A Shepard that needs some band-aids

(TLDR at the bottom)

Let's talk about the ghoul man, his spade, and his plethora of friends.

Now first of all, I started playing Yorick at the completion of his rework and I've gotta say, He is easily one of my favourite champions now and this might just be extreme nit picking but certain things about his kit seem... counter productive if thats the term I'm looking for.

His passive has two components to it: Firstly his passive causes every 12-4th minion death around Yorick to spawn a grave, Conceptually this passive is very nice to have but it has problems early, as minions killed with Yorick's Q, do NOT count towards the minion death total of a free new grave, meaning if you kill 2-3 minions with your q (Which you will do often as you want as many ghouls as possible). This delays the possibility of Yorick's passive from doing anything for 3 consecutive waves. The 2nd part of Yorick's passive deals with the ghouls, and the big problem with them is that they scale with health, but are ALWAYS one shotted by an auto attack from a turret or a champion regardless of attack damage. This is a slight problem as it allows the enemy to remove any chance that a tanky Yorick might have of dealing most of his damage very quickly and easily. I'm fine with the turret one shotting them as they do with most tiny pets and things, but it just doesn't seem useful to build tanky if the ghouls are gonna die so fast anyway. The other part of Yoricks passive is that he can have at max 4 ghouls at once and that's fine.

Yorick's Q has only one slight problem: Compared to most of the juggernaut class, Yorick's sustain doesn't scale... at all. Yorick's Q provides him with a flat heal that doubles when below half, which means at most Yorick heals 164 hp if he is below half (Not counting spirit visage). While this is nice, it is considerably little late game if Yorick were to build remotely bulky. For example, if Yorick were to build absolutely 0 health items, At level 18 Yorick's q heals him for around 8% of his max health, and because Yorick lacks the teamfight potential of other juggernauts who have more aoe effects and massive amounts of damage, Yorick also falls short in his ability to sustain during a fight.

Yorick's W, has one glaring issue, while leveling Yorick's W, The cooldown decreases 20/18/16/14/12 Which is fine but the wall health only changes on the 3rd and 5th point in the ability, this makes the ability not worth leveling until you have to, and you can't even put an early extra point in it to gain some early wall strength .

Yorick's E is really solid, its a small hit box that rewards the player for landing with an enemy slow, a self speed boost toward the target, causes ghouls to leap to the target and gets the ghoul AI to be somewhat intelligent for a few seconds, with the only issue is that sometimes ghouls can be too far away, distracted with something and they don't jump or even target the enemy struck with the ability

Lastly, Yorick's R: which allows him to summon the maiden of the mist and some ghouls seems to have an identity crisis of what it wants to be. Split between a summon that aids in 1v1ing and one that is designed to help push waves, then it kinda messes up both. As a splitpusher, the maiden is able to spawn ghouls for every minion that dies near it while not exceeding the 4 max cap, Unfortunately the Maiden has difficulty killing a minion on their own, Additonally the ghouls spawned as well as the maiden are prioritized by turrets, so they don't last very long once you get to the turret in an attempt to push it. On the duelist end of the ultimate, in that if the maiden enters a lane with minions in it, the maiden will mindlessly push the turret until it dies, this causes the maiden to get distracted very easily and coupled with the fact the maiden cant do too much on their own, Yorick has to either A: give up on what he was doing and babysit the maiden to the turret or B: just straight up abandon his ult. Either option wouldn't be that bad if Yorick's cooldown for his ult DIDN'T START until the Maiden dies, because that means it's hefty cooldown of 160/150/140 seconds might just get wasted because the maiden didn't co operate and got stuck doing something for two minutes.

While this is just nitpicking the issues with Yorick, I feel it's all these little things combined that make him less satisfying for some people to play (Still like him though) And I feel even if a few issues were solved it would help Yorick's accessibility greatly. Either by improving the clunky nature of his ult, fixing some AI problems, or making some scalings that actually feel like they matter in the long run.

TLDR: I like Yorick but there are a bunch of tiny issues that make Yorick less intuative and satisfying to play and I would like some of them fixed