Thoughts on Azir post buff

After playing him awhile longer, here are my thoughts on the 45% winrate Azir (5% increase!)

-His damage is fine. His mechanics make the lane very, very snowbally either way, but nothing can really be done about that. -His power curve doesn't peak quite high enough. His actual poke damage throughout the game is fine, but because of the cooldown limits on his soldiers on top of his aspd reliant scaling, he can't always get his soldiers where they need to be. The damage here isn't as reliable as another AP carry. -Offensive play has no margin for error. If you go for an E->R insec combo, you have to be exact in position to land both spells. Therefore, no one will bother. -On his offensive play, Azir has to play like a chicken. Seriously. If the enemy has any sort of dash, then we can't actually do anything since he spent his Q and E to get up close. E just doesn't do enough to justify using offensively it past early game. -He either gets outdps or burst down because his shield doesn't scale high enough. -His ult is still buggy or the timing is just weird. Either way, it's not reliable enough to get people off of you half the timing (J4 for example has weird interactions on when he can get knocked back during his ult animations, Riven can sometimes Q through the wall, etc.) -His synergy with any melee offensive champion is really low. He can't follow up too well and while he excels at poke, he lacks any finishing moves so it's hard to secure a kill with your jungler.

Azir could really use the following buffs:

**-Increased deployment range for Sand Soldiers ** Obviously not enough to make it outrange Q, but enough so that he can reach someone who dashes away from him. This increases his follow up potential.

**-E gives its shield or at least half of its shield without having to crash into an enemy ** Far far too often will I end up in situations where I get knocked out of the dash or end up dying in a close encounter that I would have won had I actually gotten a shield on cast rather than on hit. This also helps reliability in that you always get the shield whether or not every viable champion has mobility to dodge it or not.

**-Make E cooldown reduce on hit like Gragas ** Azir should be rewarded for playing aggressively and for smart soldier placement. It already has one of the highest cooldowns in the game for a dash at 15 seconds max rank and does practically nothing by itself.

-Increased health scaling on E Azir is not a tank. It's understandable that we don't want another Riven/Orianna overbearing offense/defense conversions, but Azir's shield doesn't cut it for the risk of going in. Increasing the health scaling might open up more options for a more frontline oriented Azir.

-Make Azir's ult a two step process. Make it knock everyone in range up and then push them back with his soldiers. This makes Azir's ult a guaranteed success when timed correctly to counter an enemy dash rather than sometimes failing completely.

-Make Azir's ult start further behind him. This makes an insec combo more reliable and allows him push enemies that dash or teleport directly on top of him with a better success rate.

Besides his shield, his kit doesn't require much more number tuning, just mechanic changes so he doesn't fail at them a quarter of the time.