i played him in jungle for 2 year OTP. lets analyze
first dragon timer, all solo after 3 camps (level 3)
pre-rework:
3:50, 0-1 health potions used, can clear the rest of the jungle effeciently straight after dragon
rework:
4:30, all 3 potions used, has to base and cannot clear jungle after. https://gyazo.com/c88b22ac76bdf3274a5e214d5ab78599
baron soloing:
pre-rework items:
Spirit Visage, Jungle AS item, Rage blade. Could do solo NP. If u did good you could get these items by 20 minutes and take it in ~20 seconds
rework:
very hard and requires way more gold, not impossible but really hard.
Counterjungling:
pre-rework
high early damage W, good heal and mixed damage from magic damaging E made it good to invade enemy jungle on early. Passive attack speed gave you good changes in duels and boosted up your sustain in a way that made you win fights even though the enemy did essentially more damage - if you just lived through their spell cycle.
Passive revive made it safer. While reviving you could charge for your Q or instantly flash after should you make a mistake. During revive any allies that joined you had time to finish up the threaths
re-work
W damage lowered significantly, E doing ad which is not as effective against junglers since they usually run low to 0 magic resist in their runes.
Cant risk going into enemy jungle since you dont have guaranteed GA and your health / potions are lower than before because of the attack speed nerf that helped you keep your hp up. While getting bloodrush you get close to the strenght as before but NOTICE, even you get the +20 ad that doesnt compensate for the lowered W heal and W damage, and it is very easy for the enemy to just pull off for 4 seconds, wait your bloodlust to end and then come and kill you easily.
and no, you cant stack your passive ready before entering enemy jungle since they fall off insanely fast when out of combat.
Clearing
this is simple, before you had permanently 30% atk speed since the first camp (game start you stack Q in base for blood, you reach camp with 98% bloodwell)
now you dont have that atk speed
E deals ad damage(less on monsters): jungle mosters DO have armor, but they had -15 magic resist, which makes it significant nerf in clear speed on that part too.
Building
wether you played in top or jungle you never liked to see rammus or malphite in enemy team while playing Aatrox. Well it WASNT so big of a problem, you could get hybrid items that are good for Aatrox such as Rage Blade (crucial item since it makes W every 2 attacks instead of 3, and makes all those solo barons possible) or gunblade
this way you would have some poke from E that their stacked armor was useless against.
NOW since the AP ratio was removed, building those items waste a significant amount of gold on AP that is only used in your ultimate once in 1.5 minutes, and not in constant E poke/clear. This makes it really impossible to play Aatrox against any tanky toplaner since they can build full armor and expect 0 damage from Aatrox.
Before you could even go AP aatrox vs malphite and that worked pretty good.
Also Rage Blade which was, atleast for jungle Aatrox, an essential core item does now have 80 AP which you basically dont get to use effeciently at all.
Now i've listed out most of my arguments against claims that new Aatrox is better in any way, specially in jungle, so I would like to hear your, who think he is better, opinions as to why you think he would be better in jungle or anywhere for that matter.
might aswell add links to accounts I have played Aatrox on:
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/19248141/Tiksu#ranked-stats season 6 stats
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/21395990/Darth%20Aatrox#ranked-stats season 6 stats
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/27427547/CFHIKO#ranked-stats season 6 stats
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/22198624/Sgt%20Karil#ranked-stats seaspm 5 stats
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/27577512/Sgt%20Karil%20III#ranked-stats season 6 and 7 stats
from LP history you will find out that the 3 first accounts were Diamond, the first one was diamond most of the time but the chart doesnt show that far, I had made a demote from it and then briefly went back before essentially quitting the game for months to come.
in total these make 1028 Aatrox ranked games during seasons 5-7 played between platinum and low diamond
Somehow I just cant see this kind of stuff being able to happen anymore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3doZ629MI5M&list=PLHLyLwDq53gA24bA031B5nBcvnyoyusfc
notice that im not even fed in this clip, 4 kills and medicore farm. And in the second one im not even really ahead in gold judging by the items of others.
. Which is bad, because he's supposed to be a duelist, and always be ready for combat. With little escape in his kit, for example, he should be able to at least trade well enough, like Jax. His W's healing is reduced. That's an issue, but Riot had previously said they hated him being a lane zombie like Trynd had been in the past, so that's expected.
But in the past, his W did NOT deal more dmg to himself than the enemy.
