LoL players think one Zed change could completely alter champion’s playstyle

Ability Haste in League of Legends is getting a bit out of hand, according to the players. And in their eyes, one champion is benefitting immensely. In a post made on the League subreddit earlier today, League players debated how one small fix could completely solve Zed’s CDR abuse issues.

The post, made by a user named Justalostdudeasking, went into detail about how they’d alter Zed’s Living Shadow (W) in an effort to stop the champion from poking so heavily and having a consistent way to escape sticky situations. 

The proposed change would be to make it so that Zed’s Living Shadow (W) starts its cooldown after the shadow has disappeared from the map. The current iteration of the ability goes on cooldown after Zed has spawned the shadow. Essentially, this change would up the downtime between Zed’s Living Shadow casts and make it so that the champion has fewer opportunities to dash around the map. 

In theory, Zed’s Living Shadow only has a two-second cooldown in its current state when you combine its uptime with how long its real cooldown is. Considering the shadow lasts for five seconds, and its cooldown can be brought down to seven seconds with a full cooldown reduction build, there are only two seconds of downtime where Zed can’t have a shadow either available to cast or available to port to. 

“This would also push Zed away from his ‘Perma-Poke with W’  playstyle, and actually have to commit to kill something, since W wouldn’t be legit a 2s CD,” Justalostdudeasking said in their original post. “If this ends up nerfing him too much, fine, buffs are a thing, but holy moly would this be a welcome change.”

We’d even be hesitant to call this an outright nerf and would instead label it as an adjustment. It’s not like Riot to make changes like this proposed one without altering a champion’s kit elsewhere to compensate, so if Zed’s Living Shadow does get changed any time soon, it’s likely other parts of his kit would too. Perhaps his Razor Shuriken (Q) could also get a cooldown increase to dial back some of his poke potential. 

Right now, Zed holds a win rate of 49.47 percent at all solo queue ranks, according to League stats site U.gg, so it’s not like he’s a certified world beater. But his ban rate of 40.9 percent is the highest in the game, so obviously, something’s not right here and a change could be coming down the pipeline soon.