I still feel like Fizz is lacking.

I initially thought that having higher upfront damage than the pre rework would be a good change but now that his W DoT is gone I'm left in alot of situations where he just doesn't have finishing power.

The main issue i'm having though is that I'm not sure if I'm doing things wrong or if my assumptions are correct. I've definitely felt like he's way weaker in more matchups now and way more inconsistent.

Used to with fizz, he had a great early game, a decent mid game, and an average late game. This was because his DoT damage made for great trades early (outside of AD champions who would out trade through auto's), you had pick power mid game whilst your opponents still had little in the way of defensive power or counters, and late game was an issue as they started grouping which almost completely destroyed your chances of getting to the carries without player error or some really situational circumstances.

Now his early game is average, mid game is decent, and his late game is roughly the same.

His early game no longer has his strong DoT to give him surprising kill pressure, his mid game is decent as he does have a higher burst output with max range Shark and W, but his late game suffers as it's all too common for even squishy champions to survive full combo's in the current meta and once he blows his rotation there's nothing left for him to use.

As utility and defensive stats became more readily available as the meta developed into what it currently is, it became next to impossible to do things late game. Worst examples of this were games where the entire enemy team built MR, leaving only the ADC in a viably killable state, and then proceeded to meat wall for said ADC. Unlike Zed or leblance which riot has said to be their ideal assassin kits, fizz can't simply escape a fight after going all in because his kit just doesn't allow it. His Q is a unit targeted dash, and his E is a short range dash. It leaves him untargetable, but that's not really enough in most cases.

Issue with using E is that is your second primary damage source. You either use it to attempt to one shot, or you use it to attempt escape. Either way once it's down your left to get CC locked and killed, or outright counter bursted.

I can't say I dislike the entire kit of his current version but If I'm not giving the choice to dip in and out of fights like Leblanc, or beable to bypass an entire team to go for a single target then blink back out if needed like zed, I'd atleast prefer 1 thing, if I land an ultimate on a target that my champion is designed to kill then I should atleast have the capability to kill them regardless of the amount of heals, and shields piled on. If that sounds too unbalanced then reworking the Q, and finally giving him a real passive would also suffice.

Since from what I seem to understand about champion balance is that the design teams give a champion an allotted amount of power then basically decide where to place it. If a champions W is exceptionally strong then the rest of the abilities have to be average or below average to compensate.

Under the assumption that what I'm saying isn't complete non sense and I actually am correct in thinking that fizz needs some tuning, I'll suggest this:

Remove the damage from fizz's E all together. Make it a pure utility ability like you did with talon's E.

Remove the DoT effect from his W, it's too weak to matter and can be converted to something better. The W mark would just stack by itself rather than being tied to the DoT.

Pile on damage to his W. The W stays the same but does MUCH more damage. Simple change.

Take out the range scaling and put it to a flat amount of damage equal to the "Chomper" tier damage.

Finally change his passive his old W passive but tuned up better. Only an Empowered W and the damage from Chum the Waters can activate it, however, by auto attacking target you can continue to refresh the passive timer. The ability would also have No base damage, instead it'd be purely AP reliant.

Example: 100 AP grants 3% increased missing HP damage, so 200 AP gives 6% of the targets missing HP, ect. To keep it strong the AP scaling would increase by level so 100 AP grants 3% at level 1, 4% at level 9, and 5% at level 16. Just examples.