Talk:Zilean/@comment-20434720-20140520011259

Anyone else find that when playing Zilean, your teammates manage to lose lanes actually MORE easily than when you're anyone else? It's funny, because your passive should be handing them a free lane if they pay attention to amounts of xp and stuff.

On a different note, if Zilean needs changes (and I think he does), they shouldn't necessarily be kit changes, but perhaps some number tweaks could be tried. The main problems as Zilean are:

1. Your Q's mana cost is huge. I get that it's targeted and high-damage. But really? 130 mana? You have more kill potential on enemies with AD Zilean, and you aren't bullying anybody out of lane because you WILL drain yourself out of mana by the time they're at half health.

2. Your E has a FLAT mana cost that seems about as high as most champions' MAX RANK mana costs.

3. Your W has the most ridiculously sharp scaling on its cooldown. It won't come anywhere near close to that constant barrage of spells always up until you get rank 4-5 in it.

4. Your kit's cooldowns are balanced around an ability that doesn't get near its full potential until 2/3 of the way into the game. Ryze's cooldowns are balanced around flat CDR, and it works, because it's his passive and the flat CDR from it doesn't scale with ranks/levels. Same with Skarner. Zilean, on the other hand, has to max W first to get effective cooldowns *close* to other champions', and only by max rank will effective cooldowns become significantly shorter than other champions'.

5. Your passive doesn't affect you. REALLY? Old Janna, old TF, they all at least benefited from their passives, but Zilean's only affects his teammates? What is the reasoning behind this?

Zilean has a strong kit. But his early game, unlike other utility-oriented picks (Soraka, Lulu), is AWFUL. He needs a stacked tear, athene's, and probably ROA for good measure before he has the mana to support his full potential.

Support Zilean, likewise, suffers from "I picked a scaling champion and the enemy champion picked a kill-everything-now-champion that stays useful" syndrome. Yes, you can perma-slow enemies and perma-haste allies... with 4 items and level 18. Yes, you'll go 0/10 against competent enemies most of the time (unless you have an ADC willing to play around your champion, which you won't) and lose the game by 20 minutes. Yes, you can bomb the enemy ADC from out of auto attack range. Yes, you will go out of mana by the time they're missing 1/3 of their health.

And by the way... as I have learned the hard way... don't take spellthief's. It's an okay item, it gives more theoretical gold gen, but you NEED the mana regen and CDR really badly. And the passive effect triggers up to 3 times in 30 seconds... which coincides exactly with your bomb cooldown. Meaning you need to be using bombs every time it's up (lol... mana wut?) or be hitting 2 or more enemies with each bomb (competent enemies don't let that happen). And while in theory you CAN get the gold from auto attack harass, no competent ADC is going to let you get within range of them or their support without hitting you hard with an auto attack. And besides, with your trash-tier early game, you shouldn't be going for kills early anyway.

TL;DR - Zilean has a pretty cool kit with a lot of potential, but his mana-gating and, perhaps more importantly, his early-game cooldowns just restrict him too much.