A comprehensive approach to Zoé : Why is she so unfun to play against ?

Hello everyone, ! I'm writing this to talk about , because I think her state is so annoying that it makes me, as a player, have to talk about it. As many of you, I don't really like Zoé's current state, so I tried to gather some ideas I found on the boards and reddit and added mines to (try to) find possible solutions for her with you guys hopefully. We can do nothing on our own, but if we are a significant number talking about this, we can maybe change things a bit. Some pictures needed to understand my explanations down below.

TL;DR : Zoé's too oppressive with her E with such a low cooldown and high damage, while her W RNG feels like it decides the future of the laning phase

First of all, let's look at the facts :

• 1st banrate since she is out (nothing new to this I think, almost every new champ goes through this) but, she's almost ban in every single game, currently at a 90% banrate. Which is problematic for those who want to play her anywhere else than blind mode.

• A not so good winrate compared to her banrate, about 49%^1 which is at first sight a bit surprising (without looking at her abilities). I mean, why would you ban a champ which has a negative/average ratio ? Because playing against it is annoying ( & more of a meme there but it's for the example ). That's where her kit come in :

• Q : Base damage is still scaling through the game even when Q reached level 5, but are not highlighted in white, while other abilities scaling over champion level are (think about every Rengar Empowered abilities, all their base damage is in white, see the pictures linked above). Besides, we have no clue what the max range for her Q to reach max damage is (someone probably tested it but I didn't find it.). To synthesize, how Zoé's Q damage works and its tooltip is a bit messy (nothing wrong here, just some improvements to do maybe).

• W : (I'll talk about the RNG/Drops part later, and only consider the range/cooldown for now) So her W shows a range when hovering it (see pictures linked above), but I'm pretty sure it has no meaning. I mean, you already picked up a summoner spell after TP-ing to top or bot, even if it wasn't in your range when it dropped, right (again, correct me if I'm wrong) ? Also summoner spell bubbles give you some kind of vision, and you know when they disappear but not when they will disappear, unless you can count every timer in your head while still playing (which I don't doubt some of you could, but in a general way there are already many timers you need to remember to not have another one).

• E : Medium/Long range CC skillshot with built-in CDR and true Damage. I like the reward mentality : "you do a good play, you're rewarded, you don't, deal with it". Her E isn't based on that. You miss (intentionally or not) and it leaves an even bigger area where you can't walk unless you're willing to be hard CC'ed resulting in an instant death for most squishies, and a nice burst of damage for the rest. About the cooldown : 16s at lvl 1, 14s at lvl 5. if you take a similar ability (taking away the damage, the wall range and the slow), let's say Elise E (in human form). Elise E goes from a 1.6s stun (which is already pretty long) at lvl 1 to a 2s stun at lvl 5. Zoé E stays at 2s no matter the lvl, and cancels upon damage. It's still very frustrating, why would a high burst mage would CC you for so long (especially when the CC comes from half the river away) ? Zoé (in fact any champ that is near you while you're asleep) has 2 choices, either let you sleep, resulting in a full 2s stun, either (s)he decides to attack, resulting in death/high damages, but you're still CC'ed until you die/take the damages so you can't dodge, just like a Elise E would do, even though you can't create a CC chain correctly if any damage break the CC. Besides, when you hit Zoé's E, it reduces its own cooldown. I can understand that, it's a good play : you hit -> you're rewarded. The CDR goes from 10% to 30% at lvl 5 (so 14.4s if you hit at level 1, 9.8s if you hit at lvl 5). So we end up with a similar (only 0.2s difference) cooldown on Zoé E if she hits it at lvl 5 and Elise E at lvl 5. If you consider the (true) damage, the range and the trap (E built-in CDR comes in when any champs fall asleep, not on E hit, so the trap can still proc the CDR), you have a way better ability on Zoé's side. I know comparing ability to ability is nonsense (Thresh Ult and Veigar Stun, I know..), it's just to give an idea of what's wrong or right (I'm still a regular dude giving my opinion, don't take anything I said for the absolute truth, it IS NOT and I insist on that to have a constructive discussion with you guys below, so maybe riot will do something about it).

