Talk:Azir/@comment-25465131-20140927221426/@comment-4167645-20140928031752

Sorry but I'm gonna have to side with Azir being not usable. Sure when hes got 6 items, he becomes quite good. But the problem is the journey to it.

Like all monarchs and rulers, Azir is terrifyingly susceptible to assassins. You can really put anyone with the assassin tag in his lane, and hes probably going to come out of lane with a minimum 5 deaths by the 20th minute. And once hes died once, its a slippery slope and no one is going to let you regain ground because Azir just can't. They can initiate on Azir with their basic spells, and hes going to take a lot of burst damage before he can W-Q-E to safety, all while not being allowed to retaliate because he depends on auto-attacks. So maybe you escaped the assassin, but hes still at close to full health while you lost around half of yours. He can use that to pressure you because you still need to remain on a leash with your soldiers and take time to auto rather than the typical mage throw and forget.

Essentially, he operates like an AD carry, really weak early and really strong late. Just farm and farm. However, unlike an AD carry, they decided to slap him with numerous debuffs which make the initial farm up so darn hard. Weak armor, unremarkable health, almost no aspd, and probably the weakest auto-attack in the game. Did you know that even with 40% cdr, his aspd is still pretty much the same with a normal mage's like Karthus? The soldiers hold little threat in the early game because they have extremely low base damage(Lvl 2 soldiers with AP runes do essentially the same damage as a normal champion with AD runes). People will just walk through a soldier and shrug off the auto, and because you can't launch a next attack fast enough due to low aspd have to watch them walk out of the circle. Worse still is when you use a Q to poke, and they move towards you, so now your soldier is far away and you hold little threat over them to dissuade them from getting closer whereas a normaly adc could continue to shoot while backpeddaling.

Additionally, he has almost no chasing power. His set-up takes so long that people most of the time just outrun him. W-Q-E-wait 6 seconds-Q. Another early game detriment.

His ult feels clunky as heck, and the optimum set-up of W-Q-E-R knocks the enemy out of range of your soldier that you sent in so you have to set up a new one, but the knockback probably launched them further than your 450 range summon. The wall on its own won't dissuade assassins because they can just circle you like a shark, or wait till its gone and come back when you have no wall.

So a lot of his time in game are spent patching up his weaknesses. Get health to not die, get ap to do normal spell dmg, get cdr so you are't left high and dry, get mana so he can harass, get aspd so it doesn't suck. Its once those are patched up with 2 or 3 items in his inventory that his gameplay really starts, so if we're talking full build champions I have no qualms with Azir and maybe even enjoy him.

The only way I see to cover these is to somehow persuade the team to let you be the marksman, go bot lane and have a really really tanky support guard you for 20 minutes. Hopefully they wont engage or gank you. You'll run out of mana though.

In short, too many detriments without items, clunky gameplay, assassins wipe him.