@Riot It's time to talk about Zilean

For a long while now, zilean has been toiling away in obscurity pretty hard. His attack range was nerfed (even though it's perfectly fine for annie to have a ridiculously long range...) his Q was turned into a skill shot that is darn near impossible to land in lane, his R cooldown was (effectively) increased, and all in all, he has been an unpopular, relatively low win rate champ. So could we adress some of the glaring issues with his kit? For instance....

What's the deal with his passive? It used to be global, but then got removed in the "anti-global passive" pass you guys did. But unlike Janna's, it wasn't increased in intensity, it was just made local, and now it feels almost useless. MAYBE you can use it to gain an early advantage from the fast level, but zilean's not a steller laner to begin with, so it usually just ends up feeling useless. Can we maybe give him something here that actually inspires gameplay and actually does something?

Why is he so needlessly squishy? Seriously, his base stats suck. He has some of the lowest health, armor and defensive scaling of any champ in the game. Other supports who have sustain and even innate defensive steriods, such as sona and nami, have far higher defense then him, and they're supposed to be squishy. He's not particularly high range, he has no sustain to speak of, he doesn't have much of a defensive steriod ( the MS boost is nice, but won't protect him against any real cc), so why is he so disproportionately squishy?

And mana costs... To pull off his burst combo it takes a ridiculous amount of mana. He's one of the most mana hungry supports, even including sustainers like nami or raka. You guys went through and reduced mana costs of ults down to around 100, why can't you do that for Zilean? It would help, at the least.

By my estimation, Zilean feels pretty impactful come end game, but in lane, he just feels like a squishy ball of "if the enemy hits me, I die, and there's nothing I can do about it". His poke isn't reliable enough to set him apart, his engage CC isn't too terribly strong (1 second stun isn't going to impress anyone when the meta is Blitz and Thresh) and his ult, while awesome, doesn't actually turn a bot lane skirmish as well as, say, a sona ult, or a zyra ult, because they just focus and kill you while your adc is in stasis, or they kill him once he comes out of stasis, because once you pull your skills, you're pretty much done. Can we give some attention to our favorite clock guy?