Pros : They don't know what you are doing Cons : You don't know what you are doing

Nasus passive: you have 12% to 18% life steal

I think you got it all wrong, seriously. Aphelios clearly allows you to draw 2 cards

If Riot has 200 years, Vars must have like 1000

Never forget with aphelios on release didn't show his off-hand by his health bar

Honestly, to this day, I have no clue what Aphelios does. And I don't think I ever will.

Aphelios does........stuff

I love the clip of a league pro match where the caster was trying to talk about aphelios and he was just like "Aphelios does his um......uh....."

You literally explained what his abilities do in this video. I even got to sit and watch the combos go off but I still couldn't understand what was going on. What I learned from this was I need to focus afelios the second I see him because I won't have to understand what he is doing if he is dead

Imagine living in a world where everyone knows what Aphelios does, but we still don‘t know what Pot of Greed does...

You win using these kinds of champions because of the lack of knowledge of the enemy team whilst you also don't understand the champion's kit.

I've often heard that Aphelios is the Invoker of lol, but I'd argue that it's easier to distinguish between a meteor crash, an ice wall and a minion summon, than between a turret or an ult with 5 different effects

I know his basic abilities but his combos are a completely different thing😢

Aphelios has access to an arsenal of 5 weapons. He equips two at any one time. At the start of the game, he starts with Calibrum and Severum, with Gravitum, Infernum and Crescendum queued.Weapons spawn with 50 Moonlight ammunition, which is consumed by basic attacks or his Q cast. Once he has consumed all the ammo, his main weapon is moved to the end of the queue.Aphelios does not improve his abilities with skill points. He starts with Phase, gains access to Q at level 2, and gains access to Moonligh Vigil at level 6. Weapon Abilites Cooldown: 9 seconds ∙ Cost: 60 mana ∙ Range: 1450 Calibrum: Gains bonus range while this is his main weapon. Enemies damaged during this time via an ability are marked, revealing them for the duration. Aphelios's next basic attack against a marked target uses the current off-hand weapon and gains global range.Moonshot: Aphelios fires a bolt of energy in a line, dealing damage to the first enemy hit.Severum: Basic attacks don't use projectiles. Attacks heal himself. Healing at max health is converted into a shield.Onslaught: Gains bonus movement speed and attacks the nearest enemy- prioritizing champions.Gravitum: Applies a slow that decays over 3.5 seconds.Binding Eclipse: Aphelios expunges all enemies affected by Gravitum's slow and deals damage plus roots them for 1 second.Infernum: Sprays firebolts in a cone behind targets dealing damage to enemies hit.Duskwave: Aphelios unleashes a wave of energy in a cone, dealing damage to all enemies hit and locking on to each of them. After a delay, Aphelios then fires a volley of basic attacks from his current off-hand weapon.Crescendum: Basic attacks with Crescendum hurl the blade at the target, which lingers for 0.25 seconds before coming back to Aphelios. He is disarmed until he retrieves Crescendum, but the attack timer is reset once caught.Sentry: Aphelios deploys a lunar sentry for up to 20 seconds, reduced to 4 seconds after it starts attacking. Deploying a new sentry reduces the eldest's duration to 4 seconds. A sentry has 3 health and enemies can attack the sentry with basic attacks, dealing 1 damage per hit. The sentry autonomously attacks the nearest enemy in range with a clone of Aphelios' current off-hand weapon Phase Cooldown: 0.8 seconds ∙ Cost: 0 mana ∙ Range: 250 Aphelios switches between his main weapon and off-hand weapon. Weapon Queue System Cooldown: 0 seconds ∙ Cost: 0 mana ∙ Range: 1000 Weapon Cooling System Moonlight Vigil Cooldown: 120 / 110 / 100 seconds ∙ Cost: 100 mana ∙ Range: 1300 Aphelios casts forth a lunar spotlight that stops when it comes into contact with an enemy champion. It then deals damage at the center. After a delay, basic attacks will begin raining from the sky based on Aphelios' current weapon.Calibrum: Applies an empowered mark that deals additional physical damage per mark.Severum: If at least one enemy is hit, Aphelios heals himself.Gravitum: Enemies are slowed by 99%.Infernum: The initial blast deals additional damage.Crescendum: 3 additional spectral chakrams return to Aphelios from the first enemy hit, for a total of 4, on top of those from other enemies hit.

