Talk:Zac/@comment-8506165-20141213034041/@comment-8506165-20150111045331

Tanks don't need to have damage scaling off their tank stats; indeed, many don't. Off the top of my head... Alistar, Amumu, Leona, Maokai... hell, Braum's only health scaling is terrible. What all of those do have, though, is heavy CC or team utility, strong defensive steroids or high base damages. Whether Riot want Zac as a tank or as an AP bruiser, he needs something to make him more relevant in fights once he's blown his big engage. I'd say better base damages or scalings is the easiest thing to playtest to achieve this, depending on whether you want him building more tanky or AP-heavy. It's either that or some sort of minor kit rework to actually give him relevant CC once his E and R are on cooldown - the fact that he currently lacks it is what makes me think of him more as an initiating fighter than a full-on tank, given that he's completely irrelevant if he's dealing low damage if they're not up. Unless he's just too tricky to kill à la Dr. Mundo - you can't ignore Mundo or he'll sit on your carry's face on full health and bring them down through sheer determination - but that goes back to my point about Zac's now unreliable sustain being the nail in his coffin. That said, I suppose a health ratio on W would achieve much the same thing as what I'm suggesting. Maybe have the flat damage scale AP and the %health damage scale with Zac's health, so he has to choose between better squishy-killing power and more target-agnostic damage for general teamfight impact? I think a base-damage buff to make him less useless when behind and less overpowering when ahead would be better, but... this is another option, I suppose.

(Ability range scaling with health is intriguing, but I'm not sure it'd help. E range doesn't really need to be higher. Could also cause problems with toplane Zac getting too much zoning power off building early health, if it affects Q. Given that many of Riot's Zac nerfs were aimed at his toplane presence, I can't see them doing anything that might potentially bring it back up to god tier.)

"As for toning down the knockback of his ult, that's a fine line. While Zac loses damage consistency from the knockback, it is meant to split up an enemy team so the squishier targets can be singled out without difficulty."

It's a pretty inconsistent knockback, though. If I want to reliably split up an enemy team with a tanky top-lane/jungle champion, why wouldn't I just pick Gragas? His ult is just better for it, and he packs more in-fight CC and natural tankiness. And he doesn't have to throw himself into the middle of a team to split them up. Also, the fact that Zac currently launches himself at an enemy to throw them out of his range seems counterproductive. He should work more like a Malph than a Gragas, imo - no-one critiques the Malphite ult for cc-ing people on the spot. Indeed, if Malphite's ult threw people away from him when he hit it, he'd never be able to combo his E off it and that'd be pretty bad for him. Zac's clearly meant to use his W while bouncing and his AOE abilities afterwards, but at the moment his first bounce on any target makes that combo impossible.

I think I saw a redpost saying that Riot were going to look at the ult change, though, so there's hope. I'm not the only one to have complained about it.