Picked up Yorick lately, kinda frustrated with his ultimate

Hello,

In all respects I'm quite pleased with Yorick. His kit has some defined strengths/weaknesses in how it works, so there is some back and forth in laning phase. Matchups tend to be on the rougher side of things, but doable if played smart. Overall, I do enjoy him, but his ultimate drives me nuts.

The Maiden is an incredible source of damage, and when he fights with her, he's quite powerful. The issue is being able to use her meaningfully anywhere else.

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• The Maiden locks into lane pushing mode way too frequently.

I guess this is a way of stopping him from walking around the map with her? If you summon her in the jungle, she'll follow until he hits a lane, then she goes into pushing mode. It feels incredibly restrictive, as this behavior is complicated by the other issues. Could be fine, could be good to get rid of, depending.

• His ultimate has an incredibly massive cooldown.

So long as the Maiden is alive, his ultimate does not start its cooldown cycle. It isn't unheard of for him, in my experiences, to go several minutes 'without' his ultimate as the Maiden is slow pushing a lane across the map. This tends to disincentive using the ultimate for lane pushing shenanigans, as his contributions in teamfights drop massively without the Maiden's help. Ok, maybe it's not too bad if the Maiden is a lane threatening monstrosity--

• The Maiden does crap all for damage against towers. Decent for tanking shots, but if you don't let a creep wave stack 'naturally', she's laughably useless.

If one of the main selling points of the ultimate is to have a cross-map split pusher, ala Banner of Command super minion, then the use of the Maiden is literally in just pushing. However, for as stiffly as Yorick runs into problems in team fighting without her, making the decision to send a super minion down a lane seems to be a disproportionate trade off. I'd expect something of this magnitude to take a tower by itself if left unattended, but even a lategame Maiden will, over several seconds, still do less damage than a couple of Champion auto attacks.

I feel Yorick's regular combat, and combat alongside the Maiden, is fine. The issue is that doing split push mode with her feels more punishing than a useful niche. The massive cooldown, combined with no ability to actually interact with the Maiden once she's in push mode, means that if Yorick is fought off, his whole ultimate is gone pretty much instantly. If Yorick is across the map without the Maiden, his direct combat is not as convincing as it could be, so he has to play a more defensive game. That's a good trade off prospect until you realize you could just buy Banner of Command and have that do its job better than the Maiden. I mean ... BOC doesn't lock its cooldown until its own super minion is dead, so why does Yorick's ultimate?

Of these issues, I think choosing one of the two and strengthening it would help. If Yorick's ultimate is to have this massive, multi-minute cooldown when he sends the Maiden split pushing, then bump her lane/tower destroying prowess so she can meaningfully slap towers around. If his ultimate's cooldown was fixed so the Maiden is more accessible, then she wouldn't need pushing prowess as Yorick isn't deprived of options for so long.

Either way, it would help clarify and push him into a convincing direction with his ultimate, I think. Thus far my most successful gameplay patterns are 'don't use the Maiden to split push', which I think defeats the purpose of even having that functionality to begin with? I've never felt like having the Maiden go off on her own was a decent thing, and having her disappear down a lane is more akin to getting robbed than anything else.