Even in a fighting game (and we know those are very intuitive) as Street Fighter, designers made sure to make hands and feet bigger than necesary so every hitbox is as clear as posible. This shows how important clarity is.

I pose myself this question every time I face him 😅

It's funny I'm always fed on aphelios because my laners don't know what I do, it's honestly really easy to counter aphelios, just take note he's a really immobile champ and has low hp regen.

He changes his Auto attacks that go under an ammo system, with Q being said Weapon ability, W switches the two and R shoots out moonlight w/ effects based on the primary Gun.

I know I’m not supposed to laugh but his description of angry gnar just killed me 8:33

The thing about Aphelios, is that a lot of people like to compare him to Invoker from DotA, which is reasonable since both of those characters are meant to function with a completely different system compared what everyone else has to use. Aphelios has the whole thing with the 5 weapons that each have a different passive, Q and ultimate, while there's also the interactions between the main and off hand guns and how he gains stats per level. Invoker instead has 3 different elemental orbs that he levels up. He can have 3 orbs rotating around him, with each individual orb giving him a buff, and when he uses his ult, he gains access to an ability based on the combination of orbs that he has out at the time (and he can have two abilities ready at one time), which means he can pick from a selection of 10 different spells. And when you look at user experience, you can clearly see that Invoker's abilities are much better designed than Aphelios's. And for how complicated Invoker's design is, it doesn't really take you a long time to understand which ability he is using, and what will it do. They all have very different color schemes, so you can't really get them confused (blue is the CC, gray/white is the utility, and red is the damage). The only Invoker ability that feels badly designed is Cold Snap (the frost debuff that ministuns you every time you take damage), because there aren't many visual indications or animations to tell you that you've been frozen by Invoker. The rest of the abilities are pretty easy to understand though. For instance Ice Wall, Ghost Walk, Chaos Meteor, EMP, and Deafening Blast are all very easy to understand and you will quickly figure out what they're supposed to do, while you're also not going to have any problems seeing them in the heat of battle. Contrast this to Aphelios, whose abilities all get a slight change with his off hand weapons that are pretty hard to identify. And yeah, some of Phel's abilities like his Moonshot or his Sentry are pretty easy to identify, but what really ends up messing with you is the off hand weapon. Due to the off hand weapon interactions, it can be really hard to fully understand what he is going to do to you, as you might get CCed when he hits you with his long range shot, but maybe you're gonna take splash damage instead. That was the same reason why his Calibrum Sentries were killing people so frequently. Because people had no idea that every turret shot is gonna apply a mark to them that will let Aphelios hit them for free, while also giving him a mini chakram. Because all they really noticed is the turret, and they haven't noticed that it's a Calibrum turret, which makes it much more painful than a Severum or an Infernum turret, so they didn't treat it with the appropriate respect. That was pretty much the main issue with Aphelios. Not that his kit is complicated, but that he was subtle about things he had no business being subtle about. It's extremely easy to understand what he is going to do when he has Gravitum, because not only does it have a very visible color scheme, but it also doesn't have any synergies that happen with his off hand gun. His other Qs are basically Invoker abilities if they would gain a secondary effect based on the other ability that is currently available to him. That would of course be pretty stupid, since you can't expect players to track Invoker's other spell when he is throwing something at you, but this is basically Aphelios (to a lesser extent). I know this turned out to be a pretty long comment, and sorry about that. But as a fan of somewhat complex characters (Bard, Senna, Aurelion Sol, Sylas and Taliyah in League, and Rubick, Oracle, Visage, Ancient Apparition and Chen in Dota), I had a lot of thoughts to share about this. The video was really well done, and it captured most of my concerns regarding confusing champions pretty well. Keep it up!

Did you mean Aph, Eli and Os, the three champions that got combined into 1 while keeping every ability, passive and mechanic? Dunno what it does :(

Best part is that when aphelios was released, the icons next to his health bar didn’t even exist. You had to figure out what gun he was using in a teamfight which was too fucking hard.

