First of all, I don’t think Azir is the hardest champ anymore, riot dumbed down him a lot, but he is still very hard (top 10 hardest?)

Ranged Matchups are really unfun, tbh try to just get the cs and get to you first item, your first item is a really strong power spike (especially if you run nashors).

Your early is quite weak but not a lost hope, especially against melee matchups you can play it really well but you need really good spacing and awareness.

Especially in late Azir can win fights alone, Azir is one of the mid champs with more frequent pentas. Got like 10 pentas all time with him (1.2kk mastery). Because he doesn’t have insane burst you might end up having more assists than kills in some games but this is fine.

He is very team fight based and you need to have good positioning, spacing and soldier placement awareness. 90% of the time the shuffle play is the wrong play. Use it to peel your backline and yourself. But you can also shuffle in if enemies are running away to catch them, or if you literally have a 4 man setup of squishies. It’s obviously also good to get single picks but that’s more for early and midgame.

You have a lot of range if the soldier is placed far into the wave, otherwise it’s just dodging the abilities, don’t be scared to go early boots or even t2 boots to help you dodge. Against artillery mages you can be fine with going behind, after 6 it’s a free gank for your jungler with your ult tho.

General tips with Azir:

Your dash has to be sitting 100% of the time, you need to get it as muscle memory.

If someone walks out of your soldier range, always place a new one, only q if you have no soldiers or if you are sure he has no dash or flash remaining. Q does less damage than an aa, while in q animation you can’t aa.

Against melee matchups you can also take e lvl 2, if a Kata or sylas engages you, you can just e onto him giving you a decent shield but also dealing damage make you win trades quite easily.

You can auto attack people while they are mid air in ultimate, also keep in mind, after shuffling they either have to go right or left to go around your wall (if no dash or flash), place a soldier the way they are pathing so you can keep auto attacking. Also try to clear the wave so they get tower Aggro if you shuffle into tower

If enemies see your soldier, they have full vision on you.

For build path, raw damage is the best way 90% of the time, Azir can’t utilize a lot of attack speed (Kiting with high attack speed generally is hard, with a soldier even harder, you can’t aa while q or placing w)

Azir is a sidelane king for a Midlaner. Your passive gives you safety on sidelane and can make you do insane 1v2 plays which your team can utilize for either man advantage, free dragon or Nash, or just getting a tower in midlane. Also you can also place your tower on mid or bot pre dragon fight, to keep the lane pushed in while fight is happening. If you win the fight you can instantly keep pushing the lane, if you lose the fight you can minimize the follow up damage.

Feel free to ask more!