About the things I already talked about, here are some ideas :

• Q Messy tooltip : Give us a range in unit (or any other reliable information) until Q will reach it's maximum damage and display the Q base damage as following : "*Base minimum damage from upgrading the ability*+*Base minimum damage from Zoé's lvl* to *Base Maximum damage from upgrading the ability*+*Base Maximum damage from Zoé's lvl* for a total of ---(+0.66AP) to --- (+1.65AP)". It would be a bit more clear.

• W : Make the circle around the summoner spell like the cooldow for inhibs to show the time before it disappear, and make the range meaningful.

• E : Don't improve the base CD over the levels. 30% built-in CDR is already big enough I think if you consider the possibility of a 40% CDR (or even 45% CDR) build. To give an example, the 9.8s cd on E hit at lvl 5 would become 11.2s cd (not so big difference) and this is without CDR from items or runes. With 40% CDR the difference is reduced, so it really isn't a big changement but would be way less annoying to play against Zoé. Besides I think the asleep duration should start at 1.6s and goes up to 2s, so a bad timing from Zoé on a E + Q1 + R + Q2 combo would be less forgiving in early game, avoiding the possibility that even if you almost perfectly played your lane, well you're fucked because she has 2 full seconds to set up her combo while the combo itself barely take 0.5s to happen. Another possibility would be, the more distance the projectile travelled, the longer the sleep, up to 2s (just like Xerath E). It's still based on the same reward mentality, and would avoid the classic, R forward then E on a very short distance, ending up in a quick and easy kill/burst for Zoé.

About the W RNG : I think this is the main part about Zoé that annoys me, and many others. Meddler talked about RNG (again ? I remember having read/heard something similar during S6) in Gameplay Thoughts 13/12/17. Currently her W can drop any summoner spell / some item actives (=RNG) from some minions (=RNG again). Upgrading Zoé's W isn't that "necessary". You could have it always at lvl 1 (and you currently do until late game), thus making the max E after max Q obvious, so you can CC your enemies more often and nuke them more easily with higher chance of one-shot, while CC skills are often upgraded last on most champions (except full CC supports like //etc. of course but as long as I know, isn't a full CC support right ?). As others already said (I failed to find the posts/comments) you could make the W feel less random by only being able to drop summoner spell and item actives already present in the current game (would avoid a redemption/Hextech GunBlade early game) but it would definitely not solve her major problems and her winrate would be even worse, while making it not nice at all to play for Zoé's players. Another idea I found (failed to found the source again, sorry) was to make the summoners/item actives drops only from cannon minions, that way it wouldn't be random on the frequency (1 every 3 wave < 20min ; 1 every 2 wave < 35min ; 1 every wave at > 35min). It would remove the RNG from the frequency of appearance, while decreasing the likelihood to have unfair drops early game AND increasing the number of plays you could make in late. Sounds good to me, but not enough. When you're playing with your team (roams, teamfights or objectives..), someone can accidentally kill a minion with a balloon and you wouldn't have the drop. I think this can lead to bad behavior (I'm pretty sure it already does). You should get the drop if any of your mates or you kill the minion (especially if they only appear on cannons), but if they get killed by a tower or other minions, you lose the drop (Still based on the "you/your team play good, here is a reward" mentality). But we still have a problem. It lets no choice to Zoé's players, you'll always max W as last because it is not fundamental to her burst to have it at lvl 1 or lvl 5. So here's a solution I figured out that Riot could use (maybe changing it, I'm just giving ideas) : The summoners/item actives Zoé could drop from minions would change depending on W lvl. Here's an example :

• Lvl 1 : Only summoner spells present in this match can be dropped from minions
• Lvl 2 : Only summoner spells and item actives present in this match can be dropped from minions
• Lvl 3 : Every summoner spell can be dropped from minions, while only item actives present in this match can be dropped (from minions)
• Lvl 4 : Every summoner spells and item actives can be dropped from minions
• Lvl 5 : Make the W range global (Implies that the base range ISN'T global)

With this W change, it would give Zoé's player a choice. "Do I prefer having a more powerful stun, or do I prefer being able to pick more different summoner/item actives from minions ?"

Besides this, if it doesn't seem good or it isn't enough, another idea would be to have a per summoner/item active cooldown (not very fun to my mind for Zoé's players).

Statistics Source : op.gg (patch 7.24/7.24b)

So I hope you guys enjoyed reading me, let me know what you think about it below and hopefully a Rioter will pass by to give us his/her thoughts about this too

I'm not an english native, sorry for possible errors, tell me if so, I'll edit