"Not to make the implication that people are stupid" *pause* "Most of them anyway" 😂

Man, i miss the old days. Remember when things were more simple? Like how passive were something like this: "You gain 1,5% mana regen per 1% missing mana"

I'd explain but I still haven't finished reading his passive.

He's clearly meant to be a typical Riot eBoy offshoot of Master Chief and Cortana, which is where he gets the weapon swapping thing from, but what purpose that all serves is still lost on me to this day. 😐

Given LoR and LOL it feels like Riot's game design logic is to pack a game with features and have characters gradually break said features so that everyone's OP (and when everyone's OP, nobody is). The problem though is that with LOL that wasn't their intention early on, and since they can't quickly rework old champs there's a large difference in power between different champions.

Vars: trying to explain Aphelios champ design. Me: this Aphelios in the gameplay has Severum and Crescendum ... That's a broken combo :^D

Chakram could have been its own unique champion and I'm sure it would be super fun. I've even read someone say that Aphelios' Chakram is what Sivir's basic attack should work like.

Duh, this is easy: He gets nerfed

Back when I used to play, Aphelios was the kind of character I really liked because there was a unique complexity to him that in theory lets him do a lot, but only if you know how to pilot him. True he effectively has 17 abilities given how he has 5 different Q's, 5 different passives, 5 different ults, the W swap, and his actual passive which gives him bonus AD, AS, and Ar Pen, but in technicality, at no point did he have more than 6 abilities to use (8 if you count his passive stat gain and swap) unless the Aphelios player could time their ammo usage correctly and get Alune to spawn in a new weapon or two with fresh clips to keep fighting. Which is why I was kind of drawn to the guy; there was a weird method to the madness since while he COULD do everything, he couldn't do everything AT ONCE. But of course that's not really how it turned out. Often times when I was playing him, people didn't fully understand what he did, and while I personally understand all of his abilities, I'm in the vast minority that decided to put in the effort to even remember the weapon names let alone how each one meshes with the other guns. Riot tried to make it obvious which weapon he was holding by altering each of his walks and idle poses based on which weapon he was holding, but that's not really easy to see in a chaotic teamfight or see what his off-hand weapon is because they always sit on his back and mesh with his character model. Honestly, I think he's still a fun character with a high skill ceiling that rewards players for pulling off really cool weapon swaps and combinations, but because he does so much, countering him becomes so much harder unless the playerbase is forced to remember what he does. And not everyone has the will to do that.

Well Aphelios does nothing now cause he got nerfed to the ground

I remember when Yasuo came out, everyone was initially confused by his complexity. You had to stack your queue, then you could use your Q as a tornado, and you could use your ultimate only when the enemy is airborne?.... Ah, the good old days.

Like legit when I was playing with my schoolmates and they think that the order of the guns are randomised instead of just using all of the gun's ammos, I was laughing so hard lol

Personally, Aphelios is my favorite champion. I just love how he has so much potential, you can just really get creative with him. Though I have to agree that it must be pretty annoying to remember what he does when facing against him, I'm happy complex champions like him exist. And I mean he's not that good right now, so I guess it should be fine.

I'm an aphelios main and I mainly just roll my face on my keyboard and I do damage couldnt tell you how

He's the only champ I don't have because after 3 in depth guides, the spotlight and your explanation I still have no idea wtf he does

I feel like both Aphelios mains and anyone facing him will ask themselves this question every match.

If it takes pros an long meet for just explaining aphelios we may have a problem on the lower end

I think Aphelios was a test run for making even more complicated champs down the line and maybe they took notes on what went wrong.

