Aatrox First Impression

So I just tried Aatrox on the PBE server for the first time. Granted, it was vs bots and he's not released yet, so changes might still be made to him. I'm also going to assume you actually know something about him.

But what I saw?

He's strong.

Really strong.

Way too strong, actually.

He has way more sustain than I have ever seen. If you max his W first, you'll actually get healed for a chunk of your health every three hits, and that effect is doubled when below half health. Stick a Spirit Visage and some natural lifesteal on top of that, and he will be healing himself like crazy. Not to mention that if you toggle the same ability, he will (at max rank) do 200 bonus damage every three hits.

At first I thought it might be a good idea to get some attack speed for this purpose. Hit faster, get to the three hits trigger quicker, moar damage. Imagine my surprise when I found out he has a natural attack speed buff. For every 2% of his passive that gets filled (Blood Well), he gets 1% attack speed. So... at 100% filled Blood Well he gets... 50% attack speed, for free. Well, of course, he has to fill the Blood Well himself with his health with ability costs, but it turns out that every time he levels, the Blood Well naturally fills itself with around 40 or so. I wasn't paying much attention at the time.

So by level 3, without ever using any abilities aside from the lifesteal on his W, which I stayed in combat the entire time to sustain myself, the blood well was already half full from just leveling up. 25% attack speed bonus for free!

Then there was his ultimate, which is a flat 200 damage AoE nuke around him (at rank 1), + 175 attack range and 40% attack speed bonus. He could just initate with Dark Flight, and with the slow, thats a total of about 140 damage, with a stun and slow... + the ultimate for 200 damage. And then he'd have maybe up to 90% attack speed bonus already to trigger the rank 3 W which deals 130 damage every three hits. You could make sure to hit twice, then initiate for the third hit so it'd trigger right away too.

I'm not going to do the math on any of that, but I just felt he was way too powerful.

In general I found his cooldowns too short, and his sustain was just nuts. Oh, right. His passive also revives him when he dies, with a 225 second cooldown. Sometimes I got knocked out, and could just lifesteal my way up again and win the fight.

...

Did I mention I fought bots? Like, beginner ones in a custom game.

That said, take everything I just said with a pinch (read: tub) of salt.