What do you guys think about Zoe? what do you think needs to be changed?

AgeOfTheMage·Jan 27, 2018·4 votes·378 views

I think she would be fine if you made her ult stop halfway through when hard cc'd (rooted, stunned, snared, etc.) it would make her much more fun to fight against.

7 Comments

greekvandaLJan 27, 20184 votes

Gut her dmg. Make her ulti cancel if she get's cc'd. boom let her rot afterwards cause she is reaching Kalista levels of toxic

Dead flag bluesJan 27, 20182 votes

As a Zoe player :

I'm for your idea
Making her E cc duration scaling with rank
Increasing her early game Q mana cost
Making her W into her true passive with a cooldown (120 from level 1 decreasing to 30 at level 18 ?), but still keeping the empowered AA damage obviously, and also removing the drops from minions
Changing her W into a new spell, maybe an utility one, I don't have an idea yet (maybe marking an enemy, the mark will look the same as the one minions get when they have an active to drop, if the mark is still here upon death, this enemy will drop a random active he owns and directly to Zoe, she won't have to pick it up and it will replace her W until she uses it, from sums to an active item with a 10 cd at all ranks)

Having a permanent advantage of getting enemies sums / active is just broken imo (same as looting tp by level 5 from minions), she's almost ungankable thanks to her E early game, she can kill caster minions by level 4 each time they spawn and still being able to harass enemies. It will also make her more useful during teamfights and more interactive, not staying out of range and spamming E until it hits someone, whoever it is and then delete him with Q (I'm fine with her damage, I'm just a bit reluctant with this Xerath-like playstyle since she's supposed to be a burst mage)

And it would also make her a real "spell thief", not a crazy RNG looter

HethaleanJan 27, 20181 votes

Personally, I like the R always going back to where she started. I think she has other places in her kit (like her RNG subgame) that could be looked at before I'd do something to her ult.

ShahamutJan 27, 20181 votes

Her E is really the only problem:

Give it a longer cooldown, or get rid of its cooldown reduction effect for hitting a champion, and have the sleep duration scale with rank. More than 2 seconds at rank 1. Yuck.

Aside from that thing being spammed late game, I have no problems with her.

Penta HexJan 27, 20181 votes

She is good but bad at the same time. Her damsge way to high but way to conditional. Many times when I do good as zoe it's just because i managed to hit a e and then do a ult combo. When I do bad it's becuase I don't hit e. It's cancer for both sides because if I'm not killing people as zoe what am I doing. I know I'm bronze 1 but as a m7 zoe main in ranked I can say that in her current state she will never be balanced because her counter play is around other players getting hit by e with no body block or minions or not. She has no real agency and that's the problem. At least vegiar can walk up and e creating some pressure and then combo. Zoe has to play around so many conditions so it's just kind or random when she gets onesjots or not. Most of the game I am hoping my e will land so I can do damsge and stop being a bad pick for my team. It's just bad design almost. I just q the wave and try to e enemy. It's is not good champ design and the only real couterplay is body blocking and items and wards. It feels awful to play her when the enemy team has a brain.

Dope SoloJan 27, 20181 votes

In general principle, range/damage should be balanced against availability off cooldown/mana cost. There's your fing problem right there. ITS RIGHT THERE!

Teridax68Jan 27, 20181 votes

While Zoe's ult may not be my own personal biggest issue with her, I agree with the change proposed in the thread OP, as I generally dislike the fact that many gapclosers eat up hard CC without getting affected by it. Now that Ryze's own delayed blink is fully interrupted by all kinds of hard CC, I think the same should apply to Zoe's ult, which is basically two blinks with some downtime in-between. The ability's meant to put her at a little more risk, so actually punishing her for getting caught could be a good start towards achieving that goal.

As for my thoughts on Zoe, I'll try with a bulletpoint list, starting with what I like about her (because there are in fact some things to like):

What I like about Zoe:

The fact that she can one-shot people. While the current implementation isn't great, I do think it could be okay for some champions to one-shot others, provided there were sufficient gameplay behind it. With Zoe in particular, I think her fantasy comes down to warping reality in tricky, unpredictable ways so that, once the stars align in her favor, she can make her enemies... pop.
Her versatility. Again, it's not implemented in the best way right now, imo, but I like the idea of a champion having a bag of tricks and being able to pull off some weird shit to do something unexpected.

