Apart from his laning safety, Zed is the most healthy assasssin in the game. How to fix laning?

BEFORE YOU RANDOMLY DOWNVOTE, READ AND CONSIDER.

Why Zed is a Healthy Assassin

The definition of an assassin is a champion that is capable of eliminating priority, squishy targets quickly. They use a combination of bursty damage and mobility spells in order to reach their target and dive the backline. Before, certain assassins were designed to kill you before you had a chance to react.

Thus, they had poor Counterplay. Riot and players alike hate champions with limited or no counterplay. Leblanc, for example. She used to have higher ratios on her Q/R'd Q and a silence. So all she had to do when she got fed (if you were a squishy adc) is dash towards you, Q and R point and click massively damaging nukes that also silence you so you couldn't use any followup abilities to save yourself, like heals or dashes, all the while instantly porting back to a place of safety.

Rengar has gotten gutted numerous times because his instantaneous kill from stealth has always been his problem, while also being his identity. They worked around that, adding indicators and also making part of his kit less reliable, like making his E a skillshot.

Zed, however, doesn't have these problems. His entire combo, is overall much slower and entirely skillshot based. You dodge the skillshots and he can't even damage you. Don't downvote just yet.

Zed's ult used to be instant, and he used to be able to instantly switch back to his ulti shadow so he could combo with complete safety. That got removed. His ulti was made longer (also made him untargetable, so while it gave more notice it also gave him a higher skill ceiling as it lets him use his ult to dodge certain abilities) while also adding a delay to his W instant cast.

But you see, in order for Zed to assassinate you, it takes time. He has to Ult you, then (after a significant delay, allowing you to reposition towards your team or a place of safety) he needs to land all of his abilities in order to bring you into the kill zone of his ulti before he can go back to his ulti shadow. But that entire time, he's in melee range, and you know exactly where he is going to pop up, behind you. You know what's going to happen, he's going to pop up behind you and then attempt to place a W shadow near you, use his E for the slow, then Q to hit you with three Q's, auto attack you, then pop back to his shadow.

In all of that time, if you couldn't take advantage of his extremely telegraphed play, then you deserved to lose the fight. If you have a mobility spell, save it for after lands from his ult, creating distance between you. If you're a shorter range mid laner, take exhaust. Use flash. Dodge his shurikens. Etc. He has counterplay because he telegraphs his intentions and once he's in, he's in for a guaranteed 1 second or so, and you know exactly where that motherfucker is gonna pop up. If he misses his shurikens, he can't kill you. Plain and simple. His ulti will tickle by itself.

I'm not even going to include the most obvious and broken thing about countering Zed: Two items do it completely. One, while it is being removed soon, does it without even immobilizing the person.

The Problem with Zed.

Zed's problem has never been his assassination ability or his safety because his capability to dash is telegraphed, short ranged, and is tied to his offensive abilities. His problem is his lane safety.

How, specifically?

His passive. His passive lets him last hit with incredible ease that is matched by no other champion in the game. Used properly in conjunction with his Q and shadow/E combo lets him push waves extremely quickly early, gaining a level advantage while burning no significant resources for it, because he has energy.

I am okay with him using his shadow to waveclear. The reason being is that it's a very long cooldown early (After its duration, it's an 18 second cooldown at rank 1) and it's tied to his safety. If he uses his shadow to wave clear he's extremely vulnerable to being all inned or ganked, especially since he runs out of energy with this combo extremely often.

The problem with Zed's waveclear is how easily and quickly he pushes waves with his passive executing minions.

Okay, so what's the solution? I suggest the following changes:

• Zed's passive no long executes minions.

• Zed's E now does 25% reduced damage to minions. However, if both Zed and his Shadow E the same minions, the penalty is removed and it deals 25% MORE damage.

This makes it so it's way riskier for him to waveclear. He has to be in melee range of the entire wave, primarily between casters and melee minions. This reinforces that his waveclear with ease should have risk. This does not significantly impact his farming potential after eliminating a target because he can rapidly spam it without worrying about dying, but makes it so that if he wants to waveclear, he has to commit his shadow and is rewarded for doing so.