Boards›Gameplay

@Meddler Your comment on Zed, would greatly appreciate a reply Best Zed NA

Laceration·8/30/2018, 1:07:21 AM·73 votes·15,293 views

In your recent thoughts for 08-29 you said this: "While it would be cool to see Zed we don't have the room to buff him in regular play"

Zed's Arguably the most difficult assassin to play in master/challenger+ and here's why; Weak lane-phase, very low kill pressure on seekers rush + barrier. Poke champion pre-6 in a meta where control mages start with more sustain than your poke will ever do. Severely gated by W cd in the early-game, doesn't have a passive unless you are winning lane. R snap-back ruining his late-game, his late game being ruined by the Reaping mechanic for the sake of making him a more niche pick(which btw the only ad mids we have are Zed and Talon where you turned talon into a roamer therefor made them different), passive being broken for low elo by making it easier to kill without landing Q at the same time easier for them to farm, and useless for high since at high elo understand they can out-trade a zed really hard early-game and out-push him if they get low to recall and get all their hp/pots back meaning Zed never procs his passive on his opponent early unless they messed up badly somewhere.

Since Zed is clearly unfun to face in lower elo and unfun to play because of how weak he is at high elo, I think Zed could use a small update like the one you recently did to Fizz.

First of all his passive is a lot of burst you do not see which makes it feel like dusk-blade, It may not be overpowered but It could be frustrating to play against. Why don't you change the passive to offer either his old %AD back which would tone down his snowballing and fix how awful he feels late-game, or make it move-speed while unseen based on a % of your Bonus AD, basically what this would grant depending on the numbers would be very low early-game meaning he would not take away from Talon's Identify, but late-game help him get flanks off while allowing for 6 items more easily, but the catch is good wards will slow him right down and he also wont be getting the passive in fights. I'm pretty much saying Zed hasn't been a lane-bully since season 4 and shouldn't be, so rather being the best LATE game assassin would make a lot more sense as well as making him that niche pick when you want a AD midlaner but also want to scale with an adc on your team.

Secondly, Okay, so he just lost a huge portion of his burst where do we move it? The answer is actually by buffing the Q ad ratio by 0.1 and the e ratio by 0.05. These are low however can easily be changed and balanced accordingly. Zed will be even more reliant on landing Q's. Early game he will have less burst at 6 without the old passive however it scales better because we want him to be that late-game assassin.

Thirdly, W cooldown could probably still use a buff by 4 seconds as he will now have less opportunity without the passive to W swap in early for the kill.

Last and most importantly, The snap-back delay is at the very least way too high. Leblanc has 0.2 snap-back delay on her basic mobility spell which is way lower cooldown than zed's ult. Ever since the snap-back delay was added it really cutdown Zeds outplay potential for the sake of making it easier to stop his lvl6. That's fair that his lvl 6 was too hard to stop, but is his lvl 16 that hard? Late-game is grouping stage and Zed really struggles to do anything beside w e q most of the time because there's too long of a window for the enemies to KILL let alone have a big enough window to cc you. They have 0.75 sec to react to the Zed R + the amount of time you spent going in. The snap-back should scale down with each point being gone at level 16. I don't think that will be an issue and if it does i'd at-least settle for 0.2

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be bias at all towards Zed, I'm just acknowledging he's not balanceable in his current state. I'm looking for ways to power him down early and power him up later because I get riot wants assassins to be a strong early class that fall off later, but Zed cannot be strong early or else he's broken so update his kit to be more fair for use zed players who picked up the champ because we loved how he felt outplay wise, but also more fair for his opponents who struggle against him in lane.

one last thing: Bortk Zed killed slower but felt nicer to play, there's also the possibility of making bortk his rush item again which means since he'll have to stay in range of your for almost the entire mark to 100-0 having snapback is pointless

138 Comments

WalkingInACircle8/30/2018, 3:28:53 AM40 votes

very low kill pressure on seekers rush + barrier.

