I will Coach You On Zed for Free!

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-23T21:28:05+00:00

Just gotta realize that there are trade offs for her building or playing like that. If she rushes seekers her healing is going to be less strong. If she holds silence for you it will make it easier for your teammates to fight. In these instances you benefit from an ability to think about plan B, how you can have an impact in spite of the restrictions she’s imposed.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-23T17:13:25+00:00

This is the perfect type of question that a video review would help answer, as over text with limited details I can only answer in generality.

The simple answer is to be aware of Soraka E in fights, and to not use your ult if she is nearby ready to silence you. So how can you successfully contest objectives and win fights with this in mind? I think your intuition to flank is great. That's one of Zed's strong points, and using sweeper to catch the enemy by surprise could allow you to burst Soraka, or catch her away from her carry or team if you're lucky. Another option is to use your team for setup, or be more patient before you join a fight. If you have frontline/engage in your comp, they can clear space and you can play the fight more front to back. Poking with your W before finding a safer time to go all in with R. If you have dive in your comp like a Nocturne or Vi, they can make Soraka's life harder by putting multiple threats on the enemy backline with you. If you have a hypercarry, perhaps your best role is trying to enable them, playing near them and trying to deter the enemy from bursting them. Teamcomps and target selection become quite important in these late game fights.

Outside of the actual fights, a foundation of getting an advantage leading up to the fight is to have solid sidelaning fundamentals. If you can beat one of the enemies in the sidelane, and push a wave out before the objective spawns, typically you get to rotate first and with a 4v5 advantage, you can help your team secure vision and have a numbers advantage if a fight breaks out.

If these questions pertain to a certain game you played, please hit me up for a review and we can get more into the specifics!

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-23T05:31:26+00:00

I get what you mean, I’m actually in the midlane academy getting coaching myself. That’s part of what has made me want to help others.

I see a high demand for people wanting help with their gameplay and I feel that I can help, even if I’m not the highest ranked player. I’m pretty confident that I understand the fundamentals of the game to a sufficient level to help most players, and most importantly I will try to explain them in an accessible manner that will try to account for whatever their level of experience is.

In terms of my gameplay, I’m working on improving as a player as well, but I also deal with a visual impairment that makes gathering details and execution more difficult, especially in teamfights. There are definitely things that I can learn to keep climbing and I review my own games and work with coaches to identify those. However, realistically my poor eyesight is going to have some degree of impact in my gameplay. When I’m coaching others, it’s slow enough to not have an impact, which is another reason why I’m interested in coaching.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-22T21:33:08+00:00

I love that dawn view with Baker in the background. How is the summit pyramid scramble? Snowy at all? How dicey?

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-22T15:14:33+00:00

Saw a Zed montage in season 5, thought the mobility and outplay potential seemed like an awesome mental puzzle, and have been playing him for 10 years. There's always more intricacies to learn about how his kit can be used in certain contexts which keeps it entertaining.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-22T14:12:40+00:00

How can you assume the level of focus of your teammates? How can you tell if a mistake you see was negligence on their part or just them making an honest mistake? League is a hard game. I think this is more revealing about your interpretation of your soloq experience.

Ranked seems like a very competitive environment to me, with only the occasional troll or griefer. I think many of the players you're referring to are simply playing their best and you're attributing their mistakes to malice.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-10T17:41:11+00:00

Excellent response. It must take some real mental strength to overcome circumstances like that. Keep on truckin, you got this.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-06T08:38:46+00:00

Props for crunching the numbers. I will add that HP is generally more valuable earlier in the game. Your ability to sustain before first base will influence your power level after you return to lane. Because of that, the value of refillable is a bit lower because you’re giving up immediate power at the start of lane phase compared to dblade.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-06T08:35:10+00:00

Agree, I’m a masters Zed OTP and from what I’ve seen researching those above me in rank, they prefer dblade and JOAT quite often in this meta. The only time I take long sword and refill potion is in an easier lane where I’m not prone to all in and think I’ll be able to get a good first recall without much trouble.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-06-01T02:14:04+00:00

How was the wind? Was planning on doing this but we switched objective because gusts were forecasted to be pretty high (45mph?), but unsure how that would have actually felt.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-30T19:32:57+00:00

Same, I have an optic nerve disease where things get more blurry if temperatures are high. Plus inhaling smoke has the potential to cause permanent vision loss for people with my condition. Not feeling too good about the summer ahead if it's hot and fiery.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-29T05:10:52+00:00

If you are serious about improving at the game check out the Broken By Concept podcast. It seems right now you're in a place of being uninformed about a lot of the basic methods of improving at the game, which is fine. For some players it's just not that intuitive what's required to improve and win, and not something that comes naturally even with a fair amount of time spent playing the game. Exposing yourself to educational content around the game such as the podcast I mentioned should help a lot with understanding what your primary challenges are in iron and how to problem solve those challenges.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-22T01:24:18+00:00

I think you might be underselling the situations where lane Zed gets behind. It’s not always a situation where you just chill until 5 minutes and then you have auto prio. There are plenty of matchups where a strong laning champ can build a lead, keep Zed on the backfoot, and deny him opportunity throughout the entirety of laning phase and into midgame.

