Anyway, my bad for how I presented the yasuo specific data. This is much more accurate. Again, NA only, ranked solo queue on SR. You can see that he shines quite a bit at lower skill level's and is fairly well countered at higher levels of play.
Well, you're also forgetting one important statistic: P/B/W of the World Champs. Obviously the WCS are a whole different meta (Zilean is a 96% PB), play-style and entirely different planning. Also note that i don't actually put a huge amount of pressure on PBW, but since you're the one making the argument and WCS refutes it...
16th highest PB rate @ 38%
Of the 11 games he was picked, he went 7-4, with a win rate of 64%.
Of the 20 highest PB champs, only 7 had a win rate of < 50%: Khazix (47%), Lucian (48%), Nami (40%), Tristana (42%), Nidalee (20%), Syndra (30%), Fizz (33%).
Of those 7, all but 2 were picked at least 10 times: Nami with 5 picks, and Fizz with 9.
So there's a few things that we can """conclude""":
Apparently Kha'zix is actually a very balanced champion and not at all Freelo.
At the very highest level of play, Yasuo is incredibly powerful when team comps are built around him. This supports Thunder's statement about high ban rate on a mechanicallly difficult champion => lower win rate. In particular:
Also - I just looked at the bottom 10 lowest win rate champs for plat. YASUO IS ON THAT LIST (with urgot/azir). To be fair, though, only at the plat level.
Means that there's a lot of people who think that Yasuo is their ticket to (diamond) and are not playing him to his full potential, while playing against people who are familiar with facing Yasuo. It's also important to recognize that a -50 HP nerf isn't actually that huge. He lost 200 HP at level 18 on his shield a few patches ago, and he lost his shield-on-dash around the same time, which made his ridiculous level 2 much more reasonable.
It'll hurt his top laning a bit, since bruisers can go toe-to-toe with him earlier. It also lets you bring Ignite to the lane a little easier.
My personal opinion on Yasuo was that they really made a big design mistake with him and allowing teammates to contribute to his R. It makes him very binary in lower Elo levels (he is way way easier to play if you have 2-3 knockups on the team). It's a problem in the Pick-Ban stages of the pro scene since he can be nearly impossible to deal with if champs that he synergizes with are also really strong (Lulu top being one of the biggest offenders a few months ago).
It also would have made it so that a lot of these other nerfs could have been toned down. At this point, the design team has decided to keep the interactions with R, so i guess additional nerfs make sense. i just wish that they had removed the interaction a long time ago and perhaps he would have become a much less polar champion at all levels.
i think that it is important to the game to try to keep higher skill champions in the game that have the ability to carry teammates. Now, i don't mean like 1v5 carry alone to victory. But some champs should be be a lot scarier when 3-0 than others. Harder champs shouldn't necessarily be straight out more powerful, even when played to perfection, but perhaps they are more flexible or able to deal with a wider variety of situations
It's also important to note that like.... 8 months ago when Leblanc was all the rage, she was like the 2nd lowest win rate in the game, right above Urgot. She was still banned after the nerfs to her W and such. It wasn't until her silence was removed that she finally stopped getting banned. Despite being way weaker than she used to be, she's actually at 45% right now - that supports Karl's statement. As pick rate drops, win rates climb. That's because you get less and less people playing the champ "just because".
The theory nowadays seems to be to avoid tanking and initiating with bad items, and instead use evasion and the extreme mobility creep as pseudo tanking (along with a few examples of AP bruisers who can build decent items like RoA, Zhonyas, etc), and just go straight DPS.
i'm disappointed you forgot Rumble. Rumble is the posterboy AP bruiser, espiecially since he also brings in that initiation. Another reason Yasuo is so powerful in pro scene is because Yasuo is able to prevent some of those ranged initiatoins (Nami, Rumble) while also being that "fighter" archetype that is "tanky" thru mobility rather than raw stats.
