I'd be willing to buy this if we didn't have successful VGUs to both Irelia and Warwick. Prior to their reworks, both champions were notorious for being ultra-binary, stat-checky, autoattack-based drain tanks. Both champions were made healthy in a manner that preserved their autoattack reliance and their sustain, in Warwick's case by putting it onto his autoattacks as well. On a larger scale, we have plenty of successful autoattack-based champions in the game. I therefore do not see the justification in changing Aatrox from an autoattacker to a caster.
As a side note, it's also worth mentioning that the Reddit posted linked above points to Aatrox's drain tanking being a problem. This is indeed true, except his new kit has omnivamp, a form of persistent sustain that is even less visible than his three-hit heal, even less gated, and at least as stat-checky. As such, I fail to see how exactly this new kit proposes to resolve Aatrox's drain tanking problem, when it fully aims to make him a drain tank in a manner that comes across as altogether even worse than his autoattack-based sustain.
Finally, I'm starting to get a little tired of the "real talk" that comes up in these defensive posts. All too often, I've seen Rioters invoke expressions like "real talk" / "let me be honest" / "let me be frank" / etc., only to say something completely trite, overly sanitized, or just generally rather corporate in tone. It's very nice to be told by Rioters that they care about the community, but one of the reasons why the Aatrox community is upset is precisely because they were not in any way consulted or communicated with, and are only now being addressed in a damage control post after an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the update. If the team that worked on the Aatrox VGU cared about his players, they certainly haven't shown it. No amount of "real talk" will change that, nor will it detract from the fact that the community had reason to expect better, given that Riot handled champions with similar problems in the past, came up with kits that genuinely captured the original champion's identity, and thus demonstrated both care and attention towards that champion's community. By contrast, it doesn't look like even Reav3 or Jag know what Aatrox's original identity is, or what players wanted him to be, which makes their post on r/AatroxMains ring all the more hollow.
