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Fizz Main's Constructive Thoughts on Improving Fizz Post-Rework

Tilted Your Game·12/29/2016, 11:28:00 AM·6 votes·1,280 views

Fizz

So let me begin as usual by saying I'm a high plat Fizz main, with an embarrassingly large amount of mastery points.

Let's get straight into it:

I think the new Fizz rework is actually in the right direction, and I know most people think he is really weak (which I agree with partly and will speak of later) but those issues can be fixed in the context of the new elements Riot has introduced into Fizz's kit.

Pros of Rework:

  • Laning is significantly better in terms of mana sustain and last hitting under tower
  • Trading in lane is much less "wtf I'm dead because of DOT" and more "he used his abilities correctly and popped me with the w empowered" (which is less frustrating for enemies which is good)
  • Fizz, believe it or not, can handle enemies in a 1v1 situation much much better without using his ultimate late game now, because of the great ratio on the w, thus buying raw AP on Fizz is really beneficial.
  • His ultimate at max range (I know there are latching on bugs, but those are bugs) is actually quite powerful late game, and allows for a higher level of fizz mastery, with aiming your ult to catch multiple people in corridors instead of just assassinating a single target.

Cons of Rework:

  • BIG ONE He has almost no DPS in late game 5v5 teamfights besides ultimate PERIOD. Let me get into this because this is the crux of the issue with playing Fizz now, and it's the biggest problem in my opinion. Fizz is thematically a "hit and run" champion, but in order to do any sort of meaningful damage late game he has to wait 2 whole seconds, which as I'm sure anyone knows during a LATE GAME teamfight is an eternity. Fizz does not have the health or the resistances of tanky melee champions to actually stay in a fight for the whole of 2 seconds and proc his w, EVEN with his playful trickster, because that only allows for 1.5 seconds of invulnerability. But let me elaborate on that, the normal combo of doing damage in a late game teamfight is either W-Q'ing someone for some damage, and then E'ing max range of someone to slow and get damage and walk away, or just E'ing out completely. There are obviously variations including W-Q'ing and then E'ing on entire team if you have Zhonyas available etc. This allows Fizz to do some sort of damage late game in team fights, such as other midlaners like Viktor, Lux, Syndra etc. But now since all of his damage is back-loaded onto his W, there is no time to do damage.

This, in essence is the most infuriating thing about the rework, is that you cannot late game teamfight besides throwing a max-range fish. I have gone literally 10-0 in the first 12 minutes in lane against a Lux on my smurf, and still end up losing the game because I cannot do a single ounce of decent damage in a teamfight compared to a 0-5 Lux at 20 minutes.

My solutions:

  1. All of Fizz's abilities should proc his W passive. This includes E, this way if he lands a multi-man E, he can then follow up and choose which target to go for, bringing back some of his hit and run tactics.
  2. Fizz's W passive timer should scale, with Fizz's ultimate (not W leveling up). The reason for this specific change is that I think encouraging W max for the sole reason of decreasing W timer will be abusive early game to a fault, and really make Fizz demonstrably powerful in lane. Tying it to his ultimate, and general levels will allow Fizz to be the same in lane, and encourage E max, but all-the-while allow him to make some cool plays late game where he's not tied down by 2 whole seconds in a 5-10 second team fight. I would say that scaling from 2 seconds at level 1, then with first ultimate level up at level 6 it should go down to 1.8, then at level 11, 1.6, and then at level 16, 1.4. This means that during late game, doing a Q, E, W will be a full damage combo which is accessible, but still only to one target which balances the ability.

Besides the huge late game problems Fizz faces, which is what in my experience (which is a lot, I have 3 Fizz-only accounts this season) I quite like the Fizz rework, and I think it makes for some pretty cool plays. I just think that if you want to make Fizz viable in the meta of Syndra, Viktor, Lux, then he needs to have some sort of comparable late game team fight damage besides assassinating because unless you get a good flank, you're not gonna land a fish on a Caitlyn late game through 4 champions and assassinate her straight up anyways. Meanwhile Viktor, Lux, and Syndra can assassinate just fine as well as do insane low cooldown AOE damage in late game team fights.

Well that's my 2 cents.

4 Comments

Pommel Knight12/29/2016, 12:50:14 PM2 votes

In my opinion Fizz needs way shorter w prime time and one point and click undodgeable ability. Every assassin has one (Akali q and ult, kata q and e, zed r, kassadin q, kha q, etc.) Fizz only has his q which deals no dmg and is easily dodgeable. Better yet make his q scale like it did some seasons ago with 0.7-0.6 ap ratio and some base dmg. It was nerfed because of wq combo and now that it inst the case we can give it some power back.

Also his laning phase is much worse, I need to wait lvl 6 until I am able to even think about killing my opponent most of the times. Only thing they gave us was w farming ability which no one asked for, we were farming just fine with the old w. Also I disagree with you about 1vs1 situations without ult, it's almost impossible to kill anyone who isn't a 0 mobility target. Fizz needs some lower cdrs on his basic abilities to be able to stay relevant now, having all of his dmg abilities and only dmg negater be on 10 sec cdr rank 5 is too much.

Another huge problem is his ult, the small shark should give some debuff to the target, so when people are diving me or lb and yas get in my face all the time I can ult them without being penalized for it. They made such a stupid gimmick with the ult that it's not even funny.

Teridax6812/29/2016, 3:26:09 PM2 votes

[{quoted}](name=One Trick Fish,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=nGGv4sqq,comment-id=,timestamp=2016-12-29T11:28:00.008+0000)

  1. All of Fizz's abilities should proc his W passive. This includes E, this way if he lands a multi-man E, he can then follow up and choose which target to go for, bringing back some of his hit and run tactics.

I completely agree with this, and I think his W passive might as well be his innate at this point. It could also help take some of the load off his E, since it could deal the same amount of total damage without having to ramp up by 50 base damage per rank, which would then give Fizz a bit more choice in maxing Q or W first.

[{quoted}](name=One Trick Fish,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=nGGv4sqq,comment-id=,timestamp=2016-12-29T11:28:00.008+0000)

  1. Fizz's W passive timer should scale, with Fizz's ultimate (not W leveling up).

This I agree a little less with. Perhaps reducing the timer to 1.5, the same as Leblanc's new innate mark (which is, admittedly, not the best for pacing either), could lock him out less hard, but I think the issue here is that a lot of Fizz's damage is locked behind large cooldowns, especially his E, which means he's essentially screwed if he's within combat range of his opponents and their W timer hasn't yet activated. Shifting a lot of damage off of his E and onto his bleed would make his damage much more consistent, and would allow him to use his E for mobility and escapes without taking a huge chunk out of his potential damage. If Fizz ends up making E second or last, that might also make things less frustrating for his opponent, since he'd have bigger windows of vulnerability in lane.

Korillo12/29/2016, 2:06:40 PM1 votes

I've been playing some fizz and agree completely. You have to win really early for Fizz to work out or you just get weaker and weaker. It's really hard to blind pick Fizz at this point.

I love fizz's laning now but he needs some help in the late game to make him a little more playable. Maybe take some of his early game power and transfer it to the late game somehow.

hiddenghost5512/30/2016, 12:11:26 AM1 votes

Heres the problem I see with this article. (And im going to try to be as unbiased as possible here) Fizz was never meant to be a very high dps champ in the late game, he is an assassin. Fizz should be a champ that takes out an adc and maybe another champ in the backline and tries to escape due to his high mobility kit. If you add dps to a champ like fizz it will make it very hard to play against him because he can kill more people than he already does in a short time period.