Explaining Malzahar's winrate as a used to be main Malz

Why is jungle Malz so strong atm?

During Season 4 and 5 I would pick Malz jungle for fun and rarely in ranked. Despite the fact you could take drake at lv 2 right after blue. Faster than every other champ in the game and faster than now. Yet his winrate was not 57%. The reason why Malz jungle is so strong right now is because objectives are a lot more valuable. It has nothing to do with his kit. In fact his kit is actually a lot weaker (yet more toxic) but I will come to that later. Taking early drakes is a lot more impactful. Rift Herald has been introduced, another powerful objective and got recently buffed. Towers are weaker than during the previous seasons and Malz has always been strong at taking towers. To reduce snowballing during S4 na d5 global gold from turrets was lowered. This season turrets give a lot of global gold again enhancing snowball strategies even more. Also Scuttler has been introduced another gold income and grants vision. Combine Drake, Rift Herald, Scuttler, weak towers + global gold income and now you have the perfect environment for Malz jungle to be super effective.

Why has his rework failed so much? First of all Repertoir made a beginners mistake by underestimating the early game power of the voidlings. Early game they literally count as extra champs. Their individual power has decreased but they come in higher numbers now. Cutting roughly 50% of Malz damage and put it in his voidlings skyrocket his early game power yet his scalings and teamfight abilities are awful but that is masked because by the time you get to that point in the game Malz has already taken 3 drakes, Rift Herald and Baron and gave his team so much global advantage it just doesn't matter any more.

Malz as a laner Malz top is stronger than Malz mid because top is more of an island. If the enemy jungler doesn't come to help vs Malzahar he will eventually solo Rift Herald and take top towers and later Baron. So if the enemy team makes an effort to gank bot or pressure drake he will take Rift Herald/Baron solo. If Malzahar goes mid he can do the same with drake but it is harder since its often better warded and has more jungle presence and presence from 2 botlaners. It is also always nice to have a champ in your team than can sneak Baron at spawn with a pink ward. Also his kit has become Yorick level of toxiness. All you have to do is point and click E, press W and watch how your voidlings force an enemy out of lane just how Yorick uses his ghouls but worse. He has become stupid to play and to play against.

His entire kit is meant to snowball. By design he has no lategame scaling. His entire kit can be shut down by a) killing the first voidling and b) QSS negating all his damage. Malz used to have a tether range and flat damage on his ult so even if you removed the suppress you were still taking damage until you got out of range. Now you can press QSS, walk ouf of pool, walk away from voidlings and you just 100% countered Malzahar. If you kill his first voidling you can spam laugh while he tickles you with his Q+E and then proceed to kill him.

Other hidden strengths Dynamic Que: Malzahar is an objective focused early game champ therefore he flourish in teams with more premades, better communication and screws solo players even harder Passive: Malzahar was historically always weak vs poke. His passive obviously counters poke now. That aside his passive is not that good. Problem is it stacks with his already insane early game. But it doesn't really solve any problems for him. Malz was already strong vs all-in compositions (unless they had multiple), he didn't needed this passive for that. The only problem this new passive solved for Malz was the weird interaction when he ulted but at the same time got cc'ed therefore disabling his ult. And he can now engage with ult and be safe for the first 1 second. But overall I simply dislike it on a mage since it doesn't fit his theme nor identity at all.

Malzahar is kitlocked What I mean by that is he can't be balanced by changing numbers alone. His kit is just too binary. There is not much going on for Malz. All his strength comes from how strong taking objectives is. Either you nerf objectives or you nerf is early game power. If you take out the early game power of his voidlings then what is left of him? His scaling is terrible because he relies on unpredictable, uncontrollable swarm of voidlings that give him windows of strength and without he is superweak. Lategame he is no menace to any lifesteal AD champ with QSS since they can OS the voidlings, lifesteal more from them than they deal damage and simply ignore Malz and kill him later.

Shift power back to his other abilities and he will look more like old Malz again but with a weaker kit without a clear goal and identity not able to really accomplish something. Fully commit to his voidlings (if that is not already the case) and either his early game becomes too oppressive or too weak to make an impact. And shifting early game power to his mid-lategame won't work either because his kit inherently falls off. Again, not a problem of numbers just bad design.

I believe Malzahars probability outcomes are binary because his kit doesn't offer any other meaningful choices other than taking objectives. If he wins early he will most likely also win late because objectives boost all 5 players. If he loses early, he will lose late etc. The line is very thin. Outcomes with his current kit based on risk/reward Wins early - Wins game --> toxic, oppressive, low risk/high reward, permabanned Wins early - Loses game --> low risk/low reward. irrelevant champ. he does all he can but still loses Loses early - Loses game --> irrelevant champ since he has no scaling Loses early - Wins game --> very unlikely. only thing going on for him is he might sneak Baron solo Goes even - Wins game --> low risk/high reward. toxic. all he needs to do is play safe which is easy to do with his kit, stay even in lane/jungle and outscale by taking objectives later Goes even - Loses game --> If he can't make a difference then the risk of picking him becomes greater than the reward hence he will not be picked as players are risk averse

Conclusion Riot always stated they hate global passives and champs with global impact but Malzahar has become the personification of global teambuffs. Just picking him gives you a lot of pressure over objectives and he is all about snowballing, another aspect everyone hates. In lane he is similar to Yorick, another champ deemed as toxic. Can Malzahar be fixed? I think not. All he can do is try and force objectives and he can do this passively like Nunu/Udyr. Malzahar strategy is very binary. He can or he can not. There is no middle ground. How to play vs him? Ward objectives, rush QSS and take it to lategame were he falls of. My prediction is that Riot will keep muddling through with this failed concept and keep tweaking him until he might reach 50% winrate which I think isn't possible. Until then happy banning or happy 0% pickrate once he gets olafed and wait for his next rework.