Talk:Aatrox/@comment-44862725-20200114221207

Aatrox... Where do I begin with this Champion. A forgotten design back before the rework, and now forgotten again by Riot and their Balance Team.

1. Make his Passive an execute against enemy units such as minions & small jungle monsters. Say if they're around 20/25% of max HP his empowered auto will kill ''em and heal 50% instead of the measely 25% which is atrociously small. No seriously, the average HP of a minion is 300 HP. With his base passive now in laning phase with 5% max health bonus Physical Damage, it deals 15 bonus Physical Damage & heals 25% of the damage dealt. Meaning Aatrox with 80 base Physical Damage from two Adaptive Force in Rune setup + 15 from his Passive = 95 Physical Damage, but only heals for 23 HP. Only 23 HP every 24 Seconds, and this is just if Aatrox can't land a single Q against the laner because they're so mobile or playing way too safe. Warwick has more healing than this, 11 Magic Damage Heal which doubles/triples the lower he gets at level 1 per auto.

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If it's around 50%, at least instead of 23 per 24 Seconds, he could have 47 per 24 Seconds which feels much more impactful in the early game. This gives Aatrox a choice on whether or not he should execute a minion/monster to gain CS and some fair HP throughout the early to late game, or he could proc normally against an Enemy Champion to get the full heal benefit. This gives a little gimmick to both the Aatrox player & the Enemy player to keep an eye out for, to fight when his Passive is either up, or down.

2. Give the Passive an Armor Reduction/Grievous Wounds debuff. If the minion nerf remains, at least give Aatrox a way to scale better into the late game. Maybe 10/14/18/22/26/30% Armor Reduction scaling throughout the game to give him some actual presence in split pushing and dueling, or a 20/24/28/32/36/40% of his Grievous Wounds so it actually scales better in the late game against heavy Lifesteal Champions or Team Comps. Either one would be absolutely valuable to help Aatrox in his dueling as most champions these days can just walk out of his hitboxes.

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If neither of these work, at least have his Maximum Health bonus Damage scale better into the late game. Have his Passive go from 24 to 12 from Levels 1 to 18 into a 20 to 10 Seconds base CD to make his Late Game very relevant. Change the scaling from 5-12% into 5-15% as well, the extra 3% bonus will help dramatically when turning around a duel or a teamfight. He's supposed to be the God Killer with unstoppable amounts of sustain, but when you actually play him, you don't heal anything at all. Seriously, stack Armor against an Aatrox and you'd be surprised how little Damage he deals to you and heals from it too.

3. Change the scaling to Aatrox's Q. Reduce the base Damage, but increase the AD Scaling to make him more viable & have his animations scale with Attack Speed similar to Yasuo so he can have an Attack Speed On Hit off meta build to bring back the nostolgia of the old Aatrox. Probably quicken the animations by 10% each time when he reaches the thresholds of 0.75/0.90/1.05/1.20/1.35/1.50 Attack Speed. This gives Aatrox a choice of either to invest in Attack Speed to quicken his Damage output but deal low to moderate amounts of Damage, or invest in heavy burst Damage but be much slower in the animations which are more punishing. Instead of the 10/30/50/70/90 Base Scaling, have it instead scale with 10/20/30/40/50 & with each additional Q the base increases by 100%. Say it deals 50 base Damage, the base is increased to 100 on the second Q, while the third Q reaches 150 at the maximum. For his base AD scaling, make it 60/70/80/90/100% so early game he doesn't dominate in the lane completely, and in the late game he's still a relevant Champion. Since his Cast Animation is 1 Second, reducing it by .1 Seconds each is amazingly useful if this scales to Attack Speed.

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Keep the Damage against Minions around 60% instead of 55% because that's a very weird number to stop at and the 60% infliction is fair enough to get Aatrox better wave clear in the late game. If not, at least let it scale like it did last time. From 40/45/50/55/60% against minions depending on how many level ups are invested in the Ability to make the Aatrox think of whether to use his Abilities to farm and clear out the wave, or to fight the Enemy player and sacrifice minion clear.