I could never keep up with aphelios' kit 😭 and I love playing adc too. Looking forward to this!

wow..I main this champ I thought he was forgotten by people and I'm surprised someone made a video on him now

Aphelios is a champion that looks difficult to play but after you really look at it he's just ranged udyr, its just a bunch of different attacks that do damage, except one of them slows and snares. So pretty much when you are trying to figure out what aphelios is going to do or doing, the answer is pretty much just "damage"

I don't find aphelios complicated or hard to understand, the hard part to learn is his combos and the interactions between his weapons

As an Aphelios with a lvl 6 mastery, I demand a PhD

-Aphelios main waiting for Why No one Plays: Aphelios -This Pikashock

When facing Aphelios, I am usually concerned about two things. 1. Does he have the stun gun? 2. Does he have sickle mode? And I usually look at his auto attacks to figure out which one he has. All other guns are basically normal auto attacks with some minor effects, but both of these can be absolutely game-changing (I'll never forget an Aphelios that survived a full combo of mine at 10 health, lifestealed his way out of death by auto attacks, then lifestealed his way to a penta with the sickle gun), so I keep on the lookout for them. Other than that, he's a lovely little butter pile to spread rocks all over.

I will be watching very closely. Aphelios was never that confusing in my opinion so im curious what your reasoning will be as I respect your opinion on many aspects of league quite a bit.

Well made video, very useful for anyone that hasn't thought about it in depth.

i started playing aphelios recently and his such an intresting champion to play like he became my fav adc

Jace and Jinx's weapon swapping on a whole another level. And I think those only affect auto attacks so aphelios is just on a whole nother realm.

As someone who plays aphelios I mostly agree. When I started playing it took way too long for me to understand that his abilties used auto attacks as a part of their damage so I thought he sucked just by reading him and at first no idea how to even utilize because as stated I didn't know where most of his damage was coming from. I WAS PLAYING HIM and I didn't know what to do. That being said the one thing I do disagree with is how visible the weapons are. He very clearly has wildly different stances and animations based on what weapon he has and are as follows. Calibrum the gun is very close to him as if ready to take aim and he is kneeling during his autos and looks like he is handling a sniper rifle. Severum the gun is far away and his stance looks as if he is holding a whip and autos as if he is avoiding backlash. Gravitum is mounted on his shoulder like a really big gun. Infernum is near the as if its heavy and also a really big gun. Crescendum he has a martial pose that looks like he wants to engage in close combat. So based on my 5 year old explanation I think it isn't hard to discern his different weapons and their autos which coincidentally is also the part most people understand in lol but yeah he is definately a lot to take in. 200 years everyone.

God, the Aphelios theme just hits different.

I love how you're talking about Aphelios like he's really strong

He's literally just Invoker from DotA, they have a lot of similarities with how their kits play out. Especially the part where you can only have only 2 active spells allowed at once.

honestly as an Aphelios main, I think it's not that important you just know everything he does, because 1. if he's fed, run away, he's so slow unless you're Rell dismounted he'll never catch you or 2. if he's behind all in and smash him, because he's so squishy. The same goes for every champion....

You make really gud points about how hard it is to tell what weapons he's using and that he can switch so often and so fast at little cost. I think riot knew about the 1st point which is why they tried to give him different walk cycles and the way he holds the each gun, but zoomed out and at the speed and chaos of the game? People just can't pay attention to such minute details. That's why they also added the indicator to his hp bar which helps, but they could go further. U raise a good point about color and how most of the weapons blend into to his color pallet. They could do more to desaturate the colors and highlight them, make them dominate the weapons more, or maybe perhaps make his whole character model glow the color of the weapon in use. Or better yet, take a page out of Gravitons book and give each weapon a floaty colored orb for him to pull his moonlight ammo from. And for the Switching animation add a burst of color around him to the guns color. I do hope they've learned thier lesson tho.

Forget learning the character, just smash your face to the keyboard with auto aimlock to play him properly.

As I recall, Jinx was their first foray into making a multiweapon champion that canonically wanted to bring the golfball bag of 'toys' to the Rift, but even she visibly changes stance from the low hanging minigun to the shoulder rocket launcher and her other weapons are tied one to a button.

This is what aphelios does: Red thing - Heals Green thing - Hits from a mile away Blue thing - Aoe + extra dmg Purple thing - Slows + binds White thing - The closer you are, the faster it hits. The more longer the fight, the harder it hits. The R just applies this to a skillshot that explodes and can hit multuple people.

I love aphelios, he's one of my favorite champions and hes so versatile. I personally have been playing league for about 7-8 years so when any new champion comes out I read about them a lot so I can understand what they do on all fronts. I also tend to play champions that have a high skill ceiling so I can better my mechanics (and those champs tend to be more fun).

