Diamond Zed Main Talking About Direction Of Zed After QSS Nerf

So for everyone that hasnt seen the patch 6.9 notes, QSS no longer removes negative debuffs (aka zed's deathmark and fiora's grand challenge). Alot of people are talking about op zed is gonna be and i can definetly see why.

Right now if you're vs a fed zed its easy to put 1300 gold into a qss and this will negate alot of zeds damage. I think that was a pretty unfair, being 10-0 and having 2 qss and 1 zhons on the other team to pretty much bring you on par with everyone else in the game despite having a large gold lead.

Also i think zed should be able to 1v1 an adc at any point of the game unless there is a major gold discrepancy. With qss most late game adcs could easily beat a zed 1v1 with the amount of lifesteal and attack speed they have despite how bad their positioning was. I think with qss removed adc's will be much more reliant on their support being near them for cc and exhaust.

Zhonyas in my opinion is still a good option for ap midlaners but is fairly weak in its current state, will have to see the new zhonyas from pbe.

I think even with qss being nerfed zed still has many flaws such as;

1. Needing an ap top/jungle or else being faced with 2-3 armor stacking champions
2. Single target damage in team fights
3. Exhaust still negating a lot of his damage. ( im assuming qss doesnt remove exhaust debuff now either)

So going forward i think riot has to do either 1 of 2 things to put zed in a healthy state.

1. Zed is a snowballing midlaner who thrives early - mid game and turns in to a strong split pusher late game. First change riot could implement is making QSS only remove cc, BUT mercurials would still negate deaths mark/grand challenge. Atleast this way people are forced to actually choose between a strong adc item (I.E, PD, etc.) or the survive ability of mercurials. QSS was to easy to obtain then continue on your path and its extremely frustrating as zed when you are strong to be countered by a 1300 gold item.

2. Second thing and more likely thing they will do is nerf zed. I think this is the better direction to go but i think it needs to be done properly. Right now zeds strength is his w e q combo. They recently nerfed his w cooldown (22 seconds lvl 1 ) which i thought was the wrong way to go, this was a huge nerf considering you rank the ability up last. And takes alot of away from his lane presence. I think they should revert the change to his w (originally 18 seconds) and proceed to attack his combo damage. They could also just buff it a bit to say 20 seconds.

I think they need to nerf the q damage when it goes through minions, right now you dont need to land a clean combo for it to do significant dmg, they can touch his normal q damage slightly but i think it should still be rewarding to land a clean combo. In the end i think zed should be able to use his combo more often but lose out on some of the damage that it provides. His e is another think that could be changed, changing the dmg so it does less if only 1 e hits you but more if you are hit by 2-3.

Now with his ult damage i think you can nerf it slightly as well, considering you can now effectively build duskblade without it being qssed and rendering it a useless item on him. Zed is a 1v1 assassin and should be able to win 1v1's vs squishy champs.

Just my opinions on what should happen to zed over the next few patches.