Talk:Zyra/@comment-26370304-20151230222840/@comment-24385282-20151231043723

I don't think she is cancer, but she definitely has some problems. If E is at around rank 2 and you land it, you get to land every single other thing you have plus summon 2 plants of your choice that are empowered by your ultimate. For someone 100% skillshot-oriented, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be able to land your main damaging spell, a knockup that deals damage, and summon 2 empowered minions directly under the knocked up champion just for landing 1 of your spells. It's a massive amount of damage that, just for hitting your E, is impossible to miss despite being all skillshots that are balanced around the chance that you have to miss.

Think about it this way: if something can miss, it's bound to be more powerful than something that can't miss. For the sake of the argument, let's say abilities that can miss will deal 2x the amount of damage of an ability that can't. Well, let's say that every 12-7 seconds, you get the opportunity to remove your chance of missing 2 otherwise-miss-able abilities. This means those abilities are essentially dealing double the damage they should be, because they're balanced around being to possible to miss, but there's no way to miss them in your situation.

But Zyra is very difficult to balance around this. Let's say, knowing the above info, that you reduce these abilities to 1.5x damage. Well, now if you miss E you're underpowered, because your abilities are dealing only 3/4 of the damage they should be - plus, if you're not good at landing E, you're at an even further disadvantage because then you can't land your other skills, as you now have a chance to miss them. And if you are good at landing E, then you'll feel un-rewarded for landing your other spells because they do less damage than they "should" (being "miss-able"), even though they actually deal more than they should if you do land E.

There's a couple of other available solutions. You could make E harder to land, but that would make her impossible for the players who had trouble landing her E, like I mentioned in the above paragraph, and increasing her damage to compensate would just worsen the problem she's already facing. Doing so without increasing her damage would be a well-suited nerf to players who actually can land her E well, but if you use Frost Queen's, E is nearly impossible to land anyway so it would be essentially no change if your target already has some CC on them, which comes with an item that basically every Zyra player gets anyway. Basically, she either has the problem made worse or ends up in pretty much the same spot she was already in.

Imo the solution to this problem is reduce Q's damage but increase its range and make it targetable. Yes, this goes against what Riot has been doing recently, making targetable stuff skillshots to reward players for having good skill and landing skillshots. But, like I said, in Zyra's case Q is already not a skillshot if you can land E, which you can almost definitely do with Frost Queen's, which can't be missed if you're in range to E anyway. This means her damage will be balanced around the requirements that are actually there at the cost of making the champion's Q poke easier to land (but doing less damage in the process). All in all I think that would be the perfect solution.