In all fairness, Aphelios was a collaborative effort between Stashu and CertainlyT which I feel is important to note especially because of the stigma surrounding CertainlyT's champion design. Additionally, to clarify, the only ability that doesn't use Aphelios' offhand is gravitum Q. Needed to make that clear for better or worse. I felt as if you were implying that the only difference between Aphelios' weapons were the weapons themselves and not his stance, and animations. Going so far as to point out Jayce's changes in stance without ever acknowledging that each of Aphelios' weapons is held and animated completely differently. Needless to say I disagree. I would elaborate further but I don't want to blast you with an even larger wall of text. That being said; I don't disagree with your points atleast to a degree and I think it was a relatively fair criticism so thank you.

I'm glad you made this, I had such a difficult time understanding what he did that I decided to pick him up and hopefully main him. 80 games later I still have trouble remembering his skill combos or what he does at times, often I found myself hesistant to pick him in champ select because I'd think about how weak he was combined with his confusing kit and that would just make for a very unfun game.. and true enough most games resulted in just that So yeah when I used to played against him it was like "wtf just happened" And now that I play him it's also "wtf did I just do"

People can remember the abilities and skins of every champion but one champion a little too complex and it overwhelms everybody lol

Aphelios is a Jack of all trades who has everything a ADC could have.

Aphelios is an incredibly well designed character... for a single player game. Imagine if you put him in a game similar to Hades or Diablo (similar top-down perspective). The complexity of his kit and all the possible combos would make for great gameplay with a very high skill ceiling for players to strive towards. Instead he's in a multi-player game were he doesn't fit at all with the mechanics of how the other 150+ champions are played, and is asking for all players to learn something that is so far out of the realm of everything else in the game that it makes them say "No, thanks. I think I'll stick with champions that make sense."

A year ago??? Holy, time flies by so fast :o

Aphelios feels like if he was created after a bet between the designers to create something so ridiculous it would feel funny.

I was waiting for this one

Thank you for this video. As someone who only plays league on and off every few months (bc of school) this was the thing that I found most challenging when I returned to the game. I struggled a lot against Sylas, Seraphine, Viego (those came to my mind first) because all the abilities kind of looked the same? Sylas had chains spinning all the time so it was hard to distinguish. Seraphine was fast af projectiles and I couldn't tell which one was which. And Viego idk I literally can't tell what he's doing. Perhaps if I played regularly rather than once every 4 months it wouldn't be as bad. Heck I still don't actually know what Sylas does ngl.

sorry gonna have to rewind, i stopped paying attention while you were explaining all his moves

As an aphelios main, although we have the element of surprise- managing our loadout really balances us out. If we don’t have the correct loadout for the right fight,, it’s just death

playing aphelios feels like piloting a fucking space shuttle with four people yelling at you for not actually working at nasa

Why does knowing what he does matter anyway its not like a zed can't 100 to 0 him in 2 sec or a toplaner who is 0/4 one-shoting him

Big fan of the upcoming Aphelios update where the devs plan to give him full access to the Valorant arsenal

best vars video by far

So THAT's why people seem to get confused when I nail them with / combo! A very well researched argument and video, I must say. And the only reason I don't get confused when playing against him is because I was one of the early adopters who bought him on release day and thus had plenty of practice with his weapons and what they, having combined, can do. As for his 5 ults though, you don't really need to know what each does other than getting hit by it is bad news, and having it hit more than 1 champion is usually catastrophic for your team. Although, I do miss the days of the ez infernum ult pentakill.

I find it strange that I basically learned what Aphelios does entirely in maybe two games? I also never had problems understanding what he was doing at any given time, aside from the situations where he'd swap to a new weapon mid-fight. After I scoped him out by playing against him and reading his toolkit, he quickly became of my favorite champions to play, even post-nerfs.

I learned adc with aphelios and doing that made it so the friends i play with have a pretty good grasp on what an enemy aphelios is doing at any given point in time, unless we get some sort of god who can do the like. 4 weapon combos. But since he was nerfed into the ground, really the only thing I feel like i have going for me when i play him is the other team having no clue what i do... Aphelios is a mess, but i still think he's pretty fun to learn

As an Aphelios main, i get it, its a lot of habilities and intricacies, buuut, i dont think Aphelios is as problematic as people say he is. There are a lot of caracthers like irelia that have habilities that are so unintuitive to look at.

