Idea for a nerf to balance Zoe more without ruining her kit - completely remove the on hit damage of the bubble, and leave it only as the increase in damage after sleep. Further, maybe cap the bonus damage if her own abilities proc it, thus requiring more team play and thought before using it.
How about reducing the length of time the sleep zone lasts for? It's so ridiculously lasting on the ground and if you clip it OOPs you're asleep? As least scale down the sleep the longer that bubble zone is on the ground so if its about to expire you don't sleep for the full duration. [zombie-nunu-bummed]
they should also make it that her sleep works like sleep in 90% of all other games, where if you take damage while drowsy, you don't fall asleep. would also make the ability less brainless
The main problem I find with Zoe is just how little down time she has on her E with the 4 second trap field. Either lowering the duration of the trap or increasing the cool down on E to ~20 seconds would make it much more punishing for Zoe to miss her bubble.
Why would someone downvote this? He's just suggesting a change lol.
LOL? This is an idiotic suggestion. She only has 2 damage spells as it is, doing this would leave her with 1? Straight dumb.
Zoe just has a lot of bizarre design choices that combine to make her extremely difficult to balance.
Only two conventionally usable damaging abilities on a champion intended to do damage, so those abilities need massively inflated damage in order for her to function.
Her W is either incredibly powerful or incredibly underwhelming depending on what shards are dropped by minions in laning phase. It then goes on to cause all kinds of havoc in team-fights when Zoe essentially has access to up to 9 extra Flashes and various support actives.
Her E has so many bells and whistles on it, likely to accommodate for a perceived high skill floor like release Azir. This didn't pan out, though, because instead Q->E does too much damage without much skill needed.
There's just a lot of stuff wrong with her on a base design level, and number changes alone aren't likely to fix it without straight-up dumpstering her.
One damage spell is bad. Lower damage on q or lower proc damage on e is a better choice but I am not convinced either is needed.
Just turn the true damage into magic damage so MR is actually useful and make her AoE sleep spread out instead of popping to it's size.
The damage is already capped. Are you saying to uncap it if an ally procs it? Hello support Zoe.
Honestly, I think she just needs some cooldown and mana cost nerfs. It's not ok that she can just spam farm with q early game. 
can't do it and that's one of the main things that keeps her early game in check.
On a separate note, it would be interesting if the actives she can get from minions for her W scaled with ability level. So only having one point in W allows for things like 
and 
and she only had access to things like 
and 
with 3 or more points in W.
How much damage does her E even do by itself?
Before getting into the suggestion itself: while the proposal isn't bad, simply throwing out an idea for a solution, without stating what kind of problem you're trying to solve in the first place and how it would be addressed, isn't the most helpful way of giving feedback. I get that the Boards, and probably many more players, are likely aware that Zoe is unhealthy and perhaps still a little too strong, but even so, that nonetheless doesn't really give all the context needed to understand what exactly your solution aims to resolve. While I personally like your idea, ideas in any creative medium are a dime a dozen, and have no intrinsic value of their own until proven: what is more important here is the process of reasoning that got you to the idea, and more specifically here the statement of the problem you're coming up with ideas to fix in the first place.
Now that that's been said, I do think it could help to remove some extraneous effects from Zoe's kit, including the impact damage on her E, as she currently has a lot going on and gets to deal a lot of burst even when she's not landing her Q, which is supposed to be her prime source of damage. It could also be interesting to make the ability more of a damage bonus for teammates, rather than herself, though that could also push her towards bot lane and require balancing there too (which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if Zoe could remain viable mid). Overall, limiting her non-Q damage sounds like a good idea, as she already has several cheap and relatively safe means of dealing damage, and is frustrating as a result of it.
However, I'm personally not sure if this would really fix Zoe's largest problems: in my opinion, the fundamental issue with her playstyle is that she's designed to one-shot, but also can personally lay down hard CC that completely prevents her opponent from reacting to her one-shot ability. Effectively, all else held equal, landing a single spell on a squishy can guarantee her a kill, whereas her range and utility give her plenty more options to escape punishment. Her kit takes the core combo of burst mages to an extreme, along with the associated frustration of getting killed during hard CC, while also adding in the low cooldowns and high ranges (and therefore the safety) of artillery mages. Because of this, I don't think her Q and E can ever truly be healthy together: even if her E stun were changed to stasis, it would still leave a fraction of time where her target would be a sitting duck, and that is enough to take a lot of much-needed counterplay out of her kit. Because of this, I think Zoe could perhaps be healthy as either a one-shot champion or a champion with long-ranged hard CC, but not both at the same time.
Im pretty sure taking >200 damage out of a mage's rotation will dumpster them but i mean w/e
A better nerf would be getting rid of the "sleep zone" area or making it <1 second duration or making her W less obnoxious, or getting rid of the cd refund on hitting a champion with her bubble. Or some combination of those
I think if they reverted her Q and R interactions, and added your change, it would be good. Zoe wouldn't be nerfed into the ground and people wouldn't complain as much as they do already, even though as it stands she isn't the end all be all.
Terrible idea. That would mean she will be balanced around only having to land one spell to kill you. Her damage needs to be distributed among her spells so that she has to hit EVERYTHING to be effective.
If you remove damage from her E, that means they will have to make her Q stronger, which means she wont need to land E to oneshot you.
