devtrackers.gg
I've posted about this before, but I'm kind of amazed by the extent to which this champ appears to have been forgotten. I don't think he's in drastic need of changes, but he's pretty much just not played anymore in mid or support, and I think part of this is because the champ has received no attention.
Zilean was reworked into his current form on patch 5.4. On patch 5.21, he received his current passive, Time in a Bottle, which allows him to grant a level up to an ally when he's accumulated enough stacks of experience. On patch 5.22, his mana regen was buffed. On patch 5.23, his ult was made to feel slightly better by making sure it always gave a minimum of 15% of the experience he had stored.
Since then, his only changes have been system wide updates, like the mage wide mana changes and the durability update.
I would love to see this champ get some attention. His passive is isn't very good and also feels terrible to cast (you need to be next to the applicable ally, you're rooted in place, and it's easy to cast accidentally). His itemization doesn't feel great in mid or support. Somehow, people will always say he feels broken to play against, but nobody wants to play him, which doesn't seem like a great combination.
I don't know exactly what he needs. It does feel like if he were released today, he'd either have a more impactful passive, or his W would somehow be his passive and he'd have a more impactful W.
To wrap, I'll repost a list of things that have happened since Zilean last got some attention, to show how long it's been:
- Zilean's last update was Illaoi's release patch. Jhin, Aurelion Sol, and Taliyah were not yet in the game. 35 champions have been released in this time.
- Dominion still existed as a game mode.
- Poppy, Shen, and Taric had not yet been reworked into their current forms.
- Doublelift's departure from CLG had been announced, but he had not yet played for TSM. CLG was the only team he'd played for in LCS at this time.
- Bjergsen had only played one professional game of Zilean. Of his 48 career Zilean games, 47 have seen the champ essentially untouched.
- CoreJJ was still an AD Carry.
- Groovy Zilean had not yet been ruined in the splash art adjustment on patch 6.8 when the Chinese splash arts and rest of the world splash arts were made the same.
- There was that one patch where no farm Kleptomancy Zilean top was a thing.
- Zilean went over 1600 days without a skin, and then went over 1000 days AGAIN without a skin, somehow reaching the 1000 day mark twice.
- Barack Obama still had another year left in his presidency.