Aatrox 9.9
So just looking through the patch notes a day previous compared to what ended up shipping to live, they really haven't changed anything about Aatrox.
Passive change if nothing else affects his match ups and who he can trade with. It's not any sort of gigantic buff to his sustain when it can be countered with Grievous Wounds. VS enemy tanks you'd think he'd outlast them as passive lifesteal is based on the targets max hp, but they can afford to ignore it even without Grievous Wounds. Huge tanks like Nasus, or Garen don't care, and Conq users that use it better than Aatrox due to faster atk spd, don't care.
Q change I'm not really sure how to quantify. The space between Q's where you can hold onto them would be fine if you had the ability to stick to your target. The animation still takes so long to complete that you can't even burn Flash. It's so slow you can walk out of it. The hang time in the air is still a huge hole in his kit. Worse yet, on it's own it's a self root still.
W was supposed to ship with 35% at all levels but at the last second they made it 25%. This ability still can be walked out of, the hit box is so huge you'd think it would be a good thing, but it just gets hung up on minions in lane or the wrong target full stop. It's not rewarding to land. 25% slow in this high mobility climate is a bit of an insult frankly. You can afford to give Aatrox 35% and see what happens. As it is this ability is on the nerfed side thanks to the CD increase.
E didn't need the extra AD, but it still helped your all-in, buffing that first Q hit. The same problem still persists with this ability in that the healing it gives is mitigated by easily affordable items, and the one charge is not enough to land that crucial 3rd Q. It doesn't need to be both, but it needs to be one or the other on this ability; 2nd charge of dash, or buff the healing.
R with the revive on it was just stupid, agreed. It was nothing but a deterrent to stave off a death you were going to get anyway, or it wasn't needed. I love that this new ult encourages smart play, and has been buffed to be a good steroid. In the case of this ability, I'm willing to bet that this is more of a team oriented ability and not a solo Q one, but solo Q is the lens I'm looking at him through, it suffers from the problems in the rest of his kit. Guys like Nasus and Renekton have just as much damage and sustain as Aatrox, if not more if we lay out the base and scaling stats, and they have cc and mobility that can stick to a target. They don't even need a revive on their ults to wade into a sea of enemies.
Aatrox doesn't do well still. His ult was never the issue, it's the lack of sticking power on his kit to deliver his damage and do his job that's the problem. I feel like Riot zero'd in on the ult as the big problem and tried to shift all kinds of power around on Aatrox, and then after that they nerfed him by overcompensating. I also feel they are looking at raw numbers and not mechanical things like his mobility, the speed of his ability animations, and the way his combo fits together. The Aatrox reddit woudl disagree, I saw tons of discussion about making his Q/E windows line up better, but that's not the issue. The abilities as they are don't allow Aatrox to do anything when most other champions being played can slip in and out of range without fear of punishment and gimp his main gimmick which at this point is supposed to be his sustain through lifesteal.
Thoughts?
