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"Zed is broken"

TheOperatorsBox·5/25/2016, 2:32:34 AM·3 votes·1,921 views

Alright this is a reality check.

It is so boring to see all this hate on Zed. Why? Does he make lane hard? Does he one-shot you all the time?

Listen to me, there is counterplay to him.

Low Elo, where most of the complaining comes from, has a lot of Zed players in there. What low-elo Zed players do normally to harass is shadow, and Q-E or E-Q. This is pre-6. If you are playing an immobile mage, yes you won't dodge that well, since he is a lot more mobile than you. However, if you play someone like Fizz, Yasuo, LeBlanc, or some mobile mage or assassin, you can dodge that as soon as you see the shadow. Yes, he deserves to be nerfed a bit, since his damage is a bit too high, but he is not flat out broken.

In high elo, Zed players are much higher skilled, and know the ins and outs of him. However, his lane opponent should still know how to anticipate his movements and poke pattern.

And yes, items do count as counterplay. Zhonya's is a must on most burst mages, because if they fuck up they will die unless they can save themselves with a few seconds of invincibility.

All in all, his power is extremely overrated, and he does not deserve to be dumpstered. His nerfs, and compensation buffs, are totally in line. If you still have a problem with it, learn to play against him, stop whining.

This was not in line with my usual demeanor, I'm just sick and tired of all this blind hate on Zed. Sorry about that.

4 Comments

xl Kirito lx5/25/2016, 2:46:06 AM1 votes

I'm not sure that people are arguing his lack of counterplay, people are arguing everything else about him.

  • He's incredibly safe of a pick. He can realistically stand behind his own minion wave and 60%+ of minions. Pushing him to tower allows you to harass him, but he gets every minion and jungle pressure. Even if he burns his shadow, he can play safe until the CD is off, without losing significant pressure.

  • SoloQ makes it incredibly hard to disclose timers. A 20s window is amazing, but useless in soloQ where few junglers are good enough to abuse it. Then roaming potential allows him to tower dive with relative little risk involved. Without good coordination, he's incredibly strong.

  • Relatively good assassination pattern. He's going to play like a Katarina most of the time. Wait for the engagement to start, then assassinate the backline while there's relative confusion. Between QSS nerfs and Duskblade, it's incredibly hard for a carry to survive that, outside of the support dumping everything on Zed. Even if Zed can't safely get a rotation in a fight, he has incredibly strong split push potential, due to insane 1v1 potential. Tryndamere reminds me of the same concept. A champion that's incredibly hard to duel, yet an amazing split pusher.

The best arguement Zed has is that he has hard counters in lane, such as Kayle or Zillean. But he counters others incredibly easy. A squishy mage can never counter roam Zed w/out jungle pressure, otherwise mages will get assassinated mid rotation. I'm not saying he's god teir, but he does garner an 85% ban rate. And that's not liable to change, especially with the nerfs/buffs he's getting on the PBE.

Sona Ping5/25/2016, 2:48:09 AM1 votes

Low Elo, where most of the complaining comes from...

Low elo isn't where his 90%+ pick/ban rate comes from.