The direction of Azir nerfs.
Right now Azir has 3 nerfs on the PBE.
- Emperor's Divide (R): Wall duration lowered to 3 seconds from 5/6/7
- Emperor's Divide (R): No longer grants 20% movement speed for 1 second when passing through wall for Azir and Allies
- Arise! (W) can no longer be used on towers to deal 60-230 (+.4 AP).
Everybody is focusing on the first one. It's actually the least important. It'll lower his wine rate across the board. But Azir's problem with balance is the skill gap between experienced and inexperienced players. The way to nerf experienced players is to reduce something they are more likely to take advantage of : in this case different situations. Azir as he currently stands has an extremely flexible kit and a wide decision/situation tree as a result. It isn't that his numbers are too high, it's that he has too many discrete things on his kit. That is why the nerfs 2 and 3 are better. They remove discrete things from his kit, not just lower numbers. Options that he had before are completely removed. Now there is one less point of situation/decision mastery. This barely influences beginners as they don't know when it's a good time to save the soldiers vs. use them on turrets etc.
These won't make Azir balanced, he never has been balanced and that's the problem. What these do is lower the skill ceiling so that in the future he might be balanced.