aatrox damage reduction on ult ?!

His ult wouldn't be the worst ult in the game anymore, but it would run into "less is more" issues.

Generally speaking it's nice to capture the essence of what an ability does in as few words/mechanics as possible: but in the case of Aatrox's ultimate, it is his ultimate and it's not a particularly loaded skill to begin with, so there is certainly room for more than AoE stomp + AS boost (especially compared to Nasus/Riven/Renekton/Olaf).

Still, more life steal on something that boosts his AS is fairly redundant. Whether you look at the raw physical DPS being translated to life-steal sustain or the per-hit life steal in Aatrox's kit, both cases are directly improved by attack speed. So just buffing it's attack speed gains would be better than tacking on a redundant bonus.

Also: %Damage reduction pretty much kills any hope for Aatrox to go any direction besides tank. 10% damage reduction on someone like Maokai is a huge deal, because it means that 3000 HP with 200 armor is a considerable boost in raw punishment that can be taken. Where 10% DR on squishy still ultimately means an OHKO combo will OHKO you. Kind of the difference between ~250 HP or ~900 HP. %DR clearly scales much better with one path than another.

I'm not sure Aatrox should be pushed into a position where he always feels the need to build into a tank with his ultimate, so I don't see %DR as being a good addition there.

And if he got a mini-rework, I'd rather see Riot stress interesting interactions and play-styles rather than pushing him further into a ball-of-stats position.

Tbh I quite like the aoe nuke. people dont expect how much damage it does, especially early. If it had bonus AD scalings whilste still doing magic damage that woudl be pretty neat. Would also mean he would scale a bit better and thematically it would make sense since he lvoe to jump into the fight and deal a shit load of dmg.