Aatrox doesn't stay a sustain auto attack diver and becomes a combo champion, why?
Imagine if Irelia lost her Q when she was reworked. That's Aatrox's rework, which has nothing from his old kit besides a revive.
Who Fed Ru4 votesCause sustain autoattack divers are almost impossible to balance correctly without making them either completely useless when behind or unkillable when ahead.
ModWulf Helhammer5 votesExactly.
“Sustain Autoattack Diver” is exactly the thing they were trying to change with his rework in the first place.
AirKingNeo1 votesand yet that design, as seen right now, is working and is viable without being broken or overpowered.
SithesisLord2 votesWorking now, when it has not worked for years.
Just because a garbage champion suddenly finds its place in the meta and is actually picked does not mean they are actually in a good spot and do not need a rework or some kind of heavy change.
AirKingNeo1 votesHe didn't "find a place in the meta". He's been fine for a year now since the rework (except during the rune update (preseason). The ONLY exception is when he lost fervor and therefore had no rune, until patch 8.1 where every aatrox just went Grasp like every other bruiser.
The data graphs reinforce this. https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/champions/stats/aatrox/top/platinum
AirKingNeo2 votes"Impossible to balance" and yet the reality we live in shows once again that this misconception is false.
The reality that Aatrox, in present, is balanced. How can the current Aatrox be "unbalanceable" if he is, at present, balanced?
Who Fed Ru5 votesAatrox currently isn't balanced, he is kept in a pretty weak state actually.
His biggest strength is that no one knows what his kit does.
AirKingNeo2 votesthen why is he viable right now? Why is he statistically decent?
https://www.op.gg/champion/statistics 51.75% winrate with a 3.71% pickrate
https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/champions/stats/aatrox/top/diamond 53.7% winrate with 4.9% pickrate
You call this weak?
His biggest strength is that no one knows what his kit does.
You think after 5 years of playing the game, people in high elo are fucking morons that they don't know the basics of a champion's kit?
Who Fed Ru5 votesBecause pretty much only his mains play him.
And even in diamond+ there are still people who don't fully understand how to play against him.
It's not about the basics of his kit, but when someone who understands the damage and possibilities of their champ plays against enemies who don't you often end up surprising them, and that goes for all elos.
Still, he is never picked in pro play and pretty easy to deny if you play against an enemy that doesn't main or one trick him.
AirKingNeo1 votesagain
people in diamond for 5 years
are not morons
Who Fed Ru5 votesyou don't get what i'm saying so whatever
AirKingNeo1 votesThere's nothing to understand. You're assuming people are idiots to say a champion is weak.
Who Fed Ru4 votesBut people are idiots and diamond is still nothing special. Especially Diamond 5 is the real cancer of this game, but that's besides the point.
It's not enough if you know how a champions kit works on paper. Even high elo players lack experience in playing against some champions that are never picked. You know, if you play against what's often picked over and over again you get experience in playing against them, know what they are able to do in what situations and in which situations you are able to make your move, can calculate their damage and so on. It's the whole point of getting better, you'll get routine in playing against champions. But if now some dude comes with a champion you are not used to playing against minimum every fifth game, suddenly you don't know for sure on what things you have to focus. And if that dude knows his champion while you don't, he is gonna have the advantage. Sure, you know his basics, that he can jump and knockup you and you should dodge that, that he can revive and so on, but honestly, could you just say that you are able to fully understand his damage and his power spikes? That's exactly the point. You, and your whole team, lack experience in knowing that one enemies critical power spikes and possibilities, and that could cause that you neglect his strengths in a critical moment and suddenly get your ass handed to you.
It comes from experience to know what you can and what you cannot do against enemy champions. If you want to tell me that you weren't ever aced by a Yi once cause you didn't save your cc for him in a fight while not knowing his position and he suddenly comes and kills your whole team, you are lying. But if that happens a few times, you'll know how to react in that situation from than on. And that's exactly the thing with Aatrox. No one really knows his possibilities from lack of experience. It doesn't matter if you are low or high elo, you'll still have 10 times less experience in handling that champion than against almost every other champion.
AirKingNeo1 votesDiamond people can be stupid, but they aren't absolute morons.
I'm saying they can make stupid decisions, but at least they know basic things.
Ralanr2 votesChampion kits of champions you've never played do not fall under basic knowledge. Basic knowledge is more like macroplay.
