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Let's Talk Aatrox

Mob Psycho 100··10 votes·1,196 views

Hey everyone! I want to talk about Aatrox for a quick second. Mainly about his feeling of being underpowered and sometimes the non-impact feel he gives sometimes on Summoner's Rift.

Aatrox is one of my favorite champs, from his design and backdrop to his playstyle and kit. I mean, c'mon, who doesn't like an ancient being that closely resembles one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse?

(Scroll down for Tldr;)

Here are some Pros and Cons that I have found playing with Aatrox: PROS 1 Sustain God - I usually jungle with him, and he can easily get to level 3 without even needing the use of your health pots. 2 E hybrid damage - Most level this first, mostly due to the poke potential and makes your opponents build path tricky. 3 Q Initiation - His Q, which I will also mention in the con's, Is a very nice initiation combo'd with his ult to deal some nice damage. 4 Early-Mid Passive - His passive is really nice to have early game for dives and that early GA to save you.

CONS 1 W Active - I feel a lot of times not even wanting to activate my W due to not only the cost of health while dueling, but also how it deals Bonus Damage, making Armor Pen something you need to make it feel impactful. 2 Squishy Early game - He has the lowest base health in the game. This makes me want to build health, which is always a must, but I'd like to feel something more helpful if I do build a tankier route. 3 Q letdown - I have found myself in constant anger over how I shouldve gotten away from dying, or popping my passive, because his Q (as an escape) feels gross. (Will explain more)

I know that there are more that some people feel, but those are ones I really notice.

How to fix this.

  1. W Active When toggled off, his sustain and heal is amazing, but when it is on, the bonus damage doesnt feel as helpful in a duel than when its healing you. To fix this, I suggest changing the bonus physical damage dealt to magic damage dealt, all while still scaling with AD. This will help add a lot of depth to his hybrid damage outside of only his E and Ult active.

  2. Needs to be Tanky To stay alive, even with his W, he needs to build tanky. Usually he's built tanky right after a item 3153 or item 3074 . Maybe sometimes both. You'd build into maybe item 3083 item 3143 or item 3065, depending on who youre against. I know plenty of people want to feel satisfied, not only by just staying alive, by building these tanky items. Fix his base stats, or make it feel more rewarding to build him tanky.

  3. Damn You, Q! I say, dying while in the midst of Q'ing away is one of the worst feelings. What sucks even more, is Q'ing away and then your passive getting popped, staying mid air for the seconds of your passive activating, then dying because after your passive ( if youre in a bad spot) you're an easy kill. Why not give him some invulnerability at the top of his Q? Too strong? Then buff his passive. Give him some sort of buff after his passive is popped that Aatrox players can feel comfortable with knowing that there can be some hope in staying alive.

ABILITY CHANGES

Passive - Blood Well

  • At 18, the most the blood well can hold is ~ 800, healing around 1k when 18 and with a full blood well. It feels really irrelevant and weak late-game. QoL fix - Change the restored amount of his after his passive is popped to scale with max health. ie: Live restored amount: Amount in Blood Well + 10.5 + (15.75 x level) QoL change: Amount in Blood well + 10.5 +(15% Max health) After some number crunching, at level one, (with no runes/masteries affecting HP) the amount restored changes from 101 to 193, and at level 18 from 884 to 1282 assuming they've built Randuin's and Spirit Visage ( once again with no runes/masteries affecting HP) bringing his Max HP to 2883. That 400 Health extra is a big difference late game, and it can feel a lot better than live when you build a tanky Aatrox.

_ Q - Dark Flight_

  • The main thing with this is his stale movement coming at the start of his Q. If he got a slight frame of invulnerability at the top, immunity to displacement, or an animation fix to help move his hitboxes out of his original location at the start of the ability would easily make his Q feel more rewarding when youre escaping.

_ W - Blood Thirst/ Blood Price_

  • His heal is amazeballs, keep it that way. His Blood Price just doesn't feel worth it too much. Change the physical damage dealt to magic damage dealt, that way the bonus damage wont feel weak when the opponent builds armor to combat you. His hybrid play would feel a lot better and the bonus damage would be used a lot more than players use it now.

E - Blades of Torment

  • Nothin to see here. Move along.

R - Massacre

  • As much as I adore the buff to his Ult, giving him the ability to fill his Blood Well by the amount of enemies he hits, the initial damage it deals is puny. It scales with AP which isn't fun anymore since there is no DFG (Full AP Aatrox with DFG were the good ol' days). Let Players feel even better about building tanky by changing the AP scaling to scale with his HP. It makes sense, considering he's drawing blood from his foe's, whole health based gameplay etc.

Tldr; Aatrox feels underpowered. Make his passive and Ult scale with HP letting Aatrox building tanky feel rewarding as well as making his passive not irrelevant late game. Fix his Q to feel better as an escape and W toggle deal magic damage instead of physical damage so it feels like it gives more of an impact when it's used.

6 Comments

Teridax681 votes

I agree with a lot of the downsides you mentioned, but I also feel like there are gameplay issues with Aatrox 's kit that are preventing him from being as good as he could be. He definitely feels like he should thrive as a drain tank, but his drain tanking can easily turn into free infinite lane sustain, which isn't good. Despite feeling mostly weak, he also tends to become overly difficult to kill if he does snowball, again due to how much sustain he can have at any given time on top of a tanky build. There needs to be a clear way of dealing with him at all times, regardless of how fed he is or how much sustain he has, if he wants to be in a good spot.

