Talk:Zyra/@comment-26262251-20190418072921/@comment-26808509-20190425171357

It's not only the to be honest. Someone once said to me that Zyra doesn't scale like a traditional mage, instead she scales like an assassin.

If you look at her winrate in relation to the minute in the game, she starts off well, has a big spike in the midgame (around 15 to 20 minutes) and then falls off hard (that's a winrate of 54% at 20 minutes and at 30% its only 46%). And the obvious reason for that are her mediocre AP scalings on her basic abilities.

However, it goes way deeper than this. One thing a lot of assassins have in common is that they have on ability that either has no damage at all and only provides utility or has a very, very poor increase of base damage, so more points into it don't make a huge difference. What that means is that after level 13, when the second ability is maxed, they don't gain more damage like most other champions, especially mages, do. From that point on they stop scaling with champion levels. The only thing they gain from additional levels are base stats.

Which leads me to the second point: Zyra's base stats. They are very unlikely for a mage and play into her 'early strong - late game weak' situation. She starts off with a decent amount of HP and a very high amount of armor. But her per-level gains are so low, that she ends up with one of the lowest health pools amongst mages at level 18 and her armor value is mediocre aswell.

So if they really wanted to "fox" Zyra, in that they give her a more natural powercurve, they would have to start at these two points. Zyra's problem is that her early is so oppressively strong, that she just dominates the botlane from the support position, while her sclaing is too low to be worth being picked up on a solo lane.

If they unified her base stats with other mage champions (less health early on, more later on, less armor early on, bigger growth) and introduced a better scaling after level 13, she would be a lot better in midlane, while also still being a good support, tho less oppressive during lane and with more options in the later stages of the game.

The best idea how to do the second that I've read until now is a new  passive that gives her flat additional damage on her plants. Kind of like Aurelion Sol's  and  interaction. His passive has a base damage that is dependant on champion level and his W give him flat damage depending on ability rank. If they reduced Zyra's plant damage per level, but added a W passive that gives her flat damage on them, they could give her a more natural power curve. Her plants would deal a bit less damage in the early and mid game, but grow a bit stronger (stronget than now that is) if you start putting points into W.

This would also give Zyra players the option to max W first or second for a DPS focused build.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on what Zyra needs right now. Not that we will get anything.