I find that looking at his stance is the best way to know the weapon, or the icon indicator but that can be a bit confusing. The stance changes a lot between all of the weapons except for maybe severum and crescendum. Gravitum is over the shoulder, Infernum is held by the hips, calibrum is also over the shoulder, but very visually different from gravitum, and crescendum has a (imho) a different enough attack animation from severum that it's easy to discern. Combine this with the icons, and it's marginally easier to know what you're dealing with.

Calibrum is long range and mark Serverum is heal+dps Gravitum is slow and root Infernum is aoe Crescendum is THE DPS/close range So you combine both weapons with his Q or the R gains the property of the weapon main hand.

Watching aphelios is like watching my roommate play fighting games. The animations all bleed together and look the same to me, and I can't tell what any of the symbols are supposed to be.

I honestly think people overthink aphelios. Yea hes got alot of text to his guns but they are pretty simple all yhings considered. Green=snipe Red=healing Purple=cc Blue=aoe White=sustain damage. And his ult does the same thing the currently equipt gun does but to everyone it hits.

when Aphilio's weapons switch how he holds the weapon and stance change and when he switches weapons he spins so it's kind of easy to notice when he switches and what weapons he's using as long as you know the difference.

What if there's an emote that pop up above aphelios every time he switches between weapons

Aphelios basically does the same as Master Chief: You just shoot stuff

I only need to know one thing about Aphelios. Be nowhere near him when he's got white and red, and only be occasionally near him when he's got blue.

Vars:Aphelios has 15 abbilities Sylas:15 abbilities? I have 154 Ults Viego: Amateurs...

Played against someone who seemed like they knew what they were doing and it got worse because it the first time me and my support were going up against him so we were confused for the entire game as he proceeded to snow ball us into oblivion

aphelios is one of my favorite champions but even i know he's just too overloaded...been playing with him since his launch and i'm not even close to learn everything that he does

as an aphelios main, the main advantage is enemies have no clue how to play against me because my playstyle has to change every minute because of the weapon cycle

One thing that is interesting, is to compare Invoker from Dota to Aphelios. Both break the game by having too many abilities, but Invoker doesn't feel like he breaks Dota. He sacrifices having a true ultimate to get his extra abilities(for those that don't know, invoker has 3 orb slots, and 3 orbs, the combination of his orbs when he presses his ult gives him an ability, e.g. 1 quas, 1 wex, and 1 exort is deafining blast, 1 quas, 2 exort is meteor), there is a clear visual que for what orbs he's using with contrasting colors, and while he has access to all of them, the way he builds heavily dictates which ones are the most threatening so you know which ones you most have to fear. Yes, late game he has access to the full repertoire in very threatening forms. Also all of his abilities look incredibly distinct with vibrant contrasting colors.

Aphelios one shots your entire team with his flamethrower ult, at least he did on release Edit: hearing you describe his abilities is giving me flashbacks to when he was released and it’s making my brain hurt

