Talk:Aatrox/@comment-40204041-20190719102318/@comment-7709681-20190811043853

@ Sticktothemeta: I was once an (old) Aatrox main, and the personal enjoyment depended of two things: absurd healing and the revive, the purest form of drain tanking... but that's it. Eventually was too repetitive for how one-tricky he was that simply stopped maining him, only to use him occasionally.

His old kit was good at the time, but the years' passing was not gentle with him as new champions were released and quality standards were raised alongside them, as well as the lack of QoL changes across those same years. Eventually, stale and untouched, players realized that his kit was suboptimal at worst, dependent of abusement at best where he had his odd spikes of popularity prior to his rework.

Was always the same gameplay, the same combos, the same builds, all linear.

But truth be told... nothing changed in that regard with the rework. Sure, it innovated gameplay-wise, optimized the kit and got rid of some of the main issues the old kit had, but ended up with as much gameplay issues as the old self had, and that wouldn't be as much of an issue if it wasn't for how poorly mismanaged has been his balance from the VGU's release onward. Only now a year later is that he's finally stable, and it required handing the kit to someone else other than Jag.

Balance to his kit has being based on trimming down excess or surplus, but that unfortunately implies that it has to reach a point were either you mess with the core gameplay and/or identity (requiring a rework) or you stop touching him, and even then his core gameplay causes troubles and yet cannot be touched.

Therefore, what you ask for changes is blissful thinking that cannot be fulfilled: Passed from being AA-centric to Q-centric, and because of that power-budget cannot be evenly distributed because otherwise gameplay would be a mess, but at the same time makes it so he's too strong when he does right and too weak when he does poorly, and the burdensome high heals cannot be touched or else means getting rid of the last vestige of his core identity. To ease this, would require adding damage where there's none (E and R) and/or add more synergy with his basic attacks, and that would mean orienting him towards his old self.