The Zed compensation buffs made Zed worse to deal with while fixing nothing about his late-game

So for anyone who's played as Zed/with Zed/against Zed, you've probably noticed since forever eternity that Zed's biggest strength is his early game power, while later teams tend to have amassed items to deal with him and his ult. Zed was in a relatively weak spot this season compared to his other AD assassin compatriots since he couldn't quite abuse duskblade to its full potential while additionally still suffering from the usual issue of getting itemized against, with the added bonus of Stopwatch being a thing. The amount of ways to deal with Zed now are pretty numerous.

So Duskblade got nerfed, which, since it was so absurdly overpowered of an item (still is, it's cancer on the game and is basically the Morellonomicon of AD assassins), was an item that Zed relied upon despite the fact he couldn't even use it to its full potential. This means buffs to Zed, yay! (boo)

For those of you who don't know what exactly the particular buff was that kind of broke his laning phase, I'll gladly point it out to you:

#REMOVED: Damage being reduced on shurikens that hit the same enemy.

This buff is absolutely stupid. Not just absurd, straight up stupid that it would be allowed through.

So here's the damage his Q does as a base: 80/115/150/185/220 + 90% of bonus AD in physical damage.

To do the simple math: Originally, Zed hitting an enemy with both of his shuriken would do 150% damage - the original shuriken deals full, the second deals 50% damage. Okay, cool. The grand total to this combo would be 330 + 135% of bonus AD at max level. That's a pretty goddamn strong early attack, but it does require the effort of hitting both of his Q's, so arguably it's fair.

All right. Now let's calculate this asinine change.

#The buff to Zed makes this Q combo do 160/230/300/370/440 + 180% of bonus AD.

#Are you guys fucking high? Most ults don't do that much damage before level 2, usually even before level 3.

So during lane, fuckface Zed before hitting level 6 will be able to gank off about 300 and some odd damage of your health with really just about a third of his combo, and this is ignoring potential electrocute procs. We haven't even added in his E damage, either. The fact that this combo is entirely based on energy and Zed has no mana worries is really just the icing of the cake - it's basically try to dodge this combo for the rest of eternity mid-lane or you will get all-in'd.

#Past the misery that is trying to avoid getting blown up by Zed in lane as a mage, this buff makes absolutely no sense whatsoever as a compensation buff for Duskblade.

The reason this makes no sense is because Zed is going to usually be maxing Q long before he ever sees Duskblade, meaning Zed isn't getting his power spike at Duskblade anymore - he gets a fractal spike every single time he levels his Q, increasing his potential damage output by an absurd 70 points per level.

#What you've done is turned Zed into far more of a feast or famine champion, with an emphasis on the feast.

If Zed gets ahead in lane, his damage is quite literally unmatched - seriously, no other champion deals over 440 damage on one basic ability (besides Zoe, and we all know just how much we adore her). So champions who scale off of items better rather than just off of their bases are doubly fucked - not only can they not stand against Zed to begin with, but Zed now has items on top of them that exacerbate his power by comparison. It's the reason why Zed either goes 17/4 or 3/10: because on top of giving Zed his power earlier, it's now also more unreliable.

That's the idea of balancing it, right? That it's a bit more unreliable, which allows for "counterplay"? Except that it really just means that if Zed's ahead, he will just walk up to you and barrel stuff you with his combo versus trying to land it from a distance, and if Zed's behind then he's not going to be able to get close enough to land it without getting gangbanged. So if Zed's ahead, he's ahead for-fucking-ever - if Zed's behind, he's a complete liability to the team.

In the end: Nothing's changed other than you have just pushed Zed further into old Rengar status - he's fucking infuriating to have in a game because one side is going to suffer for it no matter what.

There are far better buffs you could have given Zed to compensate for the Duskblade changes - such as deleting Duskblade altogether and adding an item that isn't so fucking asinine and abused by certain champions so that you don't have to worry about balancing Zed around an item not even proper for him.