Aphelios and Champions like him are a problem.

When challenger players ban them every game, there's something wrong. Aphelios reached 223.47% ban rate in Korean Challenger, followed by Akali (174.37%) and Qiyana (138.37%).

Designing an interesting, complex champion is a feat, for sure. Making a champion that is intuitive and fun to play does not sound like an easy thing to do but Riot has done pretty well with creating these kinds of designs for the past few seasons.

HOWEVER!

Fun to play AS versus fair/fun to play AGAINST has gone wildly off the rails in terms of balance. Playing against champions like Senna, Aphelios, Qiyana with her extremely busted R.... in lower elo it's a coinflip. Either the person is good with them or they aren't, so some games you do pretty well and think "yeah that champion isn't so bad actually. All these people saying the champ is unfair are just bad".

But at Challenger you don't get that rng to potentially stomp because your opponent is none the wiser. When in the right hands these champions are so unfun to play against that players ban them literally every single game, and in Aphelios' case, every single game on BOTH sides.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/elhigl/in_korean_challenger_aphelios_had_a/

So to everyone in these threads saying that you just need to learn how to deal with him... bollocks. Seriously. You cannot feasibly lane against a dude that swaps ranges, attacks, abilities, ults, and globals on the fly. Other champions were not created with the tools to deal with this kind of opponent. Same for Senna, with huge range, heals, safe damage, the best ward control item in the game, her Sona E on steroids, and massive global presence.

that is all o/