About the sustain, yes that can be a problem. I guess you can go for spellvamp, but keep in mind all of his spells are aoe, meaning your spellvamp heal will be reduced to 1/3. I don't think it is worth to trade damage for that. Just always stack your pots, aa the minions as much as possible in lane for that little bit of heal and you should be fine.

And the cdr part on Nashors, nothing agains some cdr on ap Aatrox! It might reduce the damage in the teamfights but being able to poke more often and being ready for anther burst combo sooner again can give you a great advantage. However, I woudnt go for Nashors but rather for a Morellonomicon. The Mana Regen might be wasted but it gives the same amount of cdr, 20 ap more and a great passive for 620g less in exchange for the Nashors passive and attack speed. You could ofc also go for will of the ancients for the cdr. Might be 10% cdr less and 300g more expensive, but if you keep having sustain problems, this could be the right for you.

I personally don't mind much about cdr and spellvamp simply because I rather go for a build with which I can hurt the enemy team as much as possible in a teamfight, but I can see a more poke oriented build work just as fine. I'll propably add another build path later focused on that way of playing him, most likely something like cdr boots, wota, ludens and then damage or something to fill the last 10% cdr.

@Rip-R: Synergy with other champions sure is important for a guide but it is such a huge topic that I could only fill enough champions in if I speculate how well they would work together. I don't want to spread wrong informations so I rather won't cover it until I found enough very good (or very bad) compinations for him.

I tried AP Aatrox and gotta admit it worked better than i expected. He have an ok laning phase and he have good burst and mobility to assassinate squishy carries in team fights. You were right, building attack speed isnt a good idea, as he rarely can drop additional auto attacks in his combo, but i think Nashor can still be good duo to its CDR bonus, which lets him spam E more and reduces the downtime of his ult combo. A small weakness ive found while playing AP is the lack of health sustain to cover the hp cost of his skills, a possible solution can be hextech or Will of the Ancients. The 1st would give him another skill to scale with AP and life steal from his phys dmg and the second has fairly cheap price and some extra CDR. Ofc it will be hard to choose what item to replace to use one with spell vamp.

AP Aatrox is very fun to play in normal games. His laning phase is not the easiest, as he's too squishy for top and has some trouble for last hitting in the mid lane, but once the laning phase is over, the teamfights are awesome. I confirm what you said, attack speed is useless, it is better to build full burst or AP offtank, the former being the better. It would be nice if you could add some good synergy with other Champions, such as Orianna or Amumu with their ultis combo.

Hey, I have talked about Nashors Tooth in the item section. You just don't have enough time to stand there and aa them, especially yause it isn't rewarding at all since your third aa bonusses scale ad. Haven't thought about triforce, but I guess it woudn't work that well for the same reason lich bane isn't that great on him imo.

Hey, I see this aatrox build and the first thing that comes to my mind is: where is the attackspeed from maybe tri force and nashors tooth can u explain it plz