Vars, you are one of the three league channels I follow religiously. Even though I don't always agree with your conclusions, your analysis helps me to better understand the game and its characters. With that said, I think that in this case you're overlooking a few key factors in Aphelios' design. While he can't possibly stand up to the likes of Jhin or Kalista (yes, I think Kalista is one of the best designed ADCs in League), he shouldn't be accused of being confusing. Overloaded, yes, in the sense that his kit has a lot of conditions that are simply irrelevant to his gameplay, but not confusing. The criticism comes down to two main points: 'Aphelios has 15 different abilities, [with] 5 passives, one for each weapon' and, 'only Gravitum [stands out], because he carries a purple glowing orb' (5:24 - 5:48). This is a problem, the video states, because there are too many things his enemy must keep in mind, yet his visual design doesn't telegraph his weapon combination properly. Aphelios might have 15 abilities on paper, but at his core, he is an immobile ADC. No matter the weapon combination, his win condition is the same any other right click Marksman's and he loses to the exact same things that an Ashe, Jhin or Varus would lose to. Tactically he has access to only one or two abilities at any given time. However, he can separate an ability's coverage from its effect. Consider his weapons in isolation: - Calibrum has a strong neutral game with weak all-ins. - Severum is good in trades but weak in extended fights. - Gravitum trades DPS for utility. - Infernum trades range for AoE damage. - Crescendum has a lot of DPS but is hard to confirm. Each ability, as well as passive, is an extension of its weapon: - Calibrum is all about poking, so the Q is a long-range skillshot, and the passive complements his multi-hit abilities. - Severum falls off once you've used the Q. - Gravitum gives utility, but its Q is self-contained, essentially removing half of his kit. - Infernum is about AoE, so both the Q and passive are very, very good against groups and nearly useless otherwise. - Crescendum is focused on conditional DPS, so its Q is very powerful but can be easily avoided in the neutral game (sentries are short-ranged and very fragile), while its passive requires setup to be used effectively. All of his abilities, except for Gravitum, do something with his off-hand weapon. In other words, the main-hand weapon determines what type of skillshot your Q will have, while the off-hand weapon determines what the Q will do if it hits an enemy. Even his ult follows the same pattern: you can dodge every single variation by not getting hit by the initial skillshot. And that's Aphelios in a nutshell. He's such a dedicated ADC that even his central gimmick follows on-hit mechanics With this model, fighting him becomes even simpler. If he has Calibrum, you have to engage on him. If he has Severum, you have to poke him from afar or bait his Q. If he has Gravitum, feint an all-in to make him waste his root, as it's on a pretty long cooldown, or just 1v1 him. If he has Crescendum, burst him down or run away before he can stack his chakrams. You don't have to 'calculate his off-hand interactions' (6:34) if you can play around his threat zones. Of course, a master Aphelios can exploit your ignorance, but it takes just as much energy for him to keep track of everything as it does for you, so by that point, it's a matter of skill. Moving on to the second issue, Aphelios' weapons aren't telegraphed properly. I might be biased because I have quite a few games on the champion, myself, but I have honestly never had a problem with his clarity. You get icons next to his health bar that show both of his currently equipped weapons. You can also see how long he has left until a swap, and his abilities drain ammo in a predictable way (each cast costs 10). Asking to see his queued weapon would be unreasonable, in my opinion. In addition, each weapon has a distinct set of animations and particle effects. It might not be as obvious as a Jhin fourth shot, but you have to consider that Jhin's theme, beauty in death, is infinitely easier to implement than Aphelios', a weapon-swapping bounty hunter. Riot did all they could here, given that they only have a human to work with. Clarity might be improved if the weapons were an extension of his body or of some suit, though that would contradict his lore. Ultimately, I think that Aphelios is just a victim of bad tutorialisation. His design is reminiscent of Dota 2's Invoker, who combines reagents to create abilities on the fly, as well as games like Magicka. In fact, our moon hitman looks simplified when you put him next to those examples. If Riot had shifted focus away from the paradigm of abilities and communicated his mechanics better, I think that players wouldn't be nearly as confused. If anyone makes it this far into the post, give yourself a cookie from me and have a nice day.

He does everything While standing still with no way to escape lol

For a good example of extremely complicated hero that is still understandable, i recommend Invoker from Dota. He has to invoke his spells, and he creates them from combinations of 3 elements but you not only can see what he invokes if you pay attention and know his spells, of which there are just 10, he has to somewhat telegraph which ones he will be using throughout the game as he focuses on certain elements. Somehow Aphelios is incredibly confusing but Invoker isn't... Might be that his abilities don't change what they do on a whim, even if they are some of the best spells in the game.

Just tossing out an idea, but could he be "fixed" if he could only have 2 weapons at one time, but could swap which weapons hes using at shop instead of running out of ammo?

The fact that no one knew what goth boi does + the fact that he seemed pretty complicated is what made me want to play him. He's not that bad, but I also play Starcraft II (I'm sliver II) , so I can understand his underlying micro. However, you really did point out some bullshit that he has, in that you don't really know what you are getting hit with most of the time.