The problems with Yorick's Gameplay, and my Suggestions.

https://images4.alphacoders.com/278/thumb-350-278496.jpg Yorick was designed primarily to be a split pushing monster, but his actual gameplay is far away from that. Instead he is a beast in the early game that falls off incredibly hard in the mid to late game, and has a mediocre split and one of the worst teamfights in the game. He has some problems that I'd like to address. The goal of this is to push him towards the fantasy that Riot wants to support, the one of a mid to late game split-pusher. These problems really can't be fixed by changing numbers, there are parts of Yorick's kit that stops him from being a solid split-pusher. Just for some context, I am a toplane GP main whose playstyle is heavy on splitpushing. I am also in the process of learning Tryndamere, which is probably the best split-pusher in the game. I know what makes a good split-pusher, and what makes split-pushing work.

So why does Yorick fails a split-pusher while other champions are much better at this? There's a lot of reasons for this, so I'm just going to go over them and propose solutions at the end. Firstly, Yorick is essentially chained to the minion wave while split-pushing. If there's one thing that you notice among most of the high-tier split-pushers (Tryndamere, Udyr, Fiora, etc.) is that they are generally mobile. Fiora and Tryndamere both have low cd dashes, and Udyr runs around incredibly fast. This is important because split-pushers aren't just mindless fighters that constantly go down one lane and wack at the tower, and then 1v5 when threatened. The primary goal of a split is to create pressure, drag the enemy team behind, and to be really annoying and frustrating to deal with. The obvious way to do this is to take towers, but there are other things that you can do, like take Jungle camps and roam to other lanes. You need to keep the enemy team on their toes, and fighting should almost always be a last resort, because if you give the enemy team a kill, you've failed. This is one of the places where Yorick fails. He needs minions to be powerful, but if he leaves the lane because the enemy team is chasing him, he has to leave behind his minions and stack them up again later. He can't take Jungle monsters as fast without minions, nor can he easily roam to other lanes as easily. Yorick needs to either have an easier way to drag minions out of the minion wave, have on demand access to a new batch of minions late game, or just be an incredibly strong duelist and powerhouse. Think like how an Illoai can 1v9 when she has her tentacles up, Yorick should be able to do the same thing when he gets his ghouls up, but Yorick's dueling potential is very mediocre unless you have all of your ghouls and your ult up, and even then there are other champions who do the same thing better with less setup and with more mobility and utility.

Another problem that Yorick has is that his late game is just weak. It's difficult to give a Juggernaut a strong late game, because of the way itemization works. The only Juggernauts that really have strong late games either build mainly damage , or have stats built into their kits ( passive or Q stacks.) I don't think that Yorick should have either of these, but I have a suggestion to try and make his late game better, although it has to do with the next problem as well, so I am going to talk about it at the end.

Although Yorick does depend a lot on his minions, I don't feel like he depends on them enough. As some people put it, he is one of the most lousy interpretations of a minion-mancer out there. He feels like you are playing Nasus with a bunch of caster minions following him around. Yes, they are strong in the early game, but once you leave laning phase and the enemy team starts to get their items, the minion's usefulness begin to fall off incredibly fast. They barely do damage, and die too quickly to both auto-attacks and to AOE damage. Especially in a teamfight, it feels like these minions don't even exist. I say that part of the problem is that Yorick is forced to build . The minions have a very good AD ratio, but you don't feel it because Yorick barely gets AD in his items. Tri is an item that benefits Yorick, but not his minions. IMO, he synergies too much with Sheen, so much so that he needs to lose power on unique mechanic because his bland auto-attack reset is too powerful. However, this spell is Yorick's only real defensive steroid/sustain, and it feels underwhelming in that regard. Yorick feels way less tanky than any of his other toplane Juggernaut brethren, and part of the problem is that he gets tri instead of the tankier BC, but part of the problem is also that his defensive steroid is really shitty. The fix to this is a bit complicated. I'd say just straight up rework his Q into a new spell that isn't an auto-attack reset, and is instead some other kind of damage spell that is easier to land (as in you don't need to be point blank melee range to use it). What if his Q was a small AOE swing in front of him. Hell, it could even be two swing, so that he can get more fervor/BC stacks off of it. He would need a new way to get graves off, but I think I have an idea for that.

