Detailed Essay on Malzahar Changes

This post is about Malzahar. I mained Malzahar (not one trick, but he was by far my most played) shortly after the mage update until his voidlings got gutted. I had a 70% winrate over about 120 games in mid/mostly high diamond). After his voidlings got gutted, he stopped being played mid in competitive and high elo. I made several lengthy posts explaining how this was going to ruin him as a mid laner and completely deprive him of any variation in gameplay. I made a recent post explaining why I think the current changes on PBE will successfully make him viable mid lane again, but will fail to revive his diversity in gameplay. I had a friend read this post, and he asked me a few good questions. I’m writing this post differently, hoping that addressing some of these questions will make my point more understandable.

(For reference, when I talk about diversity/variation in gameplay, I mean different ways you can play a champion in a skirmish or a teamfight or even just in lane 1v1. Pantheon, Master Yi, and Diana are just a few examples of champions that I believe have little to not variation in gameplay.)

Main Claim: The current changes on PBE will successfully make Malzahar viable mid again, but the changes still fail to revive his diversity/variation in gameplay. With the current changes, he is still a numbers champion: He is a champion that is either viable/strong or irrelevant based on how much damage his abilities do. Since there is no variation in how the champion is played (you press buttons and click them on the enemy and hope it kills them) how good he is is entirely determined by how much damage his spells do. My recommended changes are as follows: Revert all voidlings to being in the same state as before the patch that gutted him as a mid laner, and make his ultimate a stun so that it can be countered by taking cleanse.

The only real toxic thing about Malzahar was the serious lack of counterplay available to mid laners when he flash ulted you. There wasn’t any kind of skill involved in flashing on someone and killing them, because you have an ultimate that completely immobilizes them with no counterplay. Mid laners aren’t supposed to build QSS, and you still wouldn’t have QSS early enough to stop him from getting at least one flash ult on you. By making his ultimate a stun, you give mid laners the option of taking cleanse, thus removing the only real toxic part about him. Now my friend asked me: “So him pressing W and completely zoning you out of lane wasn’t toxic?” Short answer: No.

I knew all of the ins and outs of Malzahar, and I even knew at least one trick that pros didn’t. When I played against Malzahar, I normally won simply because I knew how to play against it. I will explain how this was done to show why he wasn’t that toxic. To start, let’s say you just cast W and cast malefic visions on someone so the voidling chases that person down until it either dies or the expiration goes down. The thing is, a single voidling will not do very significant damage at all, and once that spell is used up, Malzahar can’t hope to do much of anything to you for the next 20-30 seconds. Not only was W (voidlings) an incredibly high cooldown, but malzahar doesn’t have the mana to constantly sustain pressing W+E on someone if he’s not getting decent damage off it. You can think of it like a Cassiopeia constantly using twin fang without poisoning someone. Sure, it might deal some damage, but there’s no way she can sustain before any significant damage is done.

So, as a Malzahar player, here’s what you do. You want to wait for a minion to get low enough health that a voidling can instantly last hit and multiply off of it when it spawns. Here’s what makes it tricky. You need to time it perfectly and place it perfectly. If the voidling is spawned too early, then the minion will die and it won’t be able to multiply. If the voidling is spawned too late, then it won’t auto last hit the minion, and the enemy will have time to back off out of the range of Malefic visions before the voidlings have a chance to multiply. Now for placement. Because you have to save your malefic visions to re-direct your voidlings to your enemy, you need to nail the placement so that it attacks the minion you want it to attack. The tricky part is that you can’t place a voidling on top of a unit. If there’s even a little bit of overlap, then the voidling is liable to jump over a unit’s model and end up on a completely different side than intended. Often, when this happened, it causes for the voidling to attack a different minion than intended. Thus, the voidling can no longer multiply for your trade combo. If the placement or timing is messed up even slightly, then you’re practically wasting a 20-30 second cooldown, which happens to be a key part in your damage output. Next, we’ll talk about what you’re able to do when you face a Malzahar under the assumption they have perfectly mastered their voidling timing and placement.

