"B-but Bruisers make Zed balanced! Just take a bruiser mid instead of following the meta!!"
"Bruisers excel in 1v1s with assassins like Zed early. They can deny him the early kills he'd usually get." Yes.
I recognize this.
And it would, and should be, a valid option for surviving him. Except for a few issues.
This argument is like saying Lucian was balanced before because you could go Garen bot and stack armor. "Your team loses a vital carry but you (probably) survive the Lucian damage, right?!" "Just break the meta you Gold scrub, your fault for not taking a tanky champ instead of a carry versus Zed!!"
You're failing to consider 3 of Zed's strengths other than assassination;
- Farming under tower
- Splitpushing
- ROAMING
That is to say, if you zone him and deny him any kills, he can freely cs perfectly under tower (thanks to his passive), buy mobis and roam botlane as much as he wants while still having the burst necessary to destroy either (or both) of your botlaners. Furthermore, it's unlikely to come to this to begin with, because few to none of the game's toplane bruisers have waveclear comparable to Zed's. Therefore he can easily push the wave in against you, giving him plenty of space to roam and be more helpful to the team - especially with his mobiity.
If you're playing a bruiser mid, you don't have this option. You can't super-waveclear to zone them under tower. You especially can't do it vs. Zed because his passive gives him free under-tower cs'ing regardless. You definitely can't shove the lane hard enough against them to try to roam botlane. And even if you do, your range is mediocre compared to his. He can get there faster and gank better.
And even with all of this - if you somehow managed to zone him under tower, and he didn't roam at all, just sat back and farmed up freely with his passive, he would be forced into transitioning into one of the best splitpushers in the game.
Why won't you address this issue? Why does everyone who defends Zed so fervently use the excuse, "he fucks over the entire mage class so your team should've taken a bruiser mid!" You're just giving me another tip to survive the 1v1 while he becomes WAY more helpful to his team! And to top it off, your team now only has one "carry" as well, versus their Zed who, ahem, excells at assassinating one carry. How is "make your team's damage ALL in one squishy ADC, without having an APC for your team" counterplay to an overbearing assassin who can almost ensure that one person dies?
All he has to do now is target the ADC in teamfights/skirmishes and your team suddenly becomes a block of defensive stats with no range or damage. And the most ironic part is that all of that armor you built to survive him becomes a joke versus Last Whisper, Youmuu's, and BoTRK.
I'm serious. Address this, please. Every last one of these points. If you think taking a bruiser mid just to survive Zed is "counterplay", address these points.
Because "make it so your own team has no AP damage and has no waveclear by just playing a bruiser instead!" sounds like a really, really shitty solution past the first 6 levels of the game, but I'm hearing it a lot from the Zed defenders.
"But muh AP toplaners!!"
This is one of the most last-ditch, worn-out arguments in his defense. To begin with, the entire argument that, "The counterplay to Zed is to not face him. Go run to toplane as a mage and send your bruiser mid instead because Zed will slaughter you personally," is ridiculous. Pushing an entire class out of their strongest lane just by existing as ONE CHAMPION is the most blatantly obvious piece of evidence that he's a problem.
But regardless, there's more issues with your argument than that. You say to just send your AP top instead of Mid so that you don't have to be killed by Zed. But why wouldn't the enemy team just send Zed top? Midlane mages is the meta because they thrive the best there. Most mages, when forced toplane, are much, much more vulnerable to ganks, and are generally unable to help the team in teamfights except for once every 5 minutes when teleport is up. (And then they lose the top tower.) Compound this with being farther from blue buff (especially on purple side) combined with the recent mana regen nerfs, and you're not saying "AP tops are viable", you're saying, "a select few AP champs that got bullied out of mid are viable." Vladimir, Lissandra, etc. Now consider this; why is it the meta to send your assassins mid? Because that's where the squishy mages are. You're not going to get nearly as much benefit putting your assassin against tanky toplaners they can't kill as often. Assassin's position is defined almost exclusively by where mages go.
So instead of saying, "JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE A MAGE DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE ENTITLED TO MIDLANE. BREAK THE FUCKING META AND GO TOP, THAT'S THE COUNTERPLAY TO ZED."
Maybe you should consider that Zed can negate that entire solution by, ahem, GOING TOPLANE AGAINST YOU. He does not sacrifice nearly as much to go Top because he's way more mobile, and thus way less vulnerable to ganks; as a mage top, you're even further from the safety of your tower than usual, meaning you're even more susceptible to his assassination as well as to being ganked; and to top it all off, Zed is already one of the best splitpushers in the game, so chilling up there, bursting you to death if you try to CS, then splitpushing and 1v1'ing anyone who tries to stop him sounds like a paradise for anyone playing Zed.
Just as easily as you can 'break the meta' by going a mage top, so can any Zed player. Except he's given even more of an advantage there against mages.
"Run away from Zed and hope he isn't the person you have to face in lane," is not counterplay.
until Zed is nerfed."
