Zed

Zed has soared in power along with huge spikes in pickrate with Season 2’s changes, and we think he’s still going to be extremely solid despite systemic nerfs. We’d like to preserve his identity as a strong laner, but hit some of his most guaranteed damage.

We regret having jungle Zed in three of the past four patches now but players keep getting better at playing and itemizing this shadow ninja to the point where he wins more frequently today than he did before we shipped that first nerf. We're comfortable with how mid lane Zed is sitting but he's still overshadowing too many champions in the jungle. While this nerf looks very large on paper, the net impact of nerfing his jungle mod from 2.0 to 1.2 was under 1% of win rate movement, and we're looking for more than that here.

Zed’s recent jungle changes didn't affect him as strongly as we had anticipated, and players have noticed, resulting in a resurgence of pick and ban rate. We’d like to slow his clear and lower his potency, this time with more accuracy now that we have a better understanding of how to tune him in the jungle.

One bar we want to hold for high-quality jungle gameplay is around exactly how quickly a champion can clear their own jungle and then reasonably invade their opponents. In Zed's case, he can clear his jungle to hit level 4 and invade you, or instead, Recall, buy two Long Swords, and then fight you for Rift Scuttler. Of course someone has to have the fastest clear in the game (that crown will move to Ivern most likely), but what they do with that speed is important, and the way Zed manifests his jungle strengths crosses the line. So this patch, we're slowing his early jungle clear speed by a few seconds, which we expect will make him too weak for many players. While we like the variety he brings to the game and jungle, we don't believe it can come at the cost of overall game health.

E Damage increased.

Q AD ratio decreased and damage increased at higher ranks. R cooldown increased.

Q damage increased. E cooldown reduction per enemy hit increased.

W cooldown increased.

Base magic resist decreased. E cooldown decreased late.

E energy cost decreased.

R base damage ratio decreased.

Passive deals bonus damage against monsters.

Q ratio increased. E ratio decreased. R cooldown increased late.

E base damage reduced later.

W missile speed increased; cooldown decreased early.

We're reverting the bugfix that was meant to solve the bug where Zed's W - Living Shadow and R - Death Mark's shadows were stacking on top of each other when cast on a target in quick succession. It was causing general buffering issues, some of which we've identified and fixed via the revert below.

These changes differentiate Razor Shuriken as a higher risk, higher reward alternative to Shadow Slash.

Zed added to League of Legends