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Slight Zilean buffs

CrazedPorcupine·9/21/2013, 6:07:31 PM·5 votes·623 views

Zilean right now is sitting in a fairly poor spot right now, and this is due to several factors.

  1. Zilean has only 1 ability that does damage which he can combo with itself

  2. Zilean is fairly Item dependent, keeping him from supporting viably in the 0cs support meta

  3. Zilean is very squishy.

  4. Zilean's passive does not help when his entire team is level 18

Zilean does have a lot of things that make him shine. Zilean's lvl 18 utility is very strong, a revive and a possible permaslow, Plus a low cooldown large burst combo. However, there are some massive problems to these things, their mana costs when combined with the spammy nature of rewind.

There are 3 buffs/changes I propose to zilean to make him a bit better without changing his kit too much

  1. Increase Zilean's base mana and mana/level from 260 +60/level to 300 + 70/lvl (increases his mana at level 18 from 1340 (which is abysmal considering his mana costs) to 1560 which is only a 220 mana increase)

  2. make rewind cost no mana and not charge tear.

  3. increase his HP/lvl from 71 to 80 (which increases his total health at level 18 without items from 1652 to 1820 (only a 162 health increase)

Overall, those 3 changes would make Zilean much better. Zilean really needs items to buy mana and mana regen items, and as a support he just can't get those items he needs, at at mid, he's too squishy to survive the assassin/mobility meta. Late game he's much more mobile, but he uses too much mana to be viable without items in a long teamfight. Also, By changing the rewind to not cost mana and not charge tear, You have zilean still capable of charging tear fast by his nature of double casting abilities.

6 Comments

CS3Narutoi9/22/2013, 8:18:04 PM2 votes

I think Zilean actually has some more inherent problems that just the 4 listed above.

First off, if you've ever faced a Zilean in lane, you'll come to know what real poke feels like. His Q has a 700 range, does pretty high damage, and you can't dodge it. If you don't have any sustain or damage mitigation, it will force zone and eventually force you out of lane.
That being said though, this spell also has a drawback for Zilean besides the mana costs. It pushes his lane a lot since it does AOE damage. This makes Zilean more prone to ganks because he doesn't have and blinks or dashes for escape. This spell is also kinda what makes Zilean not that good of a support. Your enemy can just move to their low health minions, and then make your bomb steal your ADC's cs, and also push the lane. And did I forget the mana cost?

Now about his W, I think a huge part of his issues are actually tied to this spell.
This spell reduces the cooldown of all his spells. It gives him a Q every 3.6 seconds, double perma E, and a 28 second ult. Because it makes the cooldowns of his spells so low, it also drastically stole power from those spells as well.
Why does his spells cost so much mana? Why is he so item dependent? Why does his E only give a speed boost and not any other effects and is on a 20 sec cooldown? Why is Zilean so squishy and his ult has a base cooldown of 180 seconds?
This spell itself gives Zilean a lot of power, but at the same time took those power from Zilean's other areas. So I think in order to put Zilean in a better state, his W will need to be fixed and its power more spread apart to his other aspects.

Thanks for reading my column of text. ;)
By the way, care to read my rework for Zilean? http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=39521595#post39521595 (The reworks are ordered from most drastic to the least amount of changes.)

JackAqua9/22/2013, 4:04:16 PM1 votes

But wouldn't that make tear stacking a lot harder ?