I love that you nerfed Zoe, I hate how you did it

Now, now, please put down your pitchforks, I know, I've been on the receiving end of a fog of war oneshot. It's not fun suddenly staring at a grey screen. I'll also admit I played a bit of Zoe because she just feels fun to play, something I missed in this era of control mages, but I digress. I feel like the nerfs in 8.4 are heading in the wrong direction. I'll try to explain why.

So let's address the infamous NALCS oneshot. Many people claimed a 4 item + NLR baron buffed Zoe shouldn't be able to oneshot an ADC who has a QSS. Zoe's AP in the clip is around 700 give or take (not sure what runes Febiven had for secondary) with 36magic pen. A level 17 Tristana has 38 MR, so 68 total with QSS. Void staff cuts that to 41, and the flat pen cuts it to 5. So at this point every mage with Zoe's items would be dealing almost true damage to a Tristana with QSS.

Zoe by design SHOULD be able to one shot someone in that scenario, otherwise you'd have no reason to play her over any other long rage mage ( Xerath ). The problem is the fact that she can spam QRQ on a 4 second cooldown, over and over and over until one of them hits.

I think there're 2 ways to fix this without gutting her damage and putting her in the state she currently is, where you can't even 70% a carry with no MR after landing E and a max range Q.

Make her Q similar to Fiora's. Long CD if it misses, refund a percentage if it hits, say 60-70%. Something like 25 seconds late game means even at 40% cdr (which she rarely gets in her build) would still put her at 15 seconds if she goes for a hail mary and misses, which would give the other team a window of opportunity to engage on her. If it hits, it's down to 4.5 seconds, much like live. This way you force her to play around her team, or land her bubble for a guaranteed hit, without killing her team fight ability when she gets going. This also slows down her early game waveclear a bit, meaning you could revert the 8.4 Q-Passive nerf.

The second option is to shift more of her Q power onto her E. Bubbles are harder to hit and have a longer cooldown. Hell you could even increase it even more. Her E already amps the damage of other abilities/attacks, but you could make it so it specifically amps only her Q damage as an extra, while lowering the numbers on the Q. So an 8.3 patch QRQ hit at max range would be the same as an adjusted E + QRQ at max range after amplifying the damage. This way you make blocking an even bigger priority for the enemy team, and make it so that it won't hurt them as much for doing it.

The thing that feels like the absolute worst about 8.4 Zoe is the removal of the More Sparkles! from all Q targets. I get that she had way too easy of a time waveclearing, but it just feels so clunky leaving adjacent targets at awkward hp numbers. If you wanted to stop the waveclear into roam situation, making her Q behave like fiora would slow her down like I said, or you could make her Q deal less damage to minions, but leave the rest of the functionality as it was in 8.3. Damage nerfs always feel better than functionality nerfs. Those only serve to make the champion feel clunky. Example 4 seconds added to Kat's shunpo. I would have honestly preferred it did no damage, but kept the old cooldown. But I digress.

So yeah, it's fun to hate on Zoe, it's justified for the most part, and she indeed needed nerfs. But what we got in 8.4 is really killing the soul of the champion.