's a control mage and a hyper carry at the same time, which is a pretty volatile mix. This has caused him to be stripped down to nothing, bearing all the weaknesses of hyper carries and control mages both, and none of the strengths.

The suggestions below are just my opinion, as I don't want to see Azir continue to be a boring champ that just blows W -> Q on cooldown and does nothing else. I personally think dashing with his E and his shurima shuffle are his most engaging (heh) parts of his pattern.

He badly needs a heavy shove into an archetype to narrows and sharpen his strengths and define his weaknesses. Either he needs to be beefed back up (the loss of his shield/pop up on E reduces his self defense to non-existant) and reduce his range, letting him be a mage/skirmisher. Let him get in there and shove enemies around.

OR

Reduce his damage and allow his soldiers to apply on hit effects. His best item is Nashor's Tooth and he can't even apply it with his soldiers. So technically, he wants fast attack speed AP items and can't use any of the passives effectively. Make him a hyper carry. Give him strength to do damage and leave him glass. It feels pretty shitty when you don't even get full value from the items you are supposed to rush.

Right now he's straddling both and doing a shitty job at both. He's a fantastic champion, great from a lore a character design and deserves better.