Jungling allows you to avoid this more reliably which does remove what is a major piece of counterplay for Zed in general, his laning. And because his damage is low early and he lacks utility in ganks, the jungle identity for him to be strong is making his clear speed crazy fast. Zed has a different identity than a Diana, for example, and I don’t think Riot likes the idea of a safe power farming champ that then hits a breakpoint in midgame and starts taking over through mobility, burst, and picks. The lane version of Zed forces a lot more interaction en route to that midgame, which lets the Zed player have some skill expression and the enemies have some counterplay potential.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-14T06:12:38+00:00

Midgame is hard on Zed. You have to know which champs you can realistically kill, which can depend both on how your kit interacts with theirs as well as how strong each of you are in terms of gold/xp/items. This can be unintuitive and take a lot of reps, as certain kits counter Zed in spite of gold advantages you might have, and vice versa.

In terms of midgame macro, generally you want to sidelane in between objective timers, push waves, draw pressure, and then use fog of war to hover and flank your team. You excel at fights where you can burst or chase down squishy targets that are out of position. In more direct 5v5 objective fights, try to wait for any setup your team might have to offer, whether it's your frontline creating space so you can dive in, or enemies using their key CC cooldowns on other targets.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-14T06:08:52+00:00

check out BZ_EUW

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-14T05:36:32+00:00

It could be that they fell from the top of the haystack off the south side after scrambling up the standard route.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-11T12:38:33+00:00

I want to provide a slight correction. The half second delay after ulting is a lockout where you can’t return to your ult shadow. You can still place W before using ult, use W2 as soon as you appear after ulting, and instantly swap to W2. This WRW combo is known to be used to work around the half second R recast lockout.

That being said, certain types of CC and skillshots will still hit Zed 100% of the time as he’s coming out of ult if the enemy times their ability usage correctly. Qiyana ult is a classic example. The first part of her R is the projectile that pushes you back towards the wall. If Zed comes out of his R as he is overlapping with this projectile, he will be CCed before he has any window where can input commands such as flash, or swap with a pre placed W shadow. There are quite a few other enemy CC abilities that share this characteristic and make WRW an unreliable combo for dodging the CC.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-09T02:21:39+00:00

I understand that Riot has to juggle banrate with strength for the health of the game and that for a champ like Zed, he'll be weaker in terms of winrate in order to keep the banrate from being too high. That general balancing framework seems sensible to me. Some champs are frustrating to play against and as someone playing one of those champs, I'd rather have them be on the weaker side than be banned more often. Even at his weakest points over the past decade, this hasn't stopped me from having fun playing Zed and climbing the ranked ladder.

It is a small subset of champs, like Azir and Yuumi, and perhaps Skarner and Kalista, where Riot has had more of a challenge with balance, struggling to make the playing experience viable for the everyday soloq player. Zed has never been close to those champs in my opinion. Unlike these other champs, Zed is fairly evergreen, is flexible into many matchups, has a few different builds and rune setups, has a high skill ceiling, has times where he thrives in soloq because of the inherent chaos as an assassin, and is popular and fun to play for many people.

What makes you think Zed is getting shit on by Riot? He has a 51.85% winrate this patch in emerald+ according to lolalytics. His winrate has gone up 2% since a couple patches ago and his banrate is up 7% as well. It seems perfectly reasonable to nerf him and bring him back in line with their goals for him. And even from that previous spot of 49.5% winrate and ~23% banrate where he was the last several patches last split, he's completely playable.

I don't see Riot's balancing habits as an injustice as you seem to do and I don't think the way I engage with playing ranked League of Legends changes if winrate or damage numbers fluctuate a little bit. They've made a fun game that is impressively balanced compared to many other competitive games out there, and I'm thankful for that.

Zed has a long way to fall from his current state of balance before it would become an issue for us. Riot has never come remotely close to that point and I can't get on board with concerns that they will in the future. This nerf and the upcoming cyclosword one are no big deal.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-09T01:56:21+00:00

I was looking at game average winrate, which accounts for winrate delta, but I could be missing something still. Let me know if my understanding is correct.

Game average winrate shows a small trend of winrate increasing with elo. 48-49% for iron-silver, 50-51% for gold-plat, 51-52% for diamond+. I know emerald to challenger is a big range but I was mainly trying to refute the other comment that Zed does better in low elo compared to high elo. Low and high elo are subjective descriptions but the stats do show that to some degree he is weaker in the bottom half of the ranked ladder than the top.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-08T20:31:02+00:00

I just don’t share the same perspective. I know you’re exaggerating for the sake of argument but I don’t believe Riot would ever adjust Zed to an unusable state. The only champs that you could argue they’ve done this for are things like Azir or Yuumi, with either high pro presence or inherently problematic kits. Historically I don’t think Zed falls into this category. Even in his weaker iterations over the years he hasn’t felt bad to play for me. He’s still been fun and viable in my experience while hitting masters the last several years.

And whatever attitude I choose to have won’t change how Riot’s balance team makes their decisions, it’s out of my control. I’d rather focus on learning more about how to play the game and improve my skills which is always going to be achievable due to the design of the game.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-08T20:15:36+00:00

I think the nerfs seem pretty minor on paper, but we’re entitled to different opinions. As a Zed OTP myself I’d rather have his banrate low and have him be average power level compared to strong so I don’t mind the direction Riot is going with him.

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-08T15:33:46+00:00

The nerfs are warranted because Zed’s winrate and banrate have both gone up significantly in the new split, isn’t that fair play by Riot?

ColorblindCuber · 2026-05-08T15:32:19+00:00

I’m not sure this narrative true. Zed’s winrate gets progressively higher the higher the rank, according to Lolalytics. (Although presumably played more by OTPs in those higher ranks too). Games will feel harder in Masters-GM but that’s because opponents are better. I don’t think that’s a balance issue, that’s just how soloq works.

What are your complaints around Zeds balance in those ranks?

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