The problem (and solution) with Yasuo
Yasuo is broken. Everyone complains about Yasuo 24/7, so of course this isn't new information. I thought I'd share my two cents on what I think makes him broken.
The way I see it, the general way assassins kill you is a 2 fold approach:
First they get to you, then they kill you. Generally the trick to balancing an assassin is by weakening one of these things. For example, nidalee can blow up anyone foolish enough to let her mark them with her passive (either by tripping her bushwack trap or by taking a spear to the face). Once they're marked she gets a pretty-difficult-to-avoid leap followed by a swift takedown. The reason nidalee isn't extremely unfair is because the enemy can easily sidestep her Q and prevent her from ever getting a mark on them.
Or take katerina or leblanc for example. They both have surefire ways of getting to you quickly but a delayed form of killing you. Leblanc has 2 dashes and katerina has an instant blink. Leblanc has to wait 1.5 seconds before her passive damage removes your champion from the game and katerina has to wait for her dagger to land before striking. There's plenty of ways to counterplay such as: kill them before their attack reaches its full damage potential, time your attack so you're out of range when their attack is at its full damage potential etc.
So again the two parts to an assassin's attack is getting to you and killing you. One of those has to be weak in order to balance the champion.
Now consider yasuo: He blows you up instantly when hes in range His E gives him ridiculous mobility, basically guaranteeing that he'll get in range of you if he wants to.
Before I talk more on this I want to go over what I like about yasuo.
His Q is a directional that can be avoided with prediction or insane reflexes. His Q also requires timing (because he has to land a few Qs before he can throw a tornado) He has to land his knockup (which is a tornado most of the time) in order to get his ult and engage.
And now what I don't like about him: His Q is just a little too fast to dodge (maybe like 0.15 seconds too fast) IF HE USES HIS Q WHILE DASHING HE GETS A GUARANTEED Q ON YOU! If he has his tornado up and he uses E on you he gets a 100% guaranteed ultimate that's completely unavoidable.
My solution: Obviously yasuo is meant to be a "type 2", if you will, assassin. Basically he can get to you without a problem but he can't delete you instantly when he does. The 0.1 second cooldown on his E, his windwall to block any form of ranged cc, and the instant dash on his ultimate all point to this. So the solution to balancing him then is to simply make it harder for him to blow you up. I believe the best method for this to add more "counterplayability". Simply remove those negative things I mentioned about his attacks that are unavoidable.
- Completely remove his spin attack when dashing through an enemy. If you can dodge his Q when he isn't dashing, why can't you dodge it when he is?? I like the idea of him attacking while moving but just make it the same as his regular Q.
- Slow down his Q just slightly. If yasuo is always going to be right on top of the enemy midlaner he shouldn't always be able to hit his attacks. I don't mean a huge delay, just something like a 0.15 second delay from when the animation for his Q starts to when the attack actually strikes.
Again what I'm trying to solve here is the classic yasuo trick of: using Q on minions to have tornado up spamming E through minions to get to the enemy laner using E and Q at the same time to hit the enemy laner with an undodgable knockup + ULT, killing them instantly
Hopefully you found this remotely interesting. Reply if you have any thoughts on this, either the "problem" and the "solution".
