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Unpopular Opinion: Zed's not broken or OP

ModAzure Ole·5/19/2016, 8:11:02 PM·9 votes·770 views

He's just unhealthy in design.

  1. If he all-ins you (and hits stuff) it's just a numbers game, as in you either will survive or you won't, and he's consequently either worthless or he feels awful to play against
  2. Item variety synergizes with him, from his bork days to his youmuus to duskblade, but does not synergize against him, as in hurr durr get seeker's armguard This makes him difficult to balance. If he gets solo-shut down by zhonya's, he's going to be pretty terrible. Consequently, hhe feels balanced around this counter item. The result? He feels super strong UNLESS you get the item, and even then he's pretty okay
  3. The massive passive steroid on his w doesn't feel engaging, so it's a huge hidden-ish stat
  4. Energy means his waveclear is consistent and he doesn't have to juggle resources. Shen is balanced around this with punishingly slow waveclear, same with akali and kennen, who make significant sacrifices to stay ahead of pushing.
  5. He's got two blinks. Being slippery is something that can feel good to use, but it can get pretty absurd and draw a lot of admonition (read: Fizz, Lee Sin)

Number tweaks can only fix so many of these things. Plus, his changes to get him balanced have significantly compromised on his design and fantasy (his ult once spawned TWO shadows in development).

What would you do to Zed?

10 Comments

Kitten of Evil5/19/2016, 8:55:41 PM3 votes

Nailed it, OP. I always ban Zed whenever I mid. Sometimes I beat him, sometimes I don't, but I always despise playing against him... because when he's in a lane, it feels like he has all the options and all the control. Thankfully, late-game he has minimal teamfight presence, but who wants to suffer for 15-20 minutes until they get to that point?

He can waveclear as well as most mages and has the easiest melee CS in the game (AD + his execute passive). He can push and not worry about ganks because of his W. He can easily roam and try to snowball off bot. He can dive with the option to blink back out if he miscalculated. The only way to really punish him is for him to make a mistake.

He's not overpowered or broken, he's just the worst to lane against. So basically 1, 4, and 5 (not that I disagree with the other two points).

ModWulf Helhammer5/19/2016, 8:19:29 PM1 votes

If he gets solo-shut down by zhonya's, he's going to be pretty terrible.

Kinda why they changed QSS and have been making Zhonya's more about the active with lesser combat stats (rather then some of the most AP in the game, and hey! The best active too)

Nameless Voice5/19/2016, 8:28:33 PM1 votes

Extremely unhealthy design which makes a champion almost impossible to balance is the definition of "broken"?

Though, to be honest, I don't think Zed's overall design is that bad (compared to some others). I think he could become a much more healthy champion with some heavy number retuning. I'm don't mean things like "5 less damage on his Q", but rather things like tuning his ability and projectile speeds, energy costs, margins of safety and so on, to give him more meaningful counterplay, while perhaps removing some of the random extraneous power from his kit.

The main things people hate about Zed are: He can poke/waveclear too much, too reliably and too safely. Once he all-ins you, it's hard to avoid his damage (since he's usually using his skillshots from almost right on top of you), so it has fairly little counterplay. He's manaless with a strong early game, a combination pretty much guaranteed to push mages out of the game.

Dreadlocks5/19/2016, 8:41:17 PM1 votes

People hate assassin's in general. People cry about zed being safe, yet his ult has more counter play than other assassins. And they complain about rengar or talon for doing too much damage too quickly, even if they arnt as safe doing so.

Again, people just hate assassin's so they will never be truly satisfied unless they are bad at being an assassin, aka Kassadin.