u/Stunning-Present-711

Ive been seeing a lot of posts about people playing yorick midlane, and even some high elo yoricks flexing it with toplane. Ive been afraid to try it out in ranked due to unfamiliarity, but it seems effective in theory. insanely stable early compared to toplane because yorick is very difficult to poke out or assasinate, and post 6 you can kind of strongman the lane and prevent either party from leaving. If they leave you can just siege. Hes shockingly effective in river skirmishes. and he can always rotate sidelane once midgame hits. I have some questions tho

- what kind of builds are best for this pick? I've been going liandries poke build into most mages and titanic/heartsteel tank into most assasins

- are there any bad matchups to worry about? (excluding irelia lol) I haven't seen anything as unwinnable seeming as what yorick has to deal with in toplane yet. I imagine matchups against champs who can just nuke the wave and then roam on you would be an issue

- would you say the role has any glaring downsides compared to toplane? weirdly it has felt strictly more efficient for the champion so far. getting ganked early could be an issue maybe,

endless hunger and vamp boots, on top of all of the healing sources already in the game, have made bruisers feel absolutely insufferable to fight against. jungle is huge brawler meta, and riven is probably the best champ in the game right now with these items. getting one takedown with endless hunger and deaths dance makes you practically immortal. you have to spec into these god awful anti heal items just to put a band aid on it. the vamp boots especially feel so unbelievably toxic when somebody using them gets a lead.

what should be done about this? anti heal rework? am i overreacting? please i am so sick of riven ruining all my lobbies

I have been pushing through emerald at a relatively swift pace, but every game i am baffled by the types of players i encounter. maybe Its the high of escaping metal rank, but everybody seems to believe they are the main character of the rift, and has a totally unique idea of how the game should be played. I've never had so many surrenders in my entire climb. games are almost always complete stomps, with the losing team tearing their teammates apart like wild animals, irregardless of how good or bad they themselves are doing. people are just totally unwilling to let themselves be carried it feels like. EVERY GAME there are calls in chat to report like 4 different people.

does this toxicity improve as you climb? is emerald just a cursed place??? I just wanna know how things got like this

Ive seen chullick (korean grandmaster yorick otp) playing it on his channel ever since the heartsteel buffs. the core is heartsteel titanic bloodmail. I assumed it was int because ive never seen it before, but it honestly feels fantastic from the games Ive played so far. yorick runs on 90% base stats anyway, especially early game, so going tanky can be really useful. you can stat check anybody who isnt like a gwen. aside from being expensive and lacking ability haste, I feel like it provides pretty much everything yorick wants as a champion

hp seems like the most efficient way to itemize tanky, since his q heals based on his missing hp, and ghouls/maiden scale their hp off of it. with the base regen on heartsteel, you become incredibly hard to take out of lane, and the trades with the passive hit like a truck. titanic and and bloodmail are already very reasonable items to run on yorick, and combine into a really meaty midgame powerspike. i could see things like hullbreaker being better than bloodmail in some circumstances though.

at the very least i think this is by far the best yorick build for teamfighting. survivable, high burst damage, and ghouls stay alive for a lot longer than usual. it almost makes him feel like an actual effective frontline.

Ive been having a blast with it in my emerald games, but I would like to see if anybody else has tried it out and what their experience has been. I can see it being bad into some matchups, as well as not scaling quite as well as the standard ghoul oriented build.

Personally, I almost never hit things with my survival knife. killing anything with it is very boring and takes a ludicrous amount of time. its only worth doing with the stasis cannon, which trivializes every creature encounter and breaks a lot of the tension in navigating new areas. It seems to be the most common complaint i see, when it was such a miniscule part of the original games experience to me.

I do wish your tadpole could still run into fish though, it feels a little immersion breaking when you just phase through them.

Im fine with the new direction, i just hope they add more nonviolent ways to deter creatures when exploring and basebuilding. I too have fallen victim to hammerheads having a party in my moonpool

i dont think ive ever actually beat a singed who wasnt very new. every. single. lane. he just walks up, oneshots the wave with sheer aura, and skedaddles out before i can really punish him. pushed a wave in? gone immediately. mess up one recall timer? you are never seeing him again until lategame, where he just takes over the map. its a similar experience to sion where his tempo advantage is so disgusting that i can never really get a lead in lane. at best I can go even before they resort to afk farming. and he wont stop laughing at me :(

I suppose he is supposed to be punished earlygame, but my pool is yorick mundo and vlad LMFAO so im just as useless.

I am in desperate need of guidance. please his laughter haunts my dreams at night. how do i counterplay this creature?

surely if you were designing a midscope for a champion and you saw that a lot of the playerbase has been running jungle, you would just stabilize him in that role. was it really impossible to balance him between top and jungle effectively?

Its been done before with champs like zyra morgana brand etc where they are just adjusted to work in both lanes and became stable picks. yorick works very similarly in that he farms exceptionally at the cost of poor gank setup. especially considering that most of the jungle nerfs bled directly into yoricks effectiveness as a lane pick, and removed a lot of what players enjoyed about him AS a top laner. I guess they were worried about it becoming too good after the q changes?

Im genuinely curious what differentiates him from a balance perspective that they had to nerf it like 5 consecutive times even after it fell below a good winrate. personally i would love to see them bring it back in a future update, I found it a really fun and refreshing way to play the champion.

https://preview.redd.it/fu3ee2rrg71h1.png?width=667&format=png&auto=webp&s=43c03065c26c70a96aaa19c42780e60eb7ceba6f