Thoughts on the changes you're proposing:

  • I like the change to the passive, as this would be a decent way of making Aatrox scale with tankiness without becoming impossible to kill.
  • I wouldn't change his Q flight at all: I think it's good that he has a window where he stays in place, because it gives his opponents an opportunity to land some extra shots against him, and I think him having that is a deliberate gameplay decision. I don't think his Q needs changes at all, but if you really wanted to buff it I think it would be better to reward good use of it, instead of simply making it easier to use overall.
  • I'm not sure if giving Aatrox heavy hybrid damage would be the best way of answering the issues with his W, especially because it's already somewhat difficult to build against him (how do you deal with a guy resistant to both burst and DPS?). I'd rather try to find a way to make his W work better with his own kit, i.e. giving him sustain that's powerful without being abusive, and health costs to his damage that encourage strategic use without completely disincentivizing him.
  • Having his ult damage scale with his HP (or his enemies' health, which would make more sense) would be a good buff, though I think his ult might need bigger changes: right now, it's a half-nuke, half-steroid that isn't particularly satisfying at anything it does, and I think it has the potential to be a lot more interesting. Gameplay aside, Aatrox has this awesome theme as an instigator of war, a theme that isn't expressed anywhere on his kit, and I feel turning his ult into a team-wide offensive steroid would add a lot more depth and flavor to his kit, while allowing him to buff himself in a manner that isn't redundant (splitting the same steroid across two abilities isn't good, yet his ult adds attack speed on top of his passive's AS, and his range increase isn't that spectacular when he already has an above-average attack range for a melee champion).
khorney1 votes

One word ga on him is broken

FreshMeat7071 votes

Please Riot, make Aatrox relate-able again, h is one of my mains but it is A BITCH of a time trying to get kills.

DrNova1 votes

I stopped reading when I heard complaints about W. Get a little attack speed and W will jack some people up. Yets its not OP. I think he's in a goodish place. No need to make him OP which he could be easy with only minor tweaks

BubbaDuke1 votes

The only thing I struggle with with Aatrox is what to build on him. He struggles so hard with building Damage because he'll be so squishy and get blown up, but if you try to build him tanky/bruiser he won't do any damage.

junglerboy161 votes

Your passive change is actually only a real buff to Aatrox's early game. Right now, it actually restores this amount: 35% max blood well+current contents of blood well (up to a maximum of 135% blood well contents), which at max restores 1174.5 HP without being required to build any health items. Your change is actually inconsequential until 15% Max HP exceeds 35% Blood well content limit (and the blood well content limit already scales at roughly 50% of his baseHP), which means your max HP has to be between 245 HP at level 1 and 2030 at 18 for this to be a buff, meaning instead of helping his late game like you intended, you are severely buffing his early game (where he doesn't need this big of a buff) while only buffing his late game if he follows the cookie cutter build you set for him. Instead, they should buff the maximum capacity of blood well from 105-870 to 140-905, but have the revive instead restore 20/35/50% max blood well+current contents. That increases the base revive by nothing at level 1, and virtually unchanged until level 11 whereafter it starts to scale harder than it does now, keeping it relevant but not requiring him to either complete or build those two health items at all. at 18, the revive currently restores between 305 and 1175 health, where after this change, it would restore between 453 and 1358 health. Since this health restoration is increased by things like SV and the Second Wind mastery, this is actually a pretty big late game buff that will keep him more relevant without immediately incentivizing him to need to build full tank to get the most out of it.

For Q, I like the idea of speeding up the animation a little or only making him CC-able for the first half of the ability (the wind-up when he jumps up into the sky).

For W, changing it to magic damage would just make him a harder lane bully and fall off even worse late game (not a good thing, because then the champ becomes binary very quickly, either stomping lane and winning by 20 minutes or falling off after 15 minutes and being useless). They need to buff the damage ratio on it to reward Aatrox for taking a risk and building damage, and also reduce the self inflicted damage AD ratio so that it doesn't make it hurt even more when he already take the risk of building squishy. The numbers would look something like this: bonus AD ratio changed from 100% to 80/90/100/110/120% (less bullying early in exchange for better late game damage). Self inflicted AD ratio reduced from 25% per proc to 20% per proc.

E I would actually suggest this change: Change the damage from: 75/110/145/180/215 (+60% AP) (+60% bonus AD) to 55/95/135/175/215 (+50% AP) (+60% AD). It changes literally nothing about it's early game strength (the base damage reduction accounts for his base AD now being a part of the scaling) but provides it a little extra late game scaling because of your Base AD now being factored in giving it a little extra damage each time you level up. Nerving the AP ratio is just so that there is less false power in the kit in exchange for the better late game ratio.

For R I had actually suggested something almost exactly like this on my own thread, but it should scale with his missing HP (the closer he is to dying, the more damage it deals). This would reinforce the way he dances around half health with his W and health costs, and still allows a tankier Aatrox to have some damage impact in the game (more health to work with means an Aatrox with 3k health can get more out of the missing health ratio than a 2k HP Aatrox). Something like 10/15/20% of Aatrox's missing health would be perfect. The other thing I would suggest though is Aatrox needs a steroid other than extra AS from this ability, because together with his passive both feel weak and redundant, where if he only had his passive, they could buff it to a strong steroid and give him something else on his ult instead (like increased damage dealt by Aatrox and all allies within the cast range because Aatrox is a leader who incites his allies to glory). They could buff his passive to give between 35 and 75% AS (depending on level) which is a respectable buff instead of a rather unnoticeable one, and then all allies within range would deal % increased damage for the next 12 seconds, helping his team fighting and late game out.

All in all, you made a pretty good analysis, but not everything you suggested would be the best for him.

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