My Thoughts on Azir
~ Hyper mage-marksman. Is both a spell caster where ALL of his majour damage is from his basic attacks, which is through basic attacks.
~ Try to eliminate fluff and safety. By doing this we can focus on Azir's unique strengths and make him strong in the sand soldier stabbing and protect the emperor theme.
~ On demand dash has to go. The dash is making a very high damage champion who has insane late game scaling too safe, allows him to pressure in lane and avoid ganks in the early game, so what ends up happening is that Azir is guaranteed his late game unless a patch goes out that clips his wings and trim his claws to not be very good. If a dash were to remain (only if we want to keep Shurima Shuffle) it HAS to be only on a long cooldown ultimate.
~ Make Azir not impossible to play for low skill play. If we can make the ability to play Azir for everyone it will offer an easier time to balance him, it is weird to nerf a champion so much when at least 95%+ of the player base cannot play him well at all since his learning curve is so high he ends up being drastically overpowered for competitive play. This also includes having Azir playable at any ping.
~ Range of threat. I don't think we should remove his long range with Sand Soldiers completely, just make them a lot weaker, and for really strong attacks he has to get close to his soldiers exposing him to getting counter attacked.
~ Let's build a tower! Or should we? His passive is unique, yes, but it is also really random and may not be one of those things we can remove for something else to reduce fluff on Azir. Build a tower makes no sense to Azir's kit or even his theme. Why is a bird emperor of Shurima building a giant sun disc that shoots out laser bolts?
~ PROTECT YOUR EMPEROR! Emperor's Divide makes sense as a defensive spell to protect Azir so he can deal his damage, it actually does not make sense for him to fly in and knock enemies in his team with it exposing a squishy back line mage into the enemy team. This is a decision based on whether we want Azir to keep Shurima Shuffle in an easier to use form or not. If we go all out on Azir being a threat and emperor of Shurima then his dash is removed completely and he becomes a high power, immobile hyper mage-marksman.
~ Azir should have no burst. He has sustain damage, should not have any burst to go with it, pretty simple.
~ Remove weird ratios and have everything scaling with ability power.
~ Remove per level powering up on abilities and have everything level with ability rank. Problem with W scaling with levels is that you get two power ups of damage to level 9 since both Q+W are gaining more damage with every level up, which contributes to Azir having too good of an early game for a hyper scaler.
~ Restate with balancing Sand Soldier power. Keep their long range, but greatly reduce their damage, for a new passive Azir greatly amplifies Sand Soldier damage when he is nearby THAT Sand Soldier (let's say his natural AA range) which also allows the Sand Soldier stabs to apply on-hit effects as well (so Nashor's Tooth damage).
~ Q should be a re-positioning Sand Soldiers tool with very minimal damage and no slow. Create a slow somewhere else in Azir's kit, or even have empowered Sand Soldier for being near them slow struck enemies, slow % scales further with ability power.