ZED MID Guide - How To Carry With ZED Step by Step - Detailed Guide

hey everyone and welcome to another video so today i'm incredibly excited to share with you my take on zed now over the past two weeks i have played a ridiculous amount of this champion i think i've played at least around 110 games straight of zed between all of my accounts sitting at around diamond one low master tier level to really try and understand all of the intricacies involved with being consistent with zed and also you know trying to find out all the details in terms of what is the difference between the average zed player in gold or platinum comparatively to the high level zed players that we see on twitch with the likes of z99 and ll stylish or laceration all those really great zed players now i've watched a ridiculous amount of vods i've spoken to one tricks i've tried to find out all those little details so this is a very detailed guide there's a lot of information in it so you might feel a little bit overwhelmed so i would recommend splitting up the viewing of this guide over a few days or at least potentially even a few weeks now before we get into the guide guys just a little quick announcement we've actually hit 8 000 members we're about to hit 8 000 members in our discord and we're going to do a little bit of a community event so if you want to check that out head over to the event announcements channel over in the discord there's a link in the description below towards the discord it's a great little community for any of you guys wanting to improve at mid lane so just a little preface here before we get into the details guys zed is the definition of all the small little things matter you cannot have a very blase casual relaxed mentality when playing this champion otherwise you're gonna really find yourself being that coin flip zed player who just wins one loses one wins one loses one and you know you're never really gonna find your stride and really find consistency within your ranked solo queue matches zed also has an extremely high skill cap so if you're not willing to put in the games with this champion again you're not going to find any consistency and again i'm going to show you how i picked up this champion later on within this video and lastly guys please take your time with this guide if you try to focus on all every single little thing i talk about in this guide at once your brain is literally going to explode so i also have a little slideshow a little slide story within this presentation describing how i would recommend picking up a champion like zed so let's begin by breaking down all the differing room pages you can opt in for when playing zed we're gonna go row by row really talking about the comparisons between all of the options so if you're not really interested in any of the details you just want to know what page you should take if you're a beginner zed this is my go-to page guys electrocute taste of blood uh zombie ward here with ultimate hunter transcendent scorch double adaptive into either armor or mr if you're a beginner zed player i think that's a really really solid page if you want to understand more i'm going to describe it and we're going to go through all the differing options here guys so starting over on the left hand corner electrocute for obvious reasons synergizes very well with zed's burst combo great for just any burst oriented champion now the second row here the first option you have to make do you want to be more of a burst i guess feast or famine zed player or do you want to play a little bit more calculated a little bit more like a poke control mage which i will it sounds weird in reference to z but i will talk about that later in this video but for me personally i love taste of blood because it feels like i can easily take a trade and just heal back up slowly with taste of blood because my combo is quite reliable to hit so i can actually quite reliably proc taste of blood and also i found in the laning phase because i have no manner if i actually just slowly take short trades over a period of time not only am i going to make them go um i'm also going to get the health advantage with taste of blood so it's just a little preference thing there although if you're smurfing in low elo probably sudden impacts a lot better for those cheesy level 3 level 4 burst kills things like that now this next row is a little bit controversial i've seen zed players do a range of different options here z9 obviously really likes zombie ward here now the great thing about this one is that it synergizes very well with humble glaive if you decide to opt in for humble grave as zed and we'll go into the itemization for me i actually tried this build and i'm actually not a fan of humble grave at all at least for the average zed player until you're literally at a challenger level um but we'll go into that later but in saying that even if you don't build umbralglave you can a lot of the time when you're playing zed you are going to be swapping to sweeper at least after your first item so you can definitely be stacked you know start stacking this up and obviously with pink wars and things like that but if you don't really feel confident and clearing wards and swapping to sweeper and that sort of thing you know eyeball collection is equally viable then on the last row here again this is a very controversial thing as well now you see a lot of zed players especially z99 go ultimate hunter which for obvious reasons makes a lot of sense in regards to zed's identity as a champion being quite ultimate reliant although i somewhat disagree with that statement which we'll cover again later on but something to note here again you're pretty much guaranteeing to get a kill at least in the first eight minutes of the game or around that number and you're gonna be starting to stack up this ultimate hunter and the more availability you have towards your ultimate the more kill threat the more kill opportunities there will be but on the flip side ravenous hunter is very viable it synergizes very well with your passive auto attack as well for healing i believe you get like 20 hp per auto attack passive auto attack things like that and especially when you're in the mid game you can easily get chunked out in the side lane um and it's going to be really hard to heal up but if you want to be more of a side landing zed i actually feel like ravenous hunter might be for you um z99 is obviously a little bit of a montage player very faced high elo korean solo queue so the game's very fast paced if you find yourself playing a lot slower games of zed i actually feel like ravenous hunter might be better for you again i would recommend trying both and figuring out and actually feeling them out for you for me i like ultimate hunter but you know ravenosanta extremely viable option and i don't recommend guys you blindly follow a one-trick zed's runes you need to find what works for you your interpretation of the champion don't just blindly follow z99 i actually suffered the consequences of that when i first picked up zed now again on the left on the right hand side sorry we have transcendence and scorch now i like this specific setup because cdr is really really great for zed and more importantly even if you go above the cdr cap it turns into adaptive forces completely fine but scorch i love i really really love scorch because it feels like it's such a reliable room to proc now scorch is good on any i guess fast-paced early game