FLY Bwipo gives a Yorick masterclass: “[Top laners] are… I guess, can I say lazy?”

HotSpawn sat down with FlyQuest’s top laner Gabriel “Bwipo” Rau to chat Yorick, Yorick, and why other top laners are too lazy to play Yorick.

FlyQuest has been at the forefront of the LTA this year, and top laner Bwipo has been at the forefront of their champion select cookery. Bwipo has always been known for having his pocket picks, but this split, we’ve seen a brand new addition to his roster of rabble-rousers: Yorick. The split-pushing summoner juggernaut was previously one of League of Legends’ weirdest and least-played champions.

As my favorite champion in the game, getting the chance to sit down with the man bringing Yorick back to NA pro stages was something I was heavily looking forward to. If you’re a Yorick enjoyer (or hater), sit back and enjoy the freestyle flow-of-consciousness conversation Bwipo and I had about the last of the Brethren of the Dusk.

Bwipo says other top laners are lazy for not learning Yorick

Nick: Hey Bwipo, thanks for taking this.

Bwipo: Hey, how are you doing?

Nick: Doing well, yourself? 

Bwipo: I’m doing good.

Nick: So, as you’ll know, I requested this interview to chat about Yorick. I love that champion, but he’s been jailed away from pro play for years until now. I think the last time somebody picked Yorick in NA, it was like 2017. So, once I saw you were the first one in LTA to pick him, I knew I had to chat. That champion’s my boy. Even though he’s getting hotfixes, when did Yorick pop up to you as a potential pick, and what drew you to him as a pro play option?

Bwipo: Well, the first thing is that I still think he’s good, and I still use him, so keep that in mind. A lot of people ban Jayce or do not pick him at all so they do not have to worry about putting their Jayce top lane and playing against Yorick. If you haven’t noticed, a lot of teams have gone out of their way to either ban it or make sure they don’t play a matchup that is bad for Yorick. I think this is a very conscious decision from the people who are playing in the LTA right now. So I wanted to clarify, the hotfix nerf did hurt him a little bit, but he only got one hotfix nerf for top lane. The others were aimed at his jungle performance, which means that as a top laner, he’s still very solid.

The main reason why I thought he was in a good position to come into the meta is because of two super important factors: first, matchups. You need a good matchup when you’re playing Yorick. If you play a bad matchup, you get pushed in, you can’t abuse the fact that your maiden is spawning ghouls on cooldown and getting priority. This is what makes him a really oppressive champion. You can’t really walk into his lane and stop him unless you have kill pressure on him, which is not easy to do.

Nick: Yeah, classically a Jayce counter for exactly those reasons. 

Bwipo: So, Jayce being a very predominant champion in the meta, Rumble, Gnar, these are all characters that Yorick historically has gotten really well into, so it was worth looking into already. I started playing him when he got the changes because the big thing about the changes is that they took power out of the maiden, out of the ghouls, and placed it into Yorick himself. So even though the ghouls are still a big part of his kit, you can now spawn them yourself by queuing champions. When you’re fighting and you’re not having your ultimates, you’re still relevant. This was a huge issue for Yorick, where he had to set himself up to pressure, and it wasn’t easy to do. You had to go out of your way to sideline, spawn ghouls, then bring your ghouls and your maiden. If you died in a fight and you had to respawn and the objective was still alive, you quite literally couldn’t participate in the fight because you didn’t have time to get ghouls. You couldn’t TP into a fight and be useful.

These kinds of restrictions are what made Yorick have a hard time being a competitive champion, because even though he had the potential, it was just difficult if the game ever went south for you. A big part of playing and drafting a champion competitively is asking yourself what this champion is capable of doing when the game goes south, because you can’t always guarantee a good game. Sometimes the enemy team can focus you, maybe a mistake happens, maybe you make a mistake yourself. Yorick has now gotten better, in my opinion at least, due to the fact that his armor shreds, and his Q heals significantly more when he’s lower health. You can go for a bulldozer-ish tanky build like I did, and this makes him an actual pretty big threat front to back. You can’t just ignore him because a lot of frontline tanks have a really hard time dealing with his baby cage. That’s what I like to call it.

Bwipo: So you E someone, you run at them, they’ll use their skill, they’ll back off, and boom, you’ve created space for your team. They fight back, you put down the baby cage and you start kiting and healing with those Qs, spawning more ghouls, because again, even if you do have your maiden and you have four ghouls, keep in mind, you couldn’t refresh those ghouls in the past. If they just got killed during the combat, you would have no damage or very little damage. Now, during the fight, you can respawn ghouls as you’re fighting because your E and Q basically have 100% uptime, right? Your E has a very short cooldown later in the game: it’s like 7 or 6 seconds or so after you max it, which I do max second, just for clarity here.