Who Fed Ru1 votesHow often.. basic knowledge won't help you if your enemy has far more than basic knowledge on that champion. It just has to be one situation where you don't pay enough attention and that could cost you the game already.
Destaice2 votes"Impossible to balance" and yet the reality we live in shows once again that this misconception is false.
The reality that Aatrox, in present, is balanced. How can the current Aatrox be "unbalanceable" if he is, at present, balanced?
If you think a champion suddenly jumping from low winrate low pickrate universally regarded as bad to suddenly being incredibly strong as a result of the current meta, then you have a really bad concept of what it means for a champion to be balanced.
Balanced champions don't suddenly swap to the opposite ends of viability like that.
Ralanr4 votesBoth 
and 
were heavily changed as well. It's not like this is impossible now.
AirKingNeo1 votesboth Sion and Poppy were season 1 champions with non functional kits.
Aatrox is a season 3 champion with a mini rework in season 6, wiith a functional kit.
Ralanr3 votesIt for the most part wasn't. He was shit tier for a long time because if his numbers were decent he was too good.
AirKingNeo1 votesand get his numbers right now are decent and he's not "too good"
Don't believe in a stupid misconception.
EbonyBladeJ881 votesI think AirkingNeo here is trying to say that Aatrox's identity is being lost in this VGU. IMHO, he didn't have much of an identity (But I hardly ever played him, so that's probably a misconception on my part) but he WAS the first Darkin character of the game. So I think AirkingNeo was hoping he would retain some of that "first of the Darkins" thing in this VGU.
With this, Riot is trying to make him more distinct, since we now have 2 (3 if you count 
but I let others draw their own conclusions on that) Darkin champs with the arrival of 
and Rhaast. Now, (correct me if I'm wrong) he seems more of a "Juggernaut" type of Darkin than a "Diver". I'm cool with that, and I'm interested to see how this turns out in-game. Juggernauts are my favorite class, and while I'd like to see a brand-new one, not a rebrand of an existing character into it's group ala 
, I'll take what I can get.
Ralanr1 votesI know Neo is arguing that the identity was lost. The identity itself wasn’t intended to stay within the rework. Riot was upfront in saying his gameplay would change if I remember.
EbonyBladeJ882 votesIt's amazing the things people can find out if they would just read what Riot says instead of jumping to conclusions.
https://i.giphy.com/media/3og0IMJcSI8p6hYQXS/giphy.gif
(Not accusing you or myself of this either, just ending it with a GIF to be silly.)
Destaice3 votesGalio's concept worked. Yorick's concept worked. Taric's concept worked. Irelia's concept worked.
Aatrox's did not. Outside of his brief OP stage when his numbers were way too high on release he has consistently been an undesirable pick. A character who just "auto attacks and heals" isn't interesting or healthy for the game.
You are basically trying to argue that we should have kept a gimmick that made the game worse because other gimmicks got to stay.
AirKingNeo1 votesand yet we see right now Aatrox is a viable pick with his current kit.
Aatrox's concept is proven to work.
dapositiveviking1 voteshe’s a pick that wins games: don’t conflate viability with proper design. riot has stated they don’t like aatrox’s current gameplay theme, it’s why trynd and eventually yi are going to be reworked too.
Infernape2 votesAren't all sustain based AA champions heavily stat checky in nature and are therefore harder to balance? Once their stats out-stat yours, it's curtains for you. They're either god tier or shit tier.
AirKingNeo1 votesStatchecky? A champion with 2 passive to micromanage and 2 skillshots is not statchecky.
What would you call Aatrox on live then? He's not shit and he's not god tier.
SithesisLord2 votesA champion with 2 passive to micromanage and 2 skillshots is not statchecky.
Kayle has a small mana pool to manage, has to properly time her ult and needs to kite against any decent player.
None of those make her less of a statcheck.
AirKingNeo1 votesIf we're bringing kiting into this, Aatrox has to kite as well when using his ult.
I main Kayle, and you forget she has to play around her E cooldown and the fact that her E increases her waveclear automatically and stops you from freezing. She doesn't have mana issues anymore thanks to manaflow band.
Again, Aatrox has 2 skillshots while Kayle has 0.
SithesisLord1 votesManaflow band is, at best, a horrible choice of rune for Kayle.
The amount of skillshots a champion has or what they have to manage has nothing to do with them being stat-checky or not.