Wow really? A player who tailors their entire build to stopping you from killing them has a decent chance of doing so? What a weak laning phase.

This is why. You Zed mains really believe you're entitled to free kills.

Ahris8/30/2018, 5:42:39 AM39 votes

Saying that zed has a weak laning phase is ridiculous. Once he reaches 6, he will most likely be able to kill any midlaner and even then, his Q W combo with electrocute does crazy amount of damage

RISE Shlack1238/30/2018, 2:09:34 AM29 votes

But if they buff him, he does rampage through solo queue. And with all the upfront dmg in the game right now, buffing Zed even in the slightest way would be highly unpopular. And with the state of League as bad as it is right now, Riot can ill afford a bad PR stunt.

Plus Zed doesn't need buffs until the items he uses are balanced.

Shablagoo8/30/2018, 3:40:34 AM13 votes

Someone asking for assassin buffs on the boards? INSANE, you are bold man. I am sorry to say this but no matter how well you word it, or how much logic you put into your post, people will say zed shouldnt be buffed. Because people still believe that only assassins do burst dmg in the game, and they also believe zed is killing people with a w,e,q in high elo nor do they ever equate it to them feeding him or him being ahead to even think of doing that. They will insist, even though you've played the champion for numerous amounts of hours, that they know your main champion more then you do. And because they faced a really good Zed and lost they believe that even though it might not just be that they lost to a better player, that its the champion. We all do this man dont blame them.

BLIGHTBRINGER8/30/2018, 9:11:41 AM10 votes

Zed will never have a bad laning phase due to his passive which makes last hiting easy.

To be honest they can buff Zed how ever they want, but for the love of god can we please make it so that his basic attacks don't stack/add on to the deathmark proc.

I hate that even if a Zed misses majority of his abilities, he can still kill me/chunk a lot of my health from the Deathmark damage where he just Auto Attacked me until I am low enough.

Emo Twink8/30/2018, 4:59:01 AM10 votes

I despise Zed so much, this would give more counterplay to the burst, I'd like this

SIRROTH8/30/2018, 2:15:58 AM10 votes

the punani slayer approves of this.

Zed2g8/30/2018, 7:21:31 AM10 votes

what i dont understand is why people dont complain about the other assassins that were/are much more broken than zed. for example talon, his dps/roam potential/scaling is much better than zeds yet has such a lower ban rate.

Sexy Jack Rabbit8/30/2018, 11:15:49 AM10 votes

Since Zed is clearly unfun to face in lower elo

Doesn't he have like a 32% banrate in Diamond+?

If he's not strong like you claim, then clearly his banrate is based off of how unpleasant he is too fight right?

NineTailedMystic8/30/2018, 3:46:57 AM9 votes

I don't think any snap back ability should have a delay lower than the average cast time for a CC which is .25 IIRC.

ŹÉÐ8/30/2018, 8:52:46 AM8 votes

most people here pretty much sound like silver surfers with the rito balance team, i stopped playing this game (ranked) this season because of how bad it feels to play zed, (against actual competent players, not most of the people complaining about this post obv lol). i agree not just zed needs to change, but many things about how passivity is enabled in this game, everyone would have an insanely nice winrate if they all just picked basic tanks and pressed r at level 6. lol this is the game we play now xd

Packun Flower8/30/2018, 2:52:01 AM8 votes

As mentioned the problem is that Zed is just far to strong in SoloQ and lower Elo, he's got a pretty high ban rate simply because of what he offers. And though I do believe Zed is strong (In my elo anyway) the falt isin't totally on him its on all assassins, however, a big portion of this problem is just simply damage.

Damage right now is out of control for everyone in every class in every lane just everything., every champion can do crazy amounts of damage and 100-0 any other champions. mages, assassins, supports, ADC's, it all comes down to damage. Changing Zed in anyway with a buff of any kind would just mean adding more damage and right now riot cannot afford to do that. And I know its ironic that I say this and they just buffed Yi and Rengar I know, but at some point, they are going to have to address Damage.

