I gotta say, I'm upset.

This is a vent post more than anything so bear that in mind. (I'm also not sure exactly where to put it but it's technically gameplay related so I'm putting it in Gameplay.) I just really feeling like putting this out there since it's been really agitating me.

I picked up Zac way back at the tail end of Season 3/beginning of Season 4. Based solely on "he's a tank and also a goofy blob man superhero without the dark tragic backstory everyone else seems to have." First 6300 I ever bought. I fell in love with his gameplay and goofy personality immediately so I started maining him before I even knew what "maining" a Champion was. And I gotta say, at that point in time Zac was not a strong Champion. He couldn't jungle at all because his sustain just wasn't good enough and his clear speed was too low since cinderhulk wasn't a thing yet and more importantly, he had his old W which was locked at a 4s cd without the blobs = refresh mechanic. So I played him top, maxed Q, slapped folks to death. Had fun with that. Won lanes against Renekton when he was King Shit of "nobody comes top but me" Land.

Eventually he gets his "mechanical and QoL" rework that changed his W to 5s cd but with the blobs = refresh thing, and changed his ult from straight knock-up "malph ult but not as good" to a knock-up-and-away team splitter. I switched to playing him jungle (and learning to jungle) and had even more fun with that; flying out of bushes to splat people in the face. After that he only showed up in the patch notes every now and then to get minor buffs or tweaks up until he got another single-ability scaling/QoL rework: the one that completely changed the range scaling on his E so that at rank 1 it barely matched but at rank 5 it was "The Longest Range Non-Ultimate Engage in the Game!™ " I was pretty happy with being able to pull ganks from jungle in a way I couldn't before, and the change received, as i recall, mostly positive feedback.

Over time he went from "meh" to "solid" to finally being "consistently good" earlier this season. For the first time in three years since I started playing him he wasn't just barely scraping a rounded-up 49-50%. He had a fairly consistent 51-52%. No more "why are you playing Zac he's a troll pick they gutted him a month after release." I could play a Champion I loved and reasonably expect to do well in Ranked, which I got more into the longer I played League.

Except the community didn't like that a Champion designed around being durable and ganking from long range was... durable, and ganking from long range. No sooner does he become a solid competitive Champion than the Boards are flooded with "ZAC SO FUCXKING BROKNE GANK FROM TWO LANE AWAY AND ONESHOT ME!!1!" No, that isn't hyperbole, I saw many many people accuse him of that. And Riot, eager to kill another tank for having the audacity to do what they were designed to do, puts him on the rework list. He comes out of it so slow, clunky, and unwieldy that he instantly becomes an unplayable trollpick. Completely worthless. And all of the complaints from players like me, all of them, were saying "make him more responsive and less clunky and then maybe this rework will be okay." Riot hears however, "make him less clunky, but also give him titanic numbers buffs on top of it." Which is what they do. So now he's functional, just like we wanted, and also pushing in-game numbers that make new Galio look like old Galio. They turned Zac into the tank version of S2 Kassadin: banned permanently, dodged immediately if picked when not banned. I can't even play my favorite Champ in normals either without having people (even my own team) complain that I'm tryharding and making the game unfun.

The entire rework was an ill-conceived knee-jerk reaction to immobile mage/adc players complaining that a Champion designed to gank them was able to do his job and gank them. Nobody is happy about Zac's rework and the fact that he's now completely broken op, especially Zac mains.

I just want my old blob friend back.

TL;DR: People (read: immobile mage and adc mains) bitched and moaned that Zac was an "op generalist who does too much damage" even though he wasn't. In response Riot reworked him into... an op generalist who does too much damage. Great fucking job everyone.