Aatrox rework and it's problems(a few strengths)
Basically I've been a one trick aatrox for 3 seasons now, fluctuating from high gold to low diamond. I've got a lot of experience playing him.
His old problems were pretty apparent: terrible health costs for his abilities, hurting tank builds mainly because you took out 15% of your own health with an eq. The health costs along with his scaling led to a big feast/famine style of gameplay where when you're ahead you 2/3 hit the enemy or significantly chunk them if they're a tank because of your w scaling. But behind you're basically useless with one health bar, and a fraction of one where when you come back you have nothing.
But a vital part of his kit was his attack speed gain since he has pretty terrible base stats, that's basically gone now.
New aatrox solves the old health cost issues which is a big thing. But it leaves you laning with 0% of your bonus attack speed all the time. You've got no pressure without any attack speed and are usually forced to sit back farming with e. If aatrox's base attack speed were buffed, or if his passive attack speed applied without blood rush, it wouldn't be a problem.
New aatrox is one dimensional too. What i enjoyed about the old aatrox was that you can build tank or damage, and max w or e. There was flexibility with his build and path. With the new aatrox, you can only play him top, and only tank too.
If this is the route riot wants to take (which I'm sure a lot of aatrox players won't like) the current kit he has poses some problems. holistically, the kit doesn't mesh as well as it can, because it has both bonus ad and total scaling. This might be a good thing, I'm still testing it out. If the kit had full total ad scaling it might be good, but id rather see him having more attack speed early game to help lane.
Another big problem with aatrox is how his passive decay works. Before the passive decays after 5 seconds, but only a bit of the well at a time. Now the well decays too fast for players to keep up stacks across waves in my experience, so the only option is to go full agro pushing in wave after wave, if you want to keep up stacks for pressure. Before with epic monsters, aatrox can solo herald. If you go on any epic monsters now and want to attack at a decent rate, you have to keep up your blood price, so its harder to tank the monsters. i don't know how much it'd affect aatrox's power with a higher clear rate for those monsters.
At the end of the day, the aatrox rework works partially. But it creates a really sad landing phase for anyone playing aatrox. I think attack speed increase early would help him out in lane. mid/late game if you survive lane he scales a lot better in my experience. but now you have to play him tank, or at least bruiser like. without building health first his passive sucks and you're basically 0 stacks all the time. His stacks decay really fast, and i wish it would tick down slower, maybe 1.5 sec each 20%. His new revive works a lot better though, I think it makes it a lot easier to bring yourself back to full blood well after reviving, and the actual revive gives more health with the percentage. With tweaks to help out landing, the rework would be good for aatrox, but only for tank builds. The new aatrox loses a lot of versatility.