What I dislike about Zoe:

It's too easy for her to punish people for small mistakes. The biggest issue for me is her E + Q combo: because her E has many different ways it can hit, even if it misses, it's not difficult for an enemy to step into it, and since the ability has hard CC, it completely prevents them from fighting back as Zoe lines up the perfect shot (which, incidentally, can one-shot them). Zoe's Q deals AoE damage, so minions or other champions can't always block the effect well, and even just her E deals massive damage on its own. Effectively, getting hit by just one, not excessively difficult ability is enough to get a champion killed with her around, or at least significantly chunked.
It's too difficult to punish Zoe for even large mistakes. In addition to long spell ranges, a relatively safe way of extending them via her ult, plus random utility, Zoe has pretty short cooldowns overall, making it easy for her to stay out of harm's way for most of a fight, and stall when she's in real danger, sometimes even kill a target outright with another Q as they're attacking her at melee range. Because of this, it feels like there's a certain hypocrisy to her design: somehow, it's justified for her to punish enemies massively hard for small mistakes, but it's also okay for her to have tons of options to win even when she makes multiple severe errors in judgment. As a result, she doesn't feel fair to play against.
Her RNG. As much as that post on RNG tried to excuse her own mechanics (and in general I don't think it did a particularly good job of justifying any of the RNG it discussed), the end result is that Zoe still gets a huge variance in power based on a factor entirely separate from good play. There's some leeway when it comes to making creative use of certain effects, but if Zoe gets an early Teleport or Redemption, it just holds far too much sway over a game. If the gameplay to that effect is really to encourage creative use of telegraphed abilities, then her W needs to truly be used creatively, and it needs to be telegraphed in such a way that the players affected by it can be made properly aware of it, beyond just constantly looking at Zoe to see what she's gonna pick up next. RNG items and summoner spells, in the end, don't seem like such a great idea to me in practice.
Her EQ combo. I've mentioned it before, but I really think that this combo is fundamentally unhealthy to the game, and should not exist. It's already frustrating when a burst mage can kill a champion with a combo while they're still hard-CCed by one of their abilities (e.g. Syndra), but Zoe takes that up to eleven by being designed to one-shot, while also having a stun on her kit. As other players have brought up, Nidalee has no crowd control at all, and her own spear, which shares the same distance-to-damage mechanic as Zoe's Q, was already frustrating enough on its own when her enemies could move at will, so having another champion essentially do the same thing, only with an extra artillery-range stun thrown into the mix, doesn't feel right. In the end, I think Zoe can be a champion capable of one-shotting targets, and a champion capable of locking targets in place, but I don't think she can ever do both at the same time and still be healthy.

What I'd change on her:

Make her Q visible even through Fog of War. Generally, one effect I think needs to be applied to any sort of artillery-ranged nuke is that they should always be telegraphed enough, so as to not simply kill people from out of vision range (as was the main issue with Nidalee's nuclear-tipped spears). Thematically, there's justification for this in that her Paddle Star is, well... a star, and therefore a ball of incandescent light, and on the gameplay side it should give her opponents a more realistic window of reaction if she strikes from out of vision.
Make her Q single-target. If the counterplay to the ability is that it can be body-blocked by front liners, then the last thing it should be able to do is strike people through them. In general, the ability is forgiving enough due to its low cooldown, so it does not need a mechanic to make it easier when it cuts into its interactivity. If Zoe's waveclear suffers as a result (and it likely would), and she's meant to have better waveclear, then allowing her passive to kill multiple minions at a time could offer some compensation.
Rework her W entirely, and swap it with her current ult. To start, Portal Jump is essentially a basic ability already, and Spell Thief is her "real" ult, so that would already make things a little clearer. Second, while stealing item actives and summoner spells may still have worth, their current mode of RNG distribution simply isn't healthy, and needs to change. If those random actives were instead to spawn like Bard's chimes on the map, for example, and were both far away from Zoe's current location and visible to all, including on the minimap, that would add significantly more interaction to the mechanic, and because it would be on her ult slot, it would also put it on the same bar as other powerful ults. Even with this, however, some item effects would still likely require a change to their scaling, so that they don't have ridiculous bases early on.
Change her E stun to a stasis effect, and add a very short "wake-up" time after, during which the target remains untargetable to Zoe. This might seem a little severe, but this I think is the only way to give Zoe hard CC on a kit that can one-shot, and still make her interactive. Effectively, Zoe would be able to pin a target down, and thereby still set them up for herself and her team, but she would only be able to one-shot them while they'd be able to move.
Buff her with the specific intent of making her easier to pick up, though just as difficult to master. While this may not go down well with everyone, I think every champion deserves to be strong as long as they are healthy. If the above suggestions make Zoe healthy, I think she deserves to have a strong performance even outside of pro play. One of her less serious issues right now is that she has a bit of a steep skill floor, which is why her win rate for beginners is actually quite low, and her general win rate took some time to get to around 50% (and even then, that's likely more due to her still being a little too strong). Lowering her skill floor, but not her skill ceiling, would make her easier to balance in the future, as her performance would be more equalized at lower-level and pro play.