u/Raisylvan

I'm not a Vladimir main, and I'm a Silver/Gold player so I rarely ever see him, but I'm just curious what happened to his old build.

He used to go Hextech/Cosmic/Deathcap/Riftmaker/Zhonyas with Flash+Ghost. Now he goes Flash/Ignite with Stormsurge, Shadowflame, Deathcap kind of stuff where you don't care about HP in your items at all and just try to burst people.

What happened there? Vlad changes? AP items with HP nerfed too much? A shift in Vlad's playstyle over time collectively somehow?

I know that the typical answer is "CC", but that's really unhelpful because you can just lose in the draft against a Yi if you have little to no CC to deal with him.

My problem, as a silver/gold jungler that plays mostly bruisers, is that he completely steamrolls me/my team and there's nothing I can do about it. I can never out duel him, ever, and if I'm not enough of a threat, he just runs down my team and I'm the last to die.

I know that Yi is a low ELO demon for a reason, but if I want to improve against a jungle pick, as a jungle main, that is relatively common in my bracket, there's got to be some way I can get better at dealing with him. As a bruiser, I lose. As a tank, he just shreds me/kills my team. FH doesn't work against him. I just... genuinely have no idea how to deal with this champion.

Is my only recourse genuinely just hope my team doesn't give him resets and saves CC for dealing with him? Because most of my games into a Yi have resulted in him either getting fed early and snowballing out of control, or he's not fed but he gets a lucky teamfight where he gets resets off and ends up 2k+ gold ahead.

As for the junglers I typically play: Darius, Zac, Xin, Amumu, Briar, Kayn. Though I've been mostly sticking to Darius lately and using Xin/Briar as backups when he's banned.

Stupid 50 character limit on the title for some reason.

Anyway, what I wanted to ask is if there's some way to change Aatrox so that his matchups are less polarizing? What I mean by this is that Aatrox struggles a lot into mobile champions like Riven and Ambessa who can play around his Q sweet spots fairly easily and requires a lot of prediction/foresight on the Aatrox player's part. The equally polarizing other opposite of this spectrum is that Aatrox is an infuriating, borderline unwinnable matchup into health stacking tanks/juggernauts who have no way to dodge his Q so Aatrox perma wins trades and all-ins, but also heals a ton off of their huge HP bars.

It's moreso the latter I'm wanting to talk about. I've seen this sentiment from Whatley, who plays Tahm and considers it once of his worst matchups possible because Tahm only ever wins through cheese (ulting into tower with no minions nearby) or if the Aatrox player heavily misplays. Alois also talks about this with Mundo, where occasionally he's picked Mundo into Aatrox (not having last pick) and getting absolutely fisted for 15-20 minutes and never being able to play.

The logic used by them (mostly Whatley, to be fair) is that this is the result of increasing the damage on his Q sweetspot and lowering his AD elsewhere. Which, in theory, makes Aatrox feel generally rewarding to play and actively rewarding the player. But, in practice, it results in stuff like this. Where you win for free against champions that can't ever outplay your Q-W combo and have an incredibly hard time against champions like Riven and Ambessa who are hyper mobile and you never win into them unless they play really badly.

Is it even possible to solve something like this? Should you? Lowering his damage on Q sweetspots would make him feel less rewarding to play in a general sense, even if it makes his matchup spread less volatile. So, is it possible? Should it even be done?

I've heard this discussion around Chempunk for over a year now that it's a terrible item, but no one ever tries to explain why. They just say it's bad and needs changes.

I can understand the basic idea that, if you need antiheal, it's better to sit on the 800g Executioner's Sword, rather than buying a full 3000g antiheal item. However, I often hear that people either sell EC lategame or they are "forced" to upgrade it into Chempunk, which doesn't make sense to me.

Chempunk is a pretty gold efficient item, and items that tend to have high gold efficiency are items that are good/people like buying, so why is Chempunk somehow the exception? Is it just because it competes with Mortal Reminder? Which I don't even think makes much sense, because most champions that actually might buy Mortal Reminder (AD, crit, pen) would either buy Serylda's Grudge (assassins) or buy Black Cleaver (basically the entire fighter class).

So... the logic doesn't make sense to me. If you need antiheal on your team, why is Chempunk a bad item? It has AD, health and ability haste, which the fighter class in general loves all of those stats.

Just had a game into Sett/Xerath/Viego/Lux/Cait. The game felt so incredibly unplayable. I got a couple of early kills, but after that, it just felt impossible to play. It felt like I had to dodge everything. If I got by any single ability, I got chain CC'd and died with zero counterplay to it.

How do you deal with that as a Xin player? I'm relatively new to Xin, but it feels like he's not particularly durable if he isn't allowed to R/heal in a fight.