Malzahar's sick plays according to Riot

Agreed. If you could only combo with malz, then you weren't getting out of gold at best.

I once managed to 2v1 bot lane as AD malz, and then get a triple kill off of a 3 man dive w/ their jungler.

It was a while ago, so i don't remember exactly how it went down, but basically I summoned a voidlings, put it on the jungler with E, Silenced the other two. W to get more passive stack & damage, E again to finish off the jungler, Q again on one of the two left, E jumped, which i then use my ult on the one being targeted by tower, giving me 2 voidlings (one of which was at least stage 2), killing them in a second w/ tower damage, then finishing off the last one with E and 2 buffed voidlings.

Mind you, this was due to a 2 level advantage and lack of coordination on their part, as the jungler was already fleeing by the time the other two managed to engage.

{quoted}

The big difference between now and then is before the rework you didn't have that stupid passive shield. Most of the times you actually needed to hit your Q or teamwork with a champ with cc in order to kill. You would also blow your entire kit and be a sitting duck yourself. A lot of times you would sacrifice yourself and needed very good positioning.

Now you press R, deal zero damage, opponents can't really retaliate because of your shield and your allies need to clean up. Other than that he brings a bit of utility with his Q for silence and vision and a few voidlings to tank some drake damage. He is worse than Nunu mid.

I now build protobelt with crystal sceptre on malz. i have a replay of me engaging a gragas totally ignoring his barrels with my barrels and catching him off guard and forcing a 5v2 fight. Also the minimal requirements of playing malz now is two frontilnes. you desperately need TIME to get those 5 crabs out and make a purple tsunami wave of death

...a mage which deals damage ramping up overtime for the ultimate? Well at text he sounds like syndra but sadly he isnt THAT strong. sadly