Azir Rework
TLDR: I hate TLDRs, I wish you would just read the whole post, BUT ...
- Q moves single (farthest) Sand Soldier, instead of all, to target location.
- Damaging enemy champion with Q reduces it's own cooldown based on the number of active soldiers.
- Q mana cost decrease.
- W mana cost is 0 + 40 per active Sand Soldier (First is free, Army is expensive)
- Decrease single soldier attack damage, increase multi-soldier attack damage.
Now, please read to understand more
Azir is supposed to be a tactical commander on the battlefield and right now all he does is summon a small army and say "Go over there".
I think in order to make him feel more like a strategic champion, we could make a few changes to his Q ability, Conquering Sands.
I also want to be sure to say right now that I completely understand that other balance changes will be needed along the lines of specific cooldowns, mana costs, base and scaling damage figures, but I am confident that Riot can figure that out.
CONQUERING SANDS
The biggest change I would recommend would be to have this ability only command the Sand Soldier that is farthest from the target location to move, instead of all of them.
Then I feel that the cooldown should be reduced or reset by some mechanic involving attacks against enemy champions.
My favorite idea for this would be to have the cooldown for his Q be reduced by x seconds per active Sand Soldier under Azir's control if the soldier passes through an enemy champion.
This means if Azir has a single Sand Soldier active and he manages to pass the soldier through an enemy champion, he will not be able to instantly cast Q again, however if he has 3 Sand Soldiers active, he may be able to recast Q in order to command a new soldier to move.
I would also be concerned about the mana cost of a single cast of this ability. I understand that, if done right, this change could make this ability very strong so reducing the mana cost too much could further boost it's strength, however at the current cost of this ability, Azir's mana pool would be crippled very quickly.
ARISE
I also considered that the Sand Soldiers may need to be adjusted somewhat in order to make this more effective.
This could be something as simple as increasing the time they are active on the battlefield before dissolving.
Their duration could be reset if they are commanded by Conquering Sands or if Azir moves to them with Shifting Sands.
A different way to accomplish this could simply be to make it more cost-effective to always have multiple Sand Soldiers active.
This is actually a change that I have suggested before, but I feel that it would be good here as well.
The mana cost of Arise is 0 + 40 mana per active Sand Soldier.
This means it costs Azir no mana to always keep a single Sand Soldier on the field.
- I feel that this is important because summoning a Sand Soldier is always the first thing that Azir does when doing anything, and the mana cost of his combos are so high at the moment that he will most likely not summon a Sand Soldier without intending to use it immediately. This is a very clear telegraph that he is about to do something and I think it really hurts him. I also think this is one of the main reasons why Azir needs such a long range on his abilities with the way his kit is currently designed. If your enemy sees you summon a soldier they can be sure that you are either about to throw the soldier at them, or use the soldier to escape and they can immediately start reacting before you have even started.
The cost to summon and maintain a second soldier is the same as it is currently, and to summon and maintain more soldiers will be even more expensive.
- With the changes to Conquering Sands that I suggested, it will be a major benefit to maintain more than one soldier in order to get the most use of his abilities. This change in conjunction would help to balance the utility cost of mana consumption vs cooldown. Azir would need to spend more mana to have more soldiers active in order to reset the cooldown on his Q, which then costs additional mana to recast.
BALANCE
As I said before, I completely understand the fact that base damage, mana costs, ranges, cooldowns, ... many different things would need to be considered when making big changes like this. That is just the nature of reworking a champion.
I do think that this would make Azir more interesting to play.
I think it would make him require more skill and strategy to be effective with, but I am of the impression that was Riot's goal with this champion.
Edit #1
Thinking a little bit about how Azir typically deals damage currently, I realized that a large part of his damage comes from the attacks of his Sand Soldiers and I tried to imagine how these changes WILL impact that damage.
Currently the description for a Sand Soldier's damage is as follows according to his LoLWiki page
Soldiers deal 50 - 170 (based on level) (+ 60% AP) magic damage to all enemies in a line.
And there is a very important sentence under the Arise ability description
Multiple soldiers can strike the same target, with each soldier beyond the first dealing 25% damage.
With the way Conquering Sands works currently, it is pretty easy to stack soldiers onto a single target, and I am confident that this is why Riot felt that it was important to reduce the damage applied by multiple Sand Soldiers on a single target.
However, my change would make stacking soldiers onto a single target more difficult, and I believe as a result, it would actually be better to reward the player for doing so.
Now, in order to do this, I would actually recommend nerfing an individual soldier's base damage (keep in mind that with the changes to Arise, soldiers should be more available) and increasing the amount of damage dealt from "each soldier beyond the first". For example, simply moving this amount from 25% to 50% could be significant. Depending on how strong or weak this proves, this amount could potentially scale by level, or even on something like ability power as well, for example 50% + 10% per 100 AP. (just an example, don't hold me to that)
