My thoughts on fizz. As a fizz main.

EDIT #2- Check the first comment I posted for a tl;dr short summary. I didn't know I typed out that much but I enjoy talking about fizz so much that I kinda got carried away.

First not a complaint post about him being over powered instead it's the exact opposite. Second my credibility comes from me being a fizz main. I play him basically everytime I get mid and I've pretty much carried myself from Silver all the way to where I am now with him and I'm still climbing at a steady rate.

Now alot of people consider fizz to broken but that mainly stems from inexperience with the champion and doing every thing wrong that they can do thus giving fizz players all the opportunities to do what they want to do.Most players don't realize that the things they're doing are mistakes so from their perspective all they can see it as is that the champion has no counter play.

With that out of the way lets get right to the point. Fizz has a much lower amount of damage overall compared to other assassins and only really can shine when he snowballs from power spikes he gets from the early and mid game, but with the massive amount of counters and issues with his kit this quickly ends as he falls off way harder than any other assassin when it comes to scaling.

In total fizz has 3 damaging abilities, 1 of which is extremely weak for his role, 1 primarily utility ability, and a passive designed for laning which doesn't exactly help his scaling into the teamfighting phase which is where he's most needed.

Design wise, riot intended for all of these mechanics and designs in his kit but I believe as an assassin he has too many handicaps. Atleast that is what I choose to believe.

First lets discuss his E.

His E ability is his corner stone ability that is meant to keep him alive like most assassins have, but while also being his primary utility it also servers double as his primary damage source. While playing fizz this means you have to balance out how to effectively use your E. You could choose to use it to Engage and get its damage, you could choose to use its utility and escape from fights or dodge damage, or if you're good enough you can use it for both in 1 go.

the issue is that the ability for being such an integral part of his kit is FAR too unreliable. Without it you're essentially naked and will die instantly. the ability is next to impossible to land in in teamfights against the person you're trying to get to. it's damage is only slightly above average despite being his only real source of damage outside of his ult. Finally even when not in teamfights alittle bit of mobility makes this ability extremely easy to dodge.

Next his W.

His W ability is another central part of his kit with it being the reason why he has a strong early and mid game. For the same reason reason AD champions are stronger early, this ability gives him strong auto attacks which allow him to pummel the enemy all the while it keeps a DoT effect burning on them and in some cases all it takes is 1 really good trade then an all in to get a kill if you use your W right. This combines with his E heavily during trading as the normal concept is to dodge a key ability/cc from your enemy then out trade them early through the on hit magic damage and DoT then safely retreat to a minion if possible with Q. This isn't how it's always supposed to go but this is more or less a really basic example of trading with fizz.

The issue with this ability however is that past 1v1's this abilities efficiency drops hard.

To use this ability efficiently you NEED multiple auto attacks but if any of you know that's next to impossible in a quick teamfight where you have only a few precious seconds to ult then try to get whatever parts of your combo off on your target that you can. Without multiple auto's this basically becomes a very weak Lich bane proc.

Another issue is that despite trying to give him strong auto attacks his W is still extremely weak because in most cases its damage won't actually amount to anything without your Ulty active on your target. There's all sorts of situations where you'll find yourself with all of your abilities down after full comboing a person only to have them live on low life then you have to try AAing them with your W but then they just turn on you and kill because your W is fairly meaningless.

Next up is his Q.

His Q ability is a means of giving him mobility without the use of his E while also allowing him to set up his Lich Bane and W damage. It allows for any number of potential uses as long as you have a target and can even be used to go over walls.

The issue is that once again this ability is too unreliable considering what it does. Your E is your primary source of damage and in most cases if you want to kill a target you NEED to land your E on them but to do this would mean you need to close the gap with your Q like it's intended for. The issue behind that idea is that your E has so much counterplay, it's dodgeable with a simple dash or any other mobility, it's cancelable so people can just knock you away or CC to stop it, and most importantly you're vulnerable and open with no way to defend yourself while dashing or cancel out of the ability which means people can hit you with whatever they want, which can in alot of situations equal your instant death.

To add to all of this the damage it adds is laughable despite having such high risks for using it.

Finally his Passive.This ability was made with the pure intention of being a lane tool to work with his play style. In most cases a fizz will take alot of minion agro and will also have a very angry mid laner hitting him with ranged Auto's from a distance so his passive was put in place to help that.

Laning passive are fine but in fizz's case this is something that is not exactly all that useful for him as passives that have lane phase aspects are typically made for kits that are meant for late game scaling but need a small push to help with early but fizz lacks that scaling.

My total thoughts on assassins in general is that they are in a class that is most valuable when they can take out priority targets in the late game when it matters.

Fizz is the opposite and instead only really shines during lane phase and is a snowball or no ball champion unlike normal assassins that even if they fall behind still come to very respectable level of power once they catch up, fizz doesn't do this and only gets weaker and weaker until the point where in some cases he can't even 1 shot an ADC champion if they have 1 defensive item during the late game.

Regardless of what happens to him I'll still continue to love him but I really would love to see a rework. I don't want a buff to him as that is nothing more than a temporary band-aid. I know that he's supposed to be on the list for the Major assassin rework that's supposed to come later down the road so with that in mind I came up with some ideas for him/

If I could choose what to change about him I think it'd be something like this:

His passive definitely needs to be scrapped. I would actually change over his current W to his passive and give it some minor tweaks.

Next I would prefer to see his Q turned into a straight skill shot dash with him passing through all units and applying on hit affects. A small addition to this would be the ability to cancel your Q dash with your E.

Finally a change to both his E and W. His E would be toned down in damage and the CD upped.

His W would become an entirely new ability that combo's with his E. On activation Fizz would activate a quick AOE nuke much like his current 1st splash of his E except with a much higher damage. When fizz would use his new E he could remain in his E's activation state state slightly longer and if you used his W while in his E he could then do a medium range dash to the target location dealing the same amount of damage as his normal W. One thing I can't decide on is if he should be untargetable while dashing with his W or become targetable if he does it.

These were my thoughts on fizz but I still have more to talk about as well as I'd love to hear other people discuss him with me so instead of adding more to the post I'll let people comment then reply to each comment directly. For now I'm sure the post might get a decent amount of hate as people hate fizz so I might go to sleep then assess the hate on post and/or the possible comments.

EDIT- I just realized how big the post became in terms of amount of text so i ask those of you who choose to read it to please ignore poor formatting and punctuation as best as you can.