So now that the problems are out of the way, here are my proposed changes to try and balance Yorick. The scope of this update is going to be that of one of the micro-updates that champions have been recieving. Think like the Heimerdinger changes that he recieved recently, or the changes that Singed is getting now. The first update is more risky, but fits with the theme of Yorick being an immovable wall split-pusher that was intended. I worry that this form would be a bit difficult to balance, since Yorick loses the flexibility and mobility of other splitpushers with dashes, but he makes up for it by being incredibly difficult to shut down. The other one will be less thematically fitting, but easier to implement and to balance. With all that said and done, let's get right into the changes.

Idea #1: Base stats: Slightly weaker (his kit gives him defensive stats to compensate.) Passive: Yorick can now have up to 5 graves/mistwalkers at a time, as opposed to 4. Mistwalkers have weak base damage but better AD scaling. Now for every mistwalker that Yorick has near him, he gains a small amount of amount of HP, armor, and mr. Rate that this passive spawns graves is now every 14th/6th/2nd minion as opposed to every 12th/8th/4th (Makes Yorick's early game minion generation weaker, while giving him easier access to minions late game. Late game, he should be able to get at least 4 minions from each wave without having to use Q to last hit each minion, so he can push waves faster without fear of being weaker than he should be. Minions also have better AD scaling and give him natural tankiness so that he can afford to build more damaging items without falling behind on the tankiness department. He still probably isn't going to be able to be as tanky as other Juggernauts like Darius or Nasus, but I think that its fine since he isn't going to be teamfighting much anyways.) Q: No longer applies on hit effects. Instead applies a physical damage DoT that deals %max hp damage. Weak bases but solid scalings. Slightly weaker sustain late game. W: Mana cost is up, wall health is down to 1 hp at rank one, although the scaling for the rest of the rankups of the wall are the same, but the wall is giving a pool in the center which causes enemies standing in it to be grounded. The pool is destroyed when the wall is destroyed. E: No longer deals current hp damage, instead deals a flat number of damage. Mana cost down. R: When spawned, the Maiden allows Yorick to have 1 extra minion on the map. Over the course of multiple seconds, this number builds up until it reaches a maximum of 5 minions. (This is to make using the Maiden a choice that you do before hand, instead of going without her until things get dangerous. However, it still allows Yorick to drop her in the middle of a fight for some on-demand power) Therefore, if Yorick and the Maiden are together, they can have a maximum of 10 minions. Dropping the R does, however, destroy all of Yorick's current minions so he has to build up his army once again. Health of the Maiden is slightly lowered, and %hp magic damage when attacking with Yorick is slightly weakened.

Goals for this rework: Keep that idea of Yorick needing to build up his army before he can push like crazy, and keep the predictable, simplisitic minion AI. But make the minion horde stronger. Allow Yorick to build more damage (Items like , etc) while still remaining relatively tanky, but weaken his early game power as a result. Making him build BC instead of Tri smoothens his power-curve and allows for more power to be put into the minions, as well as his late game, while removing some of the powerful spikes that Sheen and Tri gave. Remove the synergy with Sheen but add a better synergy with BC and give his Q a better way of dealing with toplane tanks which Yorick should be strong against but generally struggles with against after the lane phase. Instead of making his minions stronger, give him access to more minions to make him feel more like a minion mancer. However, if he wants the maximum amount of minions, he needs to use his Maiden to push with him. But this means that he has to blow a high-cooldown spell that may or may not be worth it depending on whether or not the split pans out. This also means that Yorick can't have a massive army and have the Maiden pushing down another lane. This rework keeps Yorick chained to the minion wave like how he is on live, but his push becomes much stronger, almost like a Nasus split-push, where you have to send almost your whole team to come and deal with him. I think that this kind of gameplay would be fine as long as Yorick's lane is made very weak to compensate. Also becasue a lot of his power is windowed, if you can catch him before he has his minions up (this is especially true in lane), then he should be easy to shut down as he loses almost all of his dueling potential without minions. Also AOE damage would also be a good counter to Yorick, as it is on live. Auto attacks should be less of a guaranteed shut down, since there are more minions that you have to deal with. Yorick also has a better way of dealing with hyper-mobile champions which counter him hard.