4. Reduce the CD of his W. It's a useless Ability. Either reduce the CD or rework it with a different Ability because it's just so awful. Enemies can run out of the AOE & the Slow is pointless since most Champions these days have a Dash or a Blink to escape. Either Reduce the CD from 26/23/20/17/14 at base to 20/18/16/14/12 Seconds, or add a Grounded effect to actually give some weight to when the Aatrox actually lands the skillshot. This is where the Enemy player has to make a choice, one that limits them from using their Get Out of Jail free card. Oh, and increase the Slow debuff. 25% at all ranks is barely noticable. 20/25/30/35/40% is better for the late game on Aatrox so when you do get hit by his W it means gives them something to worry about. Increase the timer to 2.0 Seconds so it's longer and the Enemy has a little more time to escape the chains to make it fair.

5. Umbral Dash... It's fine as it is. No, scratch that. 30% of the Damage he deals. Let me clarify, "Damage he Deals". This is what I mean by Aatrox heals for so little. If you stack Armor against him, the damage he deals to you is reduced and so is his healing. 100+ Armor gives 50% Physical Damage Reduction, and if Aatrox deals an average of 200 Damage, that's only 100 that's actually hurting you, and he's healing for a maximum of 33 HP per attack. See how small that is? Xin Zhao has better Heal Scaling on his Passive than Aatrox's whole sustain "gimmick". Instead of having Aatrox heal the damage he deals, why not just give him permanent Lifesteal/Spellvamp to his kit. Yes I included Spellvamp too because it's in his Ult when he casts his Abilities. Just give him 10/15/20/25/30% Lifesteal/Spellvamp properties to actually make him feel useful and can survive decently in the laning phase. He'd heal about 8 HP per attack against minions which is fair game to lane sustain

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Here are the numbers. If Aatrox's first Q deals 50 +100% AD, say his base AD is 200. He deals 250 Physical Damage on his first Q and heals to 30% of that Damage as Spellvamp right off the bat. This means he heals up to 83 HP. Second Q deals 100 + 100% AD = 300 Physical Damage, healing 100 HP, and finally with 150 + 100% AD = 350 Physical Damage, he heals up to 116 HP. So in total, if he lands his three Q combo, he heals about 299 HP, 1 off from 300 which is fair game. If he hits multiple enemies this of course can stack up to give a stronger Spellvamp effect, up to either 598 healing if he hits two Enemy Champions or 897 if three are all hit within his sweetspots. "IF" they land on his sweetspots, to clearly emphasize. This way he can actually be the Drain Tank God in teamfights and not be oneshot by the ADC before he could land a single Q.

6. The World Ender. What an Ultimate that is just a discount Highlander from Yi. No originality, nothing special about it. So how about this then. Upon activation Aatrox Fears all Non Enemy Champions around him for 1 Second, Slowing them by 50% as they are Terrified and he gains 25/35/45% bonus Movement Speed for the next 10 Seconds. Whenever taking down an Enemy Champion, Increase the Ultimate duration by an extra 5 Seconds & amplify the Lifesteal & Spellvamp properties from his E (Umbral Dash) with a 20/35/50% bonus applied, meaning he can have up to 80% maximum Lifesteal & Spellvamp to give him the definition of being an unstoppable Drain Tank. This means he can also build Full Tank as an off meta and still be late game relevant as an off tank that has consistent healing from his damage.

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I know most people want the Revive mechanic back into Aatrox, as now his only gimmick they kept was his lifesteal, but the Revive mechanic wasn't really his gimmick. It was a reward system if you succeeded in surviving more than you were supposed to, and were given a second chance to continue reaping enemy champions or other enemy units in your way. With the Revive, Aatrox would never actually be able to proc it before since battles would drag on or the enemy team would all be dead before they could "kill" him. Either that, or if it did happen, Aatrox is just stalling for time to die again as the Enemy team stack their damage and CC onto him.