Since 10 bans were introduced into both normal and ranked game queues over the past few weeks, Yasuo’s banrate has spiked to 40 percent, according to League of Legends stats site LoLalytics.
That’s right, in nearly half of all games Yasuo is banned by one of the teams. He isn’t really OP, but c’mon, it’s Yasuo. You have to ban him. It’s like asking whether or not you want fries with your meal. You don’t really need the fries, but you’re going to get them anyway because you can’t eat a burger without fries. That’s the boat Yasuo is in right now. We don’t really need to ban him, but we’re going to, because we’re all still terrified of him.
Related: Yasuo’s new Nightbringer skin turns him into a demonic badass.
A good Yasuo is among one of the most difficult champions to lane against in League. He’s right up there with Fiora, Riven, and Lee Sin. In the right hands, he’s absolutely insane, but there are few people that actually play him that well. It seems there is an even rarer amount of players that know how to play well against him, and that’s why his banrate significantly drops off as you climb elo. For Diamond players and higher, his winrate is 27 percent—almost 13 percent lower than his average banrate. For Gold players on the other hand, it’s an insane 47 percent. For Silver, 53 percent, and for Bronze, 56 percent. No other champion’s banrate varies that wildly between ranks.
So why are low elo players so scared of Yasuo? Well, it might be because they remember a time when Yasuo was pretty OP, and they haven’t taken the chance of letting him through the ban phase since then. Up until a couple of weeks ago he was much stronger than he is now, but then Patch 7.11 arrived. He received a nerf that ended up weakening him more than anyone expected, and he’s certainly not OP now.
In Patch 7.11, his Steel Tempest (Q) was nerfed so that the stacks fade away after six seconds rather than the previous 10 seconds. Not being able to hold onto his tornadoes or stack it up as easily has left him struggling quite a bit. A couple of patches ago, his winrate was a balmy 53 percent, and now, it’s dropped to almost below 50 percent, according to Champion.gg, another League stats website.
Yasuo’s reign of terror is over. It’s okay to not be scared of him anymore.
On second thought, maybe we should just ban him forever just to be safe.
