Simple Survey: "Do you think Zed is balanced?" NO RITO ALLOWED. MEMBERS ONLY LOL
Feel free to put a reasonable debate or open discussion regarding your vote. Try to be respectful.
10 Comments
He does his job well, and that is to royally fuck a person up. He's meant to go in, kill someone, and get out. Unlike talon who has massive aoe, fizz who also has massive aoe, Akali who has the innate sustain and resets to continue the assassinations, and Ahri who has insane mobility and cc, Zed has his own niche. It's not required for him to go in and have to stay in. There is no reason he shouldn't be able to just get out, because every assassin has their own niche.
The only issue I see with Zed is inexperience when people fight him. I main Zed, however when I face Zed I can usually beat him simply because I know how the champion works and I know how to capitalize on things such as his shadow's cooldown, or his q's cooldown. I know how to bait out a shadow swap, or even an ult. I know how to itemize. That, in my opinion, is the biggest issue with people. They will be destroyed by him and not bother to figure out why. Just call it op and cry about it on the forums fishing for nerfs.
Only thing I'd change about Zed is maybe his wave clear. Perhaps have the passive only trigger on champions. But the damage he does to a single target and the mobility he has I would not change. People overplay Zed's mobility. It's a short range blink at most, one that even has a missile speed so it's not instant such as Ezreal.
He's not far off, like the person stated above a couple of his problems are the easy of his waveclear and his relative safety around enemy towers. Mobility in-of-itself isn't a bad thing on a champion, but Zed shouldn't have access to all the advantages he has (that is, ressourcelessness, waveclear, tower-dive safety, mobility). His passive makes farming far too easy, and should be reserved for champions only, meanwhile his shadow play - while cool - allows him to extend the range and influence radius of his skills beyond that of pretty much every assassin. Either his shadow numbers need to be tweaked, or Zed's base skills need to be looked at.
tl;dr; His assassination game is awesome, but his farming pattern needs to change.
EDIT: In future polls you might want to include more than a yes - or - no choice, and offer a gradient from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree" since opinions regarding balance are generally not so binary. i.e.: I believe Zed does some things right, but I also believe there are more oppressive elements to his gameplay that can be tuned.
The people at Riot are typically players too, and sometimes even disagree with their own companies balancing decisions. I see no good reason you would try and exclude them, other than to help push your own point of view.
I don't know if Zed has a legitimate mid-lane counter, but in my anecdotal experience some unusual characters don't fair too poorly against him. Namely Cho'gath, Lulu, and Karma - all characters with decent poke and survivability. While they can survive him and keep up in farm due to their abilities, they don't exactly win out in duels unless Zed makes a mistake.
Then there's always the infamous skill match-up between Leblanc and Zed, where the first person to use their ultimate is the one who will die lol