I know he used to max W second for some time. I maxed out E second for this reason to reduce the cooldown, get more armor shred, more movement speed, and it just means that even if I have my maiden out, I can keep respawning ghouls during combat, and it makes it so he’s just actually functioning here. Plus, you have his very egregious split-pushing mechanics. I would say that’s the way I can put it, because you can still spawn the ghouls on side lanes and have the 4 ghouls push, meanwhile you go play an objective. You can still just bog down someone in a 2v1 with your ghouls. Definitely, I think Yorick has a lot of potential, and in Asia, people are playing him too. I’m not the only one. I think that people in the LTA will also consider playing him more. I just think, right now, [top laners] are… I guess, can I say lazy? They just ban it in my scrims so that they don’t want to see it, and they don’t want to try it themselves. I’ve tried against one or two of them who have tried it. I just think the character is very strong.

Nick: Yeah, Yorick is a character whose gameplay is contingent on a bunch of really small, hard to see, interactions. Given that he’s such a unique character, it seems like some pros just wait for him to be pushed out of the meta rather than learn him. But he’s so much easier now, his moments of power are way less conditional. The new frequency with which he summons and refreshes ghouls is a huge deal, I assume it’s that aspect of the rework that’s really letting him show up in pro.

Bwipo:  Yes, no, I agree. Like I mentioned, it’s mostly the fact that even if things go wrong, the thing is, let’s say you walk up to a fight, you try to E someone, you get some poked down. That was a bad play in the past because you would lose your ghouls, and if you lost your ghouls, you lost all your damage. Now, you can freely do that and respawn your ghouls, so you can actually harass people before the team fight starts as well. You can interact with people in a non-committal fashion.

Bwipo: Whereas, if you weren’t on a side lane with a minion wave in front of you so that you could keep spawning ghouls, the champion just kind of sucked. You could throw E, and then if the enemy team is all grouped, they’re all focused on your ghouls. What do you do next? Nothing! You can’t respawn any ghouls, you can’t do anything. And I think this is the biggest difference that you have, you know, in the neutral play, because obviously, like in a competitive game, you know, it’s a dragon standoff. If your top player is just standing there, doing nothing, he must be providing something, right? He has to have, like, really good hard CC (crowd control) to one-shot someone, great follow-up, great something. But the only thing Yorick did in the neutral play was go hit the neutral objective and one-shot it, right? That’s what he did.

And my point is, that’s great and all if you’re winning, because if they walk in, you can just fight them and kill them. But if you’re losing, your top player is busy doing the neutral objective, and you’re fighting for a revive! So, he didn’t provide much back then. Now, kill your ghouls, you don’t have to worry, you can even respawn them on the dragon, like, you can just start stacking with Q on the dragon, they walk in, throw your E at someone that’s walking in, boom, four ghouls spawn on his head, you have ghouls again.

You can play the game even though the ghouls have been nerfed compared to what they used to be. They now scale off of your attack speed, not of their own attack speed per level, so they get 8% attack speed per level of Yorick.

Nick: Which, to be clear, was nuts. Building full AD and getting passive attack speed was bonkers.

Bwipo: So, yes, it did give a crazy amount of gold value to the ghouls, which is why lethality builds and, like, high amounts of AD builds really worked for him, because they scaled that AD so well with the attack speed they got per level. Now, they deal less damage, but you have uptime, and they keep coming. They don’t, they’re genuine, uh, more like a necromancer type, rather than, like, uh, I’m gonna one-shot you, and, uh, if you come in my territory, I’m going to destroy you, and if you don’t, I’m useless. This is really, in my opinion, the reason why he’s good. It’s not that his ghouls, like, it’s not that he doesn’t, like, he still doesn’t do much without ghouls. He needs his ghouls. It’s just the fact that he can actually summon them in combat that makes him great.

Nick: Yeah, overall, each individual ghoul got weaker, but you’re summoning so many more ghouls over the course of a game, especially in top lane, that the ghouls overall are net more powerful.

Bwipo: Absolutely. Ghoul attacks don’t one-shot them anymore, so, uh, in the past, all ghoul attacks one-shot them. So you could just, you know, your support clicks one, your mid clicks one, your AD clicks one, boom, all his damage is gone.

Now, you need to go out of your way to hit the ghouls, use some spells, potentially. Yet again, another reason why he’s much better. I actually enjoyed his playstyle significantly more, because, like I said, it felt a bit frustrating as I feel like I’m getting punished for even considering grouping. That was an issue in the past that made him frustrating and being restricted by your own character in terms of game strategy. If I don’t do the main strategy, I feel like I’m trying to lose. So, honestly, they did a fantastic job. I don’t know how you feel about the reward, but for me, I think it was a great job.

Nick: Yeah, honestly, overall I’m pretty happy with it. He’s a really weird character, between having semi-permanent summons, his split push power, etc. And that’s meant that he’s been sort of locked into this really odd spot where if he’s ever good enough to play in pro, he’s probably giga OP in solo queue. I think moving power from his ghouls to him at least makes his moments of strength and weakness more intuitive when compared with other juggernauts. Now it’s mostly just don’t let the Yorick stand in melee range of you and Q you for half your health, and that’s at least easier to understand. Alright, we’re running out of time here, so thanks for taking the time, Bwipo! I hope to see more Yorick in your games coming up.

Bwipo: It will show up on stage for me, uh, whether it’s on the enemy team’s ban list, or my lock-in. I can’t promise, but I’ll make sure I keep using him for the playoffs. And, obviously, I appreciate it.

Cheers, have a good one, Bwipo.

Bwipo: Take care.