What league is experiencing right now is called a Meta Collapse not a Meta Change or a Meta Shift. Riot's changes to damage have been so frequent, so big that damage is now out of total and utter control and the entire meta, the entire game revolves around which champs and team can beef out the most damage. Its a meta that Riot had hoped t avoid, a Meta where he who throws the first punch wins. This Meta is a meta no MOBA wants to experience, its frustrating, its unfun, no one wants to be a par tf it and it causes the Meta to collapse and turn into a sess pool where only one stat matters.

Right now Riot has to repair this collapse and they have to do it fast. The core change they need to make is not to the game but to the balance team, even now they continue to add damage to the game and though it sounds mean they really need to be stopped, someone in that company has to step in and say enough is enough, because if a Meta collapse lasts to long then people stop playing, riot had already admitted player base numbers are down and we are already experiencing it.

Once the out of control balance team is removed from the factor THEN riot can sit down and begin to repair the devastation they have caused to the game and the meta. They would have to start with damage, damage reduction across runes first then items, then followed by kits and champions. Once the damage is under control and not drowning out other stats the Meta can start to repair itself, one that happens THEN Riot can look into buffing champions who need it.

As of right now, the last thing this game needs is more damage, even to weak unpopular character, we need to fix the meta collapse first before any big buffs should happen again.

Shad0wStyle8/31/2018, 1:08:07 AM6 votes

Why are silvers getting upovted here talking about laningphase ?XD I mean every assassin is a low Elo stomper in the right hands, and if u still struggle vs zed rn last patches , just type in yt how to lane against him, a lot of high Elo players actually abuse zed lanes to make him pretty useless might be worth a shot to watch them before commenting also I get that the lategadme shadow ult dusk storm proc is pretty disgusting for adcs rn xd not gonna lie. But why should we have an assassin that is abuseable early and kinda disgusting lategame? Doesn't make sense to me*[sg-ahri-1]*

haahhahaha9/2/2018, 4:37:57 AM5 votes

why are silver/gold/plat players trying to lecture a challenger zed one trick about zed?

TeCoolMage8/30/2018, 7:10:44 AM5 votes

botrk rush zed oh my god the memories

imo zed was such a healthy assassin when that was the go to

I agree that a big amount of Zed's problem with high elo vs low elo is his passive being abused, but I also think that it's because he has lots of undodgeable damage in ignite - autos(+duskblade) and electrocute (with R auto ignite).

But what if instead of replacing it entirely they buffed his passive's numbers (health threshold, damage, etc) but autoing without proccing passive puts it on cooldown (either a flat amount, or until he leaves vision). Nerf base AD and other forms of damage that can't be dodged or are harder to dodge.

  • If he autos for free duskblade damage without hitting anything, he loses his passive
  • With the higher threshold, his enemies even in high elo will either have to learn to play well vs. him or just lose by constantly backing the moment they take any decent amount of damage
  • However, Zed will either farm with abilities and put them on cooldown, or with his autos and put his passive on cooldown. So unless he gives up lane priority and only last hits, plays very well and hits both the enemy and the wave with abilities, or waits for a very long time, he can't 100-0 in a single combo out of nowhere as he'll likely have something down or will have telegraphed it a LOT. Low elo zeds will probably be completely unable to manage their passive correctly
Nyarlathοtep8/30/2018, 7:41:20 AM5 votes

The snap-back delay is at the very least way too high.

Do even people understand why he has a delay? Like seriously now at this point its becoming annoying seeing people complain. The delay exists SO YOU CAN PUNISH HIM. God FKING DAMNT. How the fk do you expect me to retaliate if he retreats?

The Chillin8/31/2018, 5:58:17 AM4 votes

Just a TLDR; for silver players downvoting and shitposting here. He is asking for damage to be moved from passive to q and e, and fixing zeds w cd, as it is about double every other assassin's mobility tool cooldown right now. (this would be a buff, but its so absurdly long right now it makes him unviable at higher elos)