Azir: Conceptually Awesome, Mechanically Atrocious

I love this guy. His armor looks cool, he has an an Egyptian-like aesthetic going on like Nasus, he has interesting abilities...

but they're terrible.

Passive: Shurima's Legacy

The Sun Disc is cool and tactically useful, but it decays pretty fast and doesn't have enough health. You might say, "oh well what do you expect, it's a conjurable turret," but when considered in conjunction with how underpowered Azir is, it's pretty annoying. Then there's tanky champions who basically become impervious to turrets in the late game, but I digress.

W: Arise!

This summons sand soldiers. They're not summonable minions like Malzahar's voidlings, but untargetable soldiers.

• They last 10 seconds.
• Their summon range is short.
• They only attack whoever you target, and that target has to be in their range because they won't move on their own.
• Even when you use Q: Arising Sands (detailed next) to command them to move, they won't automatically target minions or champions they initially hit.
• The time until they disappear is halved when they're near a turret.
• These dudes primarily comprise Azir's offensive abilities, and they won't even target turrets. This kind of makes sense, since it prevents you from cheesing a turret's limited range between waves of minions, but I would say it also means their implementation in the game needs to be changed as opposed to just nerfing their utility.
• Azir has to be near his soldiers to command them in any way

When you compare this to Malhazar's voidlings, you see the glaring differences, despite both of them being squishy casters with poor basic attack range and damage, AND Mally has the advantage of actual offensive abilities outside of his minions.

Q: Conquering Sands

This ability will send currently summoned sand soldiers to a target location, hitting whatever enemies are standing there.

• Once again, they won't autoattack enemies in range / which are struck by this ability.
• The range is too short to be useful. The max distance they can travel is twice the range of Arise!, away from Azir himself and not from their current positions.
• ...you have to then get in basic attack range to make them continue attacking your intended target. Inb4 being obliterated by the person you're trying to kill while trying to get into position, and while your soldiers stand there doing nothing.

A picture is starting to form of an offensively stunted champion who can only benefit from ranged combat, but is forced to fight in close quarters while having to resummon, position, and command his sand soldiers to attack so as to actually be of any use.

E: Shifting Sands

This ability is useless offensively and mostly situational. At best you might be able to use it to escape a fight if you're ontop of your sand soldier microing game.

R: Emperor's Divide

This creates a shield wall that pushes forward a bit, does minor damage, and lasts 3 seconds. That's right baby, this overpowered godliness, which doesn't block that much area and doesn't even leave a bruise, lasts 3 whole seconds, despite everything I've detailed before now.

Riot, I implore you. Azir is cool. Whichever designer or artist conceived him had a very cool idea, and he deserves to be fixed.