There's a lot of Zoe haters for many reasons. The design of the character is one of them, same people that hate animated things, new champions or loli in general. Fighting her means she will make fun of you the whole game too, adding to the salt once she kills you. Her walking has a no fks given attitude, same as Annie. She would hit people and kill them while they felt safe and in their comfort zone. I see so many mistakes people make that zoe exploits and people get tilted by it. Recall at distance where q can hit even if they behind tower, they having no vision followed by getting hit by e, underestimating e range near walls, staying still, walking toward you in a straight line to get hit by a bubble, stacking 5 people in 1 tower defending and zoe catches 1 because not enough room for everyone to avoid it. Zoe is a very punishing champion that forces the enemies to play better and be alert, which really bothers a lot people.
Now for Riot. Her kit is also very hard to change, considering she only really has 2 damage skills. A nerf in Q or E just kills the champion, W is unreliable and can't be considered a damage skill. W right now is more of a gimmick to escape ganks which was one of her weakness before and can be used to outplay. Now you could just spam w if lot's spells were around, while moving at the speed of sound. Before 8.4 she had no real escapes, she caught people and punish their mistakes hard or gets put down if your in a bad position. They made w an escape tool removing her main weakness, and nerfed everything else abysmal levels, removing her damage and waveclear. I think the nerf to E and TP was alright and they could've stopped there, oppressive but balanced. If they really wanted, just a slight nerf to q between patches would've been alright, without the passive removal. To make it that if your squishy your screwed, but if your tanky or build spirit you will be fine. Now another issue was created by riot balance team , we can't give her much damage because now she can't be ganked anymore which was her main weakness before, we can't let her stay like this because she's the worst champion in the game. Their plan is to give her the waveclear back, reducing q damage by removing passive, giving her auto attack range increase, a slight rng w damage boost which we already know is now a fun escape tool so who cares. Which is basically means that the balanced team is like, we have no clue what we are doing. Lets just throw random shit at zoe and see what sticks. Increasing her winrate by not increasing damage, but by reworking how she will plays. Instead of a burst mage, she will be a safe/poke mage, low risk, low reward thing. Zoe's main issue with winrate being low is the lack of team utility, her cc goes away upon contact which is great for picking isolated targets. Very bad for when there's lots of things going on. I really hope it doesn't happen, but in the future Riot might end up changing her kit w,e,r, removing her uniqueness and fun playstyle.
