Aurelion Sol rework feedback for devs since they asked for it on twitter.

Sol main (or secondary depending on season) since he came out. Had close to a 70% win rate with him in plat. Winrate has fallen significantly since the rework (def in the negatives now). Here are my thoughts.

First off, design goals as stated by the devs were a complete miss. They said they wanted to stop him from shoving and roaming so much early. They said they wanted to make him easier to play for the normal player to up his popularity. IMO they missed on both these fronts while making him less unique in the process and definitely a worse champion. First off, he can still shove and roam early. He can't do it level 1 anymore so I guess they achieved their goal there but he actually shoves the wave and roams EASIER now once he has a few levels in W and maybe a blasting wand. Instead of having to use up half your mana bar to shove the wave, he now just does W once and then is free to roam and gank with his E that now has MORE range so it actually makes it easier to roam. Yes he lost out of combat move speed but I think the other two aspects they gave him made him better at it regardless.

Ease of use: What? He's way harder now IMO. Early on, your W has an EXTREMELY long cooldown so you generally get 1 W per fight. In the early game skirmishes which are mandatory now because of scuttle, you have to make sure your W hits with all it's stars and you have to keep them in it for the full duration. Before he was free to W and move in and out of range as necessary for safety but because it's all or nothing now, you expose yourself to being engaged on trying to get the full duration of W to hit them. The other problem is late game, the small down periods on W's duration can come at critical times when you need to be able to kill someone and this will result in people escaping or having just enough time to kill you fairly often in team fights where he wouldn't have had that issue before. He also lost his safety in his out of combat move speed, so it's easier to get caught and harder to position correctly in fights. It's also harder to approach players with him to get into W range which is his only real source of damage. They gave him Q movespeed to compensate for this where I believe the trading pattern they wanted was for you to Q into W range, stun them, hit W, and then use W's ending move speed to pull out for a clean trade. This doesn't work though as anyone that's not asleep can just walk out of the way of the extremely slow moving / telegraphed Q. You almost never want to do Q from a range other than fairly close to the enemy because of this, so you're already in you W range anyway, meaning this doesn't help his approach. Also because he now has no flexibility in his approach and because he has to get into the threat range of other burstier / more reliable champions, he just feels very weak in lane because he's so squishy and pretty much gets out traded by more popular mages. This in turn just makes him harder to play effectively. So, a big miss on both the roaming nerf aspect and the ease of use aspect.

IMO the worst thing about this change is it hit his unique playstyle and niche in favor of him being a short bursty trade champion like every mage (that's worse at it and less safe than other mages that do the same thing now). Why would I pick Sol now to do burst when I can play literally any other mage that does comparable or better burst damage faster and from a safer distance? Being essentially a sustained magic damage bruiser before was a really neat niche that not many other champions occupied but now he's just a crappier version of better champions with an annoying to use W mechanic for damage. Why homogenize him when he was so unique before? Doesn't this game want more diversity in playstyles?

So, what would I like to see changed to help:

1. Revert to old Sol. This was a complete miss on the design goals, most of the community hates it. His winrate took a good 4-5 point drop. He still has his "toxic playstyle" of roaming a lot early and not engaging mid while losing what made him unique.

2. If a revert is off the table:

• Increase his base movespeed. He has incredibly low movespeed for a champion who's entire DPS pattern revolves around being able to move.
• Increase his stats to make him tankier. He's super squishy for being so short ranged and basically loses the short trade game that he's been redesigned to play against nearly every popular midlaner.
• Move W's movespeed increase to the front instead of the back for "ease of use" since that was the design goal.
• Consider adding a mechanic to help W's cooldown in early fights so he's not completely useless in scuttle skirmishes while also still nerfing his early W waveclear. I like the idea of having each boop landed by W on a champion reduce the cooldown by X amount, or extend the duration of W by X amount. This would reward using his W aggressively while keeping the cooldown longer so he can't just delete the minion wave early on and would make him not a complete potato in scuttle skirmishes in early levels.
• E > Q combo: If you want the giant star engage to be anything other than a meme, he's gotta be able to redirect the star while flying IMO. I'm not sure what the best way to implement this would be but being able to change the direction of the star slightly after a certain point would greatly help in making the big star plays something he can realistically do in higher elos. Maybe not a complete redirecting but being able to alter it's trajectory slightly would help A LOT.

Hope some of this feedback helps address people's issues with the rework. Personally (and I know most Sol players feel the same way) I really just don't find the new Sol as enjoyable to play and would prefer to get the old one back.