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.

Zed is still looking a bit worse for wear and is deserving of a shot in the arm. We want to give him more damage that asks him to risk his body or put his shadow on cooldown in order to access it.

Last patch’s Zed buffs gave him the power level we wanted but we want to further adjust his power curve. We’d like if his strengths were expressed more in lane dominance and less about being a late game scaler. As a stretch goal, it’d also be cool to see him in Pro. So we’re adjusting his Q to be stronger for the early and mid game and slightly bringing down his R frequency to bring down his late game power in his typical normal and Ranked games.

Zed's been stuck in the shadows recently (and not in the good way), so we're looking to give him a bit more of an edge in the early game by sharpening his shuriken and giving him a bit more combo power with his E.

While the vast majority of Zed players max Q first and E second, W max second is currently better and is growing in popularity among high-skill brackets of play. This is giving Zed expectation-breaking ability uptime, as he's also acquiring plenty of haste through his item builds. Since we're addressing the items with the 2024 gameplay changes, we're looking to nerf his incentive for maxing W directly. This is mostly intended to nerf the W max second optimization while not affecting the majority of Zed players, as they put their second point in W at level 14 when they already have a lot of haste.

In 12.23's hotfix, we hit Zed's late game E - Shadow Slash cooldown along with a few other nerfs to bring down his winrate and ban rate. These succeeded, but left Zed's late-game combos feeling pretty awkward and eliminated some of his cooler shadow shenanigans. We think his winrate is in a pretty good spot for a quick, combo-centric assassin, so we're adding a small nerf in exchange for reverting the original cooldown change.

As a system, energy is intended to give champions spikes of power that fall off with extended combat times. Given the current state of the game and more extended fights, champions that use energy as a resource have found it more difficult to find success before their energy depletes (note: this section is repeated for energy users in this patch). In Zed’s case, we’re lowering the energy cost on his E and giving his shadow a little freedom so it doesn’t always need to walk beside him.

Zed has been creeping up from the shadows in terms of both power and ban rate. We're tapping him back down in a way that will require him to make better use of his base kit to secure kills.

Zed's another assassin we're attempting to introduce into the jungle meta. Our buffs to Zed jungle earlier in the season didn't really land, so we're taking another stab at making him viable in the role by buffing his passive's damage vs monsters again.

Once Zed gets some items under his belt, his kill pattern becomes too reliable, especially for a champion with such flexible mobility tools to slip in and out of the shadows. We're asking the master of shadows to master more shurikens to secure his kills. His ult cooldown is also getting nerfed late to match its power level more appropriately.