Honestly? Yasuo is badass. He’s a lethal Ronin-esque character that can pull off slick moves in game, dashing and slashing everywhere, leaving chaos and death behind him…at least when he’s on the enemy team. We’re thrilled that we created a character that people love to play as much as him, but we’re also sad that he’s effectively removed from play because of his popularity.

We want you to be able to play Yasuo. The moments when he dashes from minion to minion narrowly escaping death, or lands that 5 man ult getting the pentakill, are super satisfying and exciting — we just need to make sure that the way you do it also provides your opponents with the feeling like they could have made meaningful decisions during the engagement.

Now, we could easily get his ban rate down by focusing on his raw power, but doing so would probably also mean that he’d have to be so weak that picking him was actually putting Yasuo players at a MAJOR disadvantage, let alone putting his promised fantasy at risk. Yasuo already struggles with being a viable champion the higher you climb, and instead has a lot of his playrate derived from players who devote themselves to mastering him (and even then aren’t rewarded with the typical winrate growth you would expect).

A decent indicator of this is his presence in pro play:

2016: 19 picks, 1 ban (Nidalee for reference was 404 picks and 930 bans)

2017: 1 pick, 1 ban

*While these numbers certainly aren’t conclusive, nor necessarily indicative of a problem, it’s an interesting note that in the most competitive environment Yasuo actually struggles to find his place on the Rift.

Our belief is that if we want to get him into a state where he is both viable and also not a must-ban, we need to tweak more than numbers. He was already pretty high on our list of champions that we wanted to look at on the scope of a potential ability update (think Rek’sai, Kindred, Heimer etc.), and with the release of 10 bans he’s moved right up alongside some fellow counterparts in Leblanc and Azir.

I want to stress that we haven’t begun investigation yet as we iterate on some other projects, but we’ll be taking a look at him in the next few weeks. I’d expect that when we’re done Yasuo will look and feel very similar to now, but with power shifted around on his kit to provide more windows of engaging decision making for his opponents, while maintaining a lot of the agile swordmaster experience he provides today. Again, we’re thrilled that Yasuo is a champion that gives people who play him something to love, now we just need to find a fair way to have his opponents accept their fate as he steals their last breath with his blade.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this, actually! What is it that you love about playing as Yasuo? What is it that you hate when playing against him? Tell us in the comments!