‘Significant work’ is in Aatrox’s future

One of the forgotten fighters in the top lane, Aatrox has long been ignored in favor of other options at the position. He’s got some interesting qualities to him, like the ability to resurrect with his passive or just go all-in and take on a team, but most of what he currently brings to the table is brought elsewhere (and usually better) by other champions.

Well fear not, unsatisfied Aatrox mains. There are changes probably coming, as lead game designer Andrei “Meddler” Van Roon said in an Ask Riot post.

We'd like to do some significant work on Aatrox when we do a class update to diving fighters. Aatrox has a theme with an enormous amount of potential. At present, however, his gameplay is a bit generic, doing a mix of things plenty of other fighters also do. That means, unless he's the best at those things, he's not going to be the best pick gameplay wise. Our goal with an update, as a result, would be to make him more unique, taking advantage of his backstory and letting him bring some distinct tools to a team.

We'd also like to do some work before then, both to help him out slightly (he's a little on the weak side) and at least start to push him in a more focused direction. At a rough guess, sometime around the pre-season is when we'll likely look at that.

Aatrox recently received a mid-patch bug fix in 6.18. According to Champion.gg’s stats of 6.18 ranked games Platinum and above, he has a play rate of 0.64 percent (49th out of 54 top laners) and a win rate of 50.14 percent (36th). He saw some pro play in Latin America, Russia and Turkey this year, but was last seen in a major region in January 2015, when Shook played him in the jungle for Elements.