Playing against Malzahar becomes similar to playing against Irelia . When you’re used to playing against Irelia, you know to watch the minions in the creep wave that she can reset her dash off of and position yourself accordingly. It’s actually easier to do this against Malzahar because the voidling cast range isn’t very long, so he needs to be very close to a minion if he intends on multiplying a voidling off of it. Additionally, he needs to keep himself relatively close to the enemy champion so that he can cast malefic visions right as soon as the voidling multiplies. Malzahar will also need to be carful in this sense, so that he doesn’t extend too far in the lane that he becomes an easy pick for the enemy jungler. When you consider both how close Malzahar needs to be to you and how close he needs to be to a minion, it becomes fairly easy to spot when he’s going to try to use his trade combo on you. Again, without using voidlings in this way, Malzahar’s damage becomes sub-par at best. There are some champions that were good counters to Malzahar because they didn’t even need to consider how he was positioning himself in the lane. Some champions had kits that enabled them to instantly clear Malzahar’s voidlings, even as a swarm.

Because it is sufficiently easy (compared to many other champions) to play against Malzahar (and I speak from a vast range of experience), it is sufficiently hard to play him to his fullest potential, he has multiple counter matchups like any other mid laner, and he doesn’t deal a sizable amount of damage without being played to a high potential, I did not and do not consider him to be toxic to play against. I did not find it exceptionally difficult to win games against a mid lane Malzahar in high diamond. (Reminder: I am a mid lane main and have been since season 3). The only exception to this statement is his ability to flash and ultimate someone, which I described earlier.

Another question my friend asked me was, “How do you know people won’t just keep playing him support?” There are a lot of champions that can be played in different positions in League of Legends, and different things to consider when you decide which position you want the champion to be played in. Do I want Hecarim to be top or jungle? Do I want ekko/fizz/jayce to be top or mid? Etc. For Malzahar, after the nerfs, his damage output become very weak and he was stripped of practically every single voidling interaction that was vital to his damage output and gameplay as a mid laner. He was picked support because the toxic utility from his ultimate remained intact, and there was no point in feeding farm to a champion that wouldn’t be able to carry with it. Not only that, but the change to giving voidlings 3 hp made him more ideal for bot lane. With the prior state of his voidlings, it’d be easy for a support and marksman to both contribute an auto and instanty kill the voidling. With 3 hp, it wasn’t quite that simple. Additionally, the removal of the HP threshold last hitting that voidlings had, it meant Malzahar could be played support without accidentally siphoning a significant amount of creeps from his marksman. I firmly believe that gutting Malzahar’s voidlings was a mistake that can only be remedied through reverting the changes. It wasn’t just a damage nerf, but it decimated the champion’s gameplay. There was no skill ceiling anymore. There wasn’t anything to be good at other than pressing your buttons on an enemy champion.

I have nothing against Riot. I know they always make changes with their best intentions, even though it can be hard to see that at times. I know they are willing to own up to mistakes and revert a big change when it doesn’t take a positive turn. (We’ve seen this with Fizz and Kog’Maw just as two examples). Sometimes, I am also impressed with their ability to almost read my mind in what I think a champion needs. Bottom line is that I know Riot workers are reasonable, they never try to make the game worse, and that they listen to the community. It is for this reason that instead of posting how little I appreciate a change, I take time out of my day to write a detailed post about something to help Riot workers understand my point of view. I apologize if some of the players reading this do not appreciate how lengthy it is, but try to understand that I believe it’s always best to show as much of your logic and reasoning as possible if one’s goal is to help another understand one’s point.

Point Recap: Make Malzahar ultimate something that can be cleansed, and revert the voidling changes that ruined him as a mid laner in the first place. Thanks for reading! And of course if there's any remaining confusion I will try to make sure I clear any of it up if you tell me what you're confused about!