Aurelion Sol has had a pretty high presence in the LCS as soon as he was implemented on patch 13.4, and Palafox has played him the most with the highest rate of success. We asked whether he thinks this champ is broken and how he thinks A Sol will affect pro play.
Aurelion Sol’s rework helped him shoot up to the top of the popularity charts with an incredibly high win rate on live servers, prompting a hotfix to nerf to the champion and more nerfs on the way in patch 13.5.
Meanwhile, A Sol’s pro play debut has been anything but stellar. His win rate so far is only 33% with six games played, and he’s not exactly a first pick/first ban champion despite his high popularity in solo queue.
He might be strong in solo queue, but even as the most successful Aurelion Sol player so far, Cristian ‘Palafox’ Palafox wasn’t sold on the champion just yet in an interview with Dexerto.
Is Aurelion Sol OP in LoL pro play?
The things that make champions strong in pro play and things that make champions strong in solo queue are often very different. This is why Ryze and Azir will often catch nerfs even when their win rates in solo queues hover around 45-48% most of the time.
It’s yet unclear whether Aurelion Sol is just great for solo queue because of his late-game hyperscaling or if that scaling can translate to pro play where mid laners are often pressured immensely by the enemy jungler.
After having arguably the most success on the pick so far out of any pro player in the world at the time of writing, we asked Palafox about Aurelion Sol. He was able to obliterate 100 Thieves and Bjergsen on the pick, but, more importantly, he almost managed to bring back a game from an over 10k gold deficit against FlyQuest, the best team in the LCS. Even being that far behind, he made the game look winnable.
But, according to Palafox, getting to the point where Aurelion Sol is useful takes some serious effort. He’s split on whether or not this champion will dominate pro play.
“I can’t tell if he’s an absolute s*** champ or if he’s just insanely broken. I don’t know if you saw the first ten levels [against 100 Thieves], but like I’m not a champion. Level 1, his [Q] does, like, ten damage. Comet does more damage than his ability, right? Levels 1-9, you’re just awful. But it’s so good after you have levels that it’s just… You get the champion there, and he’ll do the rest.“
When asked if he sees his time practicing Aurelion Sol being worth it, he didn’t seem overly happy with having to learn the champion and gave a few reasons behind why CLG (and perhaps other teams) are playing him.
“It’s kind of awkward Riot released a champion like this in the middle of the LCS split, right? 1, he has a good amount of bugs, and 2, we don’t know how hard they’re gonna nerf him, and if it’s gonna matter, and 3, what if the enemy team picks it? And we don’t know if it’s completely broken yet. It’s something we have to practice for playoffs. It’s just a lot of question marks. I’m playing it not because I know it’s OP but because I think it is. I’m not even that good at the champ.”
Aurelion Sol had a lot of outright game-breaking bugs when he was initially released, prompting him to be disabled. If you want to read up on what some of these bugs were, you can find a comprehensive list here.
These bugs included some of A Sol’s abilities being unusable for the entire game, DoTs that never went away, being able to use his ultimate while it’s on cooldown, and a whole bunch more. Most of these have been resolved, but some are still lingering alongside smaller bugs that can cause gameplay disruptions.
Fortunately for Palafox, the patch 13.5 nerfs don’t look like they’ll take the champion out of viability. They’re shaving a little bit of AP scaling off of his Q and paring back his health and armor growth per level by a small margin. Nothing earth-shattering.
Aurelion Sol’s future in pro play is pretty uncertain. He has more of a future than he had before his rework, but it’s hard to say if there’s a world where the celestial dragon will be able to consistently get out of the early game in the highest level of play.
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