League of Legends: Major Azir Rework Inbound

After spending the last six months in the gutter, it looks like there may soon be some hope for everyone's favorite League of Legends monarch, as Riot confirmed earlier this week on their column Ask Riot that Azir was on the block for a full ability rework in the near future. The news comes after months of silence about the state of the Emperor of Shurima, who has spent most of his time in the League as a balance nightmare for Riot. Almost immediately upon his release, many analysts called him broken by design, and said that he would never be balanceable, and boy did they end up getting proven right over time. Azir has spent his entire life in one of two states: the most powerful champion in his lane, or completely and utterly useless.

The problem stems from the current kits skill curve. While Azir isn't all that terrifying in the hands of ye olde Silver 5 player, he becomes a walking fortress that also has some of the best initiation in the game in the hands of, say, Royal Never Give Up's Xiahou or SKT Telecom T1's former substitute Easyhoon. Even while Azir was tearing up the top tables, he was never performing all the well in solo queue, since he fell pray to many counters that simply weren't reasonable in competitive play. The problems started when Azir started getting nerfed in order to bring him in line in competitive play, as those nerfs took him from being somewhat weak in solo queue to the de facto worst champion in the game in terms of win rate, a title he still competes for against Ryze for to this day.

Thus, a rework is pretty much the only way that Riot could ever hope to fix the Emperor, and the team in charge of the planned rework have emphasized their dedication to keeping Azir's unique playstyle intact.

The full text of the announcement can be found below.

"Our favorite Emperor of the Sands is a bit of a trailblazir when it comes to the mid-lane, dipping his toes pretty deeply into both the marksman and battlemage playstyles. When you pick him, the things you do feel incredibly unique which is awesome, but when coupled with proficiency and high level skill it becomes very difficult to give him power in any way that isn't absolutely oppressive when he's played optimally. We took a few passes at him over the past year or so, and while we saw improvement, he was still far from where we wanted him to be, so we made the call to wait until we could allocate the appropriate amount of time to solve his long term power imbalances.

With some of our other projects wrapping up, we've started exploring several avenues for shifting power around on his abilities to make him more sustainable for League in the long run, while being very careful to not cause a massive divide between what we want and what current Azir players are excited by. Generally, we're going to be looking to sharpen his identity and remove extraneous power from his kit in an effort of giving him more counterplay when played extremely well, something he certainly doesn't have.

To quickly clarify, we see no need to give him a full VGU as players around the world are really happy with how he looks, and instead will only be looking to do an ability update focused around improving gameplay, and not visuals. Wav3Break is the gentleman owning the project, and you can expect a post on the boards from him in the next few months going into more detail around goals/direction."