Asian Teams Picking Zed in High Level Competitive Play, Phreak Defends Zed

On the NA servers, Zed is largely seen as a hero that's too hard to play and might need some quality of life buffs. Meanwhile, the Asian servers disagree, consistently picking Zed in high level game-play such as the match you can see below in the OGN Winter quarterfinals match between Azubu Frost and CJ Entus.

It's 55 min, EDIT: But crazy epic! I wish the quality was a little better but this match was seriously AMAZING)

Meanwhile, RedMercy from Youtube assembled this montage of impressive Zed clips, proving that the champion can snowball hard if given a lead.

Personally, I've only seen one good Zed, and he tends to feed the majority of games he's played in at gold Elo. However, this might just be another Lee Sin moment, and we'll have to wait until people figure out how to play him correctly before we see the Zed QQ begin.

For those of you who like more concrete numbers besides my personal opinion at nerfplz.com (which is understandable), in terms of statistics, Zed's not played all that often, and sports about a 47% win rate according to LolKing.net.

RiotPhreak had the following to say on Zed: (Concluding that he's a balanced champion that will not be receiving any buffs)

Quote:

Originally Posted by  The only fantastic Zed play I saw in all of those asian tournaments is where Zed ulted Ashe to avoid her arrow. And I don't think he even killed her. Every Zed I've seen doesn't do well in terms of getting kills. Even his ability to assist is not that great. Zed cannot reliably stick to his foe when his ultimate is cast. That would not be a problem in of itself, but his ultimate also does **** damage before rank 3. His Q's are hard to hit, and getting overlapping shadows on his W is too difficult because you'd have to place your shadows in extremely inefficient ways just to get it to hit because of how terrible of a range his E actually is. It doesn't take a Game Analyst at riot to see that Zed needs buffed. Not one game have I been extremely impressed with the asian pro's playing Zed except for dodging Ashes arrow. Zed should of been able to kill that ashe. Do you know why that didnt happen? Because he missed his Q. I've seen Zed's missing Q's constantly at the professional level of play. That ability is too damn hard to hit with right now. Here's a video of the encounter. (watch at 20:15) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9wI5qnzr4Q Seriously, Speed up his Q. After witnessing several Q misses from Zed, when the player playing him is obviously very skilled, I can say there's something very wrong. Ashe should NOT of been able to get away from that. At all. ***EDIT*** Zed's Ultimate Detonation is too weak at rank 1 and 2. Zed is extremely throttled by it, the fact that his W is leveled last which gives him passive bonus AD to make a more powerful ult, and then he isn't going to have the itemization to make use of his ultimate at rank 1 and 2. E's Radius needs to be bumped up to what it originally was on the PBE, which was Katarina's W range. It got nerfed for reasons unexplained. Zed's Q is extremely easy to juke. It needs to not be that easy to juke. Increase the width of the detection hitbox, or increase the speed.

I don't understand posts like these.

We just saw some of the best teams in the world repeatedly pick a champion in matches that meant elimination or the chance at $80,000. Your conclusion is that we need to buff this champion.

Not every champion goes 20/0. That's not the earmark of a great champion. If our goal is to balance this game at the highest tier, the competitive tier, then our biggest indicator is how often these champions are picked and banned at the highest tier.

Zed's being picked a lot.

I watched Irelia from CJ's LongPanda (oops! wrote InSec the first time) only go like 4/4/20 as well. She has this passive that lowers stun duration, but this one time she totally died to Ashe ultimate. Clearly this is an expert player and something is wrong here if he would die. That's just silly! We surely must buff Irelia. She sucks so much she's picked at the highest tier of competition.

Not all champions do flashy things every single game. League of Legends is not just a Doublelift highlight reel. My theory is that Zed's being picked frequently because he is a strong laner, puts a lot of pressure on enemy AD carries, and scales well. It seems that he's doing all those things quite well and both Shy and InSec certainly appear to agree.


He may be extremely energy gated. His energy regain might be incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. I'm not here to dispute individual points of a champion. You all play Zed more than I do and I trust your experiences.

However, the point I want to bring out is that Zed is apparently balanced or (too?) strong. When you simply buff a champion, it only gets stronger. Lowering energy costs, increasing missile speed/width. Those are buffs.

Now, the question is: If you really wanted these, what would you be willing to give away? Because Zed isn't showing to me as, "This is a weak champion who needs buffs." This shows to me as, "This is a balanced/strong/whatever champion who could get improvements but would have to be nerfed as a result.'

Just look at Rumble. Source 1 Source 2

What do you guys think about Zed? Is he balanced? Is he too strong? Is he too weak? Comment below!