Yet Another 'AZIR NEEDS MORE RANGE' Thread

Now I know I am not the only one to have raised this concern on this board, but as well all know you cannot make a choir without multiple varying voices. People are already well aware of Azir's abysmal 38% win rate, but that does not clearly reveal what his problem is. It only shows he has a problem.

Now, for people who cannot be asked to read a Great Wall of Text, here is the long and short of it. Riot's view of from a mechanical standpoint is a late-game hypercarry that has little 'influence' in the early/laning phase. However, his recent nerf to the range of his soldiers severely hamper his ability to contribute in mid-late game teamfights as well as his ability to harass in lane. Therefore, his soldiers range needs to be extended from it's current range of ~325 to ~375 or even ~400 so that he can still be useful in the late game.

The way to compensate for this, since Riot probably will feel needs to pay a little to get a little, is to further reduce the base damage on his Q and maybe a touch of the base damage of his Soldiers. 's harass, from my experience of playing the [expletive] out of him when he first came out, is a casting of his W followed by Qing his summoned soldier over to wherever the enemy laner is, which results in damage from the Q followed by either 1 or 2 auto-attacks provided the enemy laner is smart enough to immediately back away from the soldier. Reducing the damage he is able to accomplish with this combo at the beginning of the game without touching the AP Ratios of these abilities will reduce his early game harass without noticeably hurting his late game damage.

The rest of this post will now be devoted to explaining my reasoning on why the reduced range he currently has hurt 's ability to contribute to the team even during the lategame to the point where you are just plain better off picking someone else.

To start things off, I am going to point out what sort of champion is when it comes to his way of dishing out the pain. is not a mage that does a burst of damage to 100-0 squishies. He is an ability-power based champion that deals damage over time from a significant range to whittle people down until they either run away from his soldiers and give ground or go YOLO and try to 'assassinate' The Emperor. This very closely fits the description of Caitlyn as well as most other ADCs sans the AP part, and I will be using that sort of standard to explain what Azir is failing to achieve.

Now while I do not know of a magical way in which I can revert my League of Legends file to show what his range of ~400 looked like before, here is a link to his champion spotlight from when he did have that range.

As you can see, a single soldier is able to comfortably 'control' a little over half of the lane in terms of width, and is long enough to get in several hits if someone decides to try and saunter through. When you put on a second soldier on top of that is essentially 'putting all of his cards down' so as to contribute damage do a teamfight, with his soldiers able to attack anyone along the length of the lane while relying on his teammates to protect him since he has now given up the spare soldier he would need to quickly E away which leaves him with only his long cooldown R.

Now take a look at what the range of 2 soldiers is with the current range of ~325, which only covers slightly more of the area where one soldier had been able to suffice before. While it is true that the ranges overlap each other somewhat this is what it looks like after has used his Q, which is very likely what he will have used to try and get his soldiers 'into position' so as to start whacking away at the enemy.

Now look at that tiny area and tell me whether you think it would be very hard to simply walk out of that area without necessarily 'giving up ground' or closing in to engage the enemy. The answer in my opinion is 'No', as all it takes is a little backstep or a dash to the side and now you're about the same distance away from the enemy while is forced to wait on the cooldown of his Q before he can move his soldiers again to try and get some more autoattacks off. Does have a problem like that? Of course not, and neither did before they decided to nerf the range on his soldiers.

Another thing I noticed with the new range is that it doesn't even manage to overlap a tower! If a melee champion like Jax or Udyr or Fiora is wailing away at that tower and tries to W-Q a soldier over to defend it they only need to sidestep before they continue wailing, at which point is now forced to either say 'Oh well there goes a tower' or go YOLO and E over to the soldier he spawned before either using his R or summoning a soldier on the other side of a tower (The latter being suicidal since now a squishy has just willingly placed themselves next to a high-damage duelist). Does have this problem? Heck no, and neither does any other carry in the game! So why should our poor bird-friend have it? That's two for two in both his inability to contribute to teamfights and his ability to protect objectives/towers, as far as I'm concerned that's reason enough to let those soldiers get their spears back rather than be forced to make do with their daggers-in-disguise!

And that's all she wrote, feel free to comment on how either my logic is flawed or Azir could perhaps be better adjusted or maybe something I'm not thinking of.