AirKingNeo1 votesare you the Kayle main? Getting mana for just auto attacking the enemy, hitting them with the splash, or pressing Q is great. You can stack it by like 7 minutes and then have infinite mana because of it.
Then what defines a champion as stat checky? Every champion is inherently stat-checky by the design that people who are ahead will tend to kill you simply by having more stats from items. You can play around Aatrox's W stacks and passive too, so he's definitely not just press 1 button and murder you like Yi.
Galiö2 votesGalio is nothing like old galio was. Aatrox is more like old aatrox than galio was. Dont u dare make the comparision lol.
AirKingNeo1 votesbut Galio kept his identity.
Aatrox doesn't.
Galiö3 votesGalio dindt keep his identity at all. He was a sit back and be 'on being hit' benefit champion who was stoic and lore wise intelligent.
The new one is a generic tank set with a Skillshot that now gets played as a burst mage.
His identity was a unique tank that was unfortunately gated by CDs. Now the new one can span more but it's nothing like the old one
SEKAI1 votesGalio ... who was stoic and lore wise intelligent.
People still claim Galio was "wise intelligent"?
Old Galio was barely sentient, one could see Galio barely had enough intelligence above a guard dog in the 2 and only versions of old Galio's lore. Only the League Judgement in the old lore where Galio was depicted to have any level of mental capacity worthy of note, but even then, despite the first paragraph or so spelling the "Galio is wise" in an exposition to the reader, Galio was actually not "wise" or "intelligent" or at least he was never shown to actually be those things, but rather he was shown to be "observant"; very different traits, much like how dogs are very observant, but their intelligence and wisdom will never surpass that of a 5 year old child. Then out of the very few and handful of in-game voice lines Galio possessed, true to his theme of being a stone golem, all of which were very generic, but it also didn't help building his character personality profile, especially the aspects regarding intelligence and wisdom.
Galio, for all intents and purposes of the old lore, was a flying dog made out of stone that happen to also be able to speak and was sad that they had lost their master, when it comes to characterisation. The highest intellectual and wisdom related achievement from the old Galio in this regard was him gaining a sense of agency and self motivation and where he stopped thinking everything in terms of his master, and that's it.
The observant aspect of old Galio's personality is on the other hand, also a core part of new Galio's personality. Meanwhile the new Galio, who may be equal to old Galio when it comes to "smart-smart" which is to say, not so much, but he demonstrates a far stronger grasp in emotional intelligence than the old one: The most obvious evidence comes from new Galio consciously deciding to adopt an aura and ideal of heroism both as a self fulfillment and as a temporary solution to his identity crisis, as an answer to some of the worldly things he doesn't understand due to his lack of those concepts as a stone golem, but he also does so out of genuine passion and empathetic consideration of other smaller and weaker entities in order to install hope to empower them. This highly contrasts the old Galio in that it's multi-faceted and highly personal to the new Galio as his own personal motivation, unlike the old Galio which even with the new found agency he realised at the end of the League Judgement he still ultimately made the decision to protect Demacia solely because it is something he shared with the master and that it's technically his "home".
When it comes to wisdom and intelligence, I can't help but arrive at the conclusion that the new Galio, for all his worth, does those things better than his old iteration.
It's kind of ironic imho, that the old Galio had the all "he is wise and intelligent" and "don't judge a book by its cover" deals shoved directly into the readers' faces heavy-handed expositions TELLING you so and not much else, and meanwhile the new Galio's characterisation actually SHOWS and demonstrates those aspects but he is dissed instead on the grounds of lacking them or whatnot because his new lore doesn't directly spell it into the readers' faces and that people just judge him entirely on his cover.
Marshbouy1 votesBecause the game already has a lot of auto attacker champions, there is only so much you can do with them before they all start feeling/more or less being exactly the same.
Khristophoros1 votesWhen a melee champ deals a lot of autoattack damage, all that means is that champion will have a constant stream of damage as long as they can stay in melee range. What makes the champion unique is the other abilities on their kit which determine how they can engage and stick to targets. There is a lot of potential for them to have unique gameplay because of that.
AirKingNeo1 votesand yet none of them had bonus attack range
jocomotion1 votesWent from sustain auto attack diver to sustain ability skirmisher. He did keep his sustain at the very least.
That being said I doubt I’ll see Aatrox diving on the back line as often. Not sure how I feel about that.
