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Aatrox: The Most Unviable Champion

Doctor Feed·10/25/2016, 5:33:32 PM·2 votes·1,088 views

This is gonna sound like just a lot of salt, but I've been playing this game for a while and I've got some things to say. I may not be a great Aatrox player, and I'm not calling myself a god at top lane either. But in 5 games of Aatrox, I have only won 1, and my general KDA is 3/8/2. He's too easily countered by commonly played champions. Riven, Teemo, and Yasuo are all I see up there, and the few good matchups he has, any jungle pressure and his lane is over. A recent video popped up on my YouTube (Link above) and it looked like Aatrox would be pretty good. I would need perfect cs and like 0 enemy jungle pressure just to survive the lane, and in Silver, that's not going to happen.

Playing this champion has been one of the most frustrating experiences of my entire time playing this game, (and believe me, I've seen a lot of frustrating things in this game). His early game is so garbage, that any fear of a late game is erased by his lack of any kind of power. He requires too many items to be good, and he can't be involved in any by the most rewarding teleport plays, so he has to sit in a lane and farm it the entire time. Super exciting.

If a Red could answer some of the following questions, that would be helpful, because I think that Riot in general has just left Aatrox to rot.

  1. I understand that, on release, Aatrox was an absolute nightmare, requiring heavy nerfs just to balance him, and I know that trying to balance him is a nightmare. What is the general plan for Aatrox, rework him in a future class update, give him his own specific rework, or just abandon him entirely?
  2. Do you see a place for Aatrox in this game? It seems like the other Divers just do his job better and actually do something once they get into the fight. Full tank feels super weak and makes his fantasy of "No one will stand in my way" flop as he hits things with a wet noodle, and even building him like a traditional fighter seems to just take the bad parts of the extremes and make him look powerful but actually do nothing. Thanks for listening to my rant about Aatrox.

7 Comments

Nahui10/25/2016, 6:11:48 PM2 votes

I'm not trying to be rude, but I do this to all complaint posts about Aatrox. Don't take this poorly.

You're not bringing up anything new. Riot and all of League understand that he is a shit champion with a poorly balanced archtype. Making more posts about it won't help anything, Riot will rework him eventually.

Praise the Son10/25/2016, 8:08:59 PM1 votes

You misspelled Mordekaiser. Kappa

Failog10/26/2016, 12:20:47 AM1 votes

Well I looked at your builds--pretty conventional. Here is the problem--this conventional wisdom on how to build Aatrox comes from a community that barely plays him seriously. So forget all of that.

My win rate is usually 60-70 percent at top. Its a little lower right now because I played tons of matches with a mouse that I late realized was not clicking when I clicked sometimes and it really screwed me up.

Try him again. And here is what you should try:

item 3812 item 3046 item 3047 will be build most games in this order.

The last 3 items usually are something likeitem 3026 item 3071 item 3156 or item 3742 item 3075 against a very AD heavy team. I like early guardian angel. I find it very strong on Aatrox especially since its so cheap to get.

Run Thunderlords with the extra cool down. This will give you 15% cool down once you finish item 3812

item 3046 provides damage reduction, movement speed, damage from crits and attack speed, and its cheap. Get it.

Thunderlords scales off AD, and it helps a lot with early trades, and Bandit mastery helps with early gold income as you get 10 gold per auto attack. It adds up.

Take scaling armor and magic resist runes to help him out late game, take AD reds 1 AD quint and 2 attack speed quints.

Take ignite and Ghost, with the Insight mastery, this allows you to have both of them ready at 150 and 180 seconds or so. And they work well together. Ghost lasts for 10 seconds so you can stick, or move through minions in a confusing team fight, and ignite makes sure that they don't lose you in a bush (and of course the extra damage)

So, let me know how it goes.

CleanBandito4/12/2018, 5:22:25 PM1 votes

I know this is old but really? Yasuo is a counter? Like, are you being for real? Dude is a stick, cant beat aatrox in the laning phase