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Buffing Zoe (Without Making Her Anti-Fun)

Meme God Shrek·8/21/2019, 8:29:43 PM·1 votes·1,113 views

So I've been having a lot of fun with Zoe, but at the same time it can feel frustrating to play as her against other champions who feel like they do her job better, i.e. Leblanc, Zed, and so on. I do think she needs some buffs but at the same time I don't want her to go back to doing 80% of your health off 1 E at level 2, even if that can be blocked by hiding behind minions.

My idea to buff her is, instead of increasing her damage or utility with something like a lower E cooldown, to improve her mobility. Consider the fact that champions like Zed and Leblanc have far better mobility than her while also having higher base health and defense, not to mention better AoE damage in the case of Zed I think this is fair.

In exchange for how extremely squishy Zoe is, I think buffing her mobility is totally justified, allowing her to better chase or dodge attacks and ganks. That buff being allowing her to cancel blinking back to her original location, allowing her ultimate to essentially be a slower Flash with a short cooldown. The cooldown will be made a bit longer to balance this.

Portal Jump
COOLDOWN: 12 / 10 / 8

ACTIVE: After a brief delay, Zoe dives into a portal that she opens beneath her, blinking to the target location.

Zoe remains able to attack and cast abilities during Portal Jump, and can see over walls, but is unable to move. After 1 second, she blinks back to her cast location.

Zoe can recast Portal Jump 0.2 seconds after blinking and before blinking back to her original location to jump out of the portal and cancel the blink back to her original location.

8 Comments

iiGazeii8/22/2019, 4:54:15 PM2 votes

If mobility is the direction Zoe is going in, I'd rather they let her move around a bit before being sucked back in, like a forced LeBlanc Distortion. She could get a bit more distance on Paddle Star and wouldn't be as much of a sitting duck. I think they discussed this a while back on ideas they had for Zoe, but nothing ever came of it.

The frustration of playing and playing against Zoe isn't tied to her mobility. It's her W. It allows her to RNG win a lane with the balloons minions drop, and you can't make plays with your Summoner Spells to get ahead without Zoe throwing them right back at you with extra auto-lock damage to boot. If Zoe isn't lucky and you don't get many minion balloons or the ones you get are useless, then you basically have two abilities. The current implementation doesn't feel good for anybody involved.

What Zoe really needs is a mini-rework, swapping her W and R. She would get her Portal Jump as early as level 2 so she could "feel" like Zoe early on, able to play like a true artillery mage (with a higher cooldown on her Portal Jump early on and a non-spammable mana cost). By having her Spell Thief as her R, she wouldn't get free summoners for the first part of laning,so her opponent has an opportunity to use theirs to get a lead. Then, the types of summoners she gets randomly could be gated by level, so at rank 1 at level 6 she might only get defensive things like Heal and Barrier, without getting the lane-winning spells like Redemption or Ignite. At rank 3, level 16, she could be finding powerful spells that wouldn't otherwise be appropriate, like Teleport or Gunblade. Or do away with minions dropping full summoners, and have them drop pickups for Zoe to use, like health/mana potions and extra wards.

Zoe's laning phase shouldn't be so heavily influenced by randomness.

Chembaron Yamada8/21/2019, 11:46:17 PM1 votes

Dude, that would make her extremely more frustrating to deal with. You want to give her a true mobility spell that she can use every 7 seconds.