champion that can reliably proc it that's why you see it sometimes with orianna who can reliably proc it with the q or champions like zoe who can reliably proc it with q and the passive auto attack things like that zed i feel like you can reliably proc it um and it's great for poking out your enemy getting them in kill throat range for when you hit level six or at least chunking them out getting a bit of an xp advantage creating that kill threat at level six now just directing directing your attention over the right hand side here there are a lot of high elo zed players that also opt in for inspiration secondary with this electrocute tree faker is one of the big advocates for this page as well and the great thing about it cosmic insight makes a lot of sense because you can utilize flash and ignite a lot so extra summon spell cdr is very very helpful helpful sorry and cdr in general because it makes you get to 45 cdr which is very great on z as well because the more cdr the more access to your abilities more mobility with your w more access to your ultimate that that sort of thing and magical forward can be extremely good on zed because you want to get and spend all of that gold put all that gold into your first key item spike ideally and the great thing about this one it's going to allow you to get to your yo moves first item way earlier because otherwise you're going to have to be spending that 300 gold onto your tier one boot which is going to slow down that first item spike so again this is a very very viable option yes you have less poke in lane but i feel like it is equally a viable room page for you guys so that's something i would also experiment with um and then decide for you is the poke is this extra poke damage with scorch even worth it um that sort of thing now moving on to the next room page z9 likes to go this page versus very this is just the same one on the left hand side but on the right hand side we're taking precision here instead of sorcery or inspiration with presence of mind and legend tenacity now watching a lot of z99 especially he likes to go this page was very heavy cc oriented comps that are still relatively squishy so champions like lisandra um or some other ones syndra things like that he does go this sometimes now i have tried this setup i am actually a massive critic i hate it i think this is trash i actually really really don't like this setup now for the av i'm talking on behalf of any i guess zed player up to at least low master tier i don't really feel like you're gonna get much value from this i feel like legend tenacity yes it's okay and it's nice but i ever feel i always feel like if you're in a position to get cc'd and that really matters to you you're either going to die or you're not going to get the damage off anyway i don't feel like this is the be-all end-all i would way rather the extra cdr because cd are so important from either the inspiration tree or the sorcery tree or for me personally i really love the scorch poke damage so when i play champions like uh against syndra and zoe i personally feel like the scorch damage really adds up and allows me to have more kill threat than i would otherwise who cares if i can defend against them i want to kill them i'm zed at the end of the day yes presence of mine does feel a little bit nicer around 15 minutes in the game once you've got one or two kills things like that but i'm just not a fan i also see him sometimes go legend alacrity when versing um some other compositions with less cc but he still wants person's mind so more for extended fights so if you want to be playing less for bursts but more for extended fights he does grow this sometimes again i don't really understand that because i'm like why wouldn't you just go sorcery secondary for those of you guys unless you're versing heavy cc even then i would not recommend this page i would recommend testing it to feel it out let me know how it feels for you personally i'm not a fan whatsoever now the last page here is the conqueror page again i'm a massive critic of this page i don't really like it at all i think there are some situations that call for it i think the page the match-ups or the games that call for it sorry sometimes when you're versing things like set mid um you know mordekaiser made like a lot of those bruiser mids you can opt in for conquer you can also opt in for conquer versus champions like echo because you can't really burst them and they're long extended fights so very tanky team compositions that you really can't burst this is a viable setup for zed but again what i've realized is that even if reversing say three tanky members a lot of the time i would still rather the electrocute and just be that champion that's gonna delete the enemy a to carry i feel like as soon as i opt in for this page my early game skirmishing goes out the window my lanings got gone out the window um and i have way less threat onto the enemy 80 carry it's more of a sustained damage bruiser shredding zed setup again i would highly recommend testing it for you guys out there in those bruiser oriented games get your opinion on it get a feel for it but again it's a completely different build it's a completely different play style you're less about burst you're more about using your w and your alt for dodging cc and getting the max amount of damage off in long extended combos your laning trades change it's not something you should you will be able to quickly alternate between okay here i'm gonna play electric now i'm gonna play conqueror but i play the exact same you're not gonna have the same success doing that sort of thing with zed so the way it works concrete ever since the conqueror nerfs as well i think it really really hurt i think pre-conquer on earth um i think this was a very viable thing for zed but post conquer enough i don't think it's that strong at all anymore i actually don't take it at all i think there's maybe like a few games where i really started to take it at the start of playing zed but then i just hated it really don't like it but the way it works obviously conquerors stack it up in fights extended flights with bruises presence of mind legends tenacity you can also go legend alacrity with this page of reversing not much cc crew degra uh taste of blood ultimate hunter that sort of thing nothing too special i'm not really going to talk about this specific style of playing zed in this guide either um if you want to know more about this specific style i would watch more of z99s stream now for summoners guys super super simple you're always going to be going flash ignite pretty straightforward i don't think i really need to spend too much time there now for the builds so let's start over on the left hand side long sword into refillable or um hp bots here so this is the first controversial thing and preference thing that you guys really need to test both to see what works for you now z9 most of the time goes refillable although in heavy poke match-ups he will go the health pots here for the extra sustain in lane now refillable is great when you can get away with it but for me personally and speaking to a one trick we have over in oceania which i'll refer to later on in the video as well he also prefer always takes the three pots now i've actually turned and converted to the three pot goblin i'm the three-pot goblin now i never ever ever take refillable anymore and the reason being is that the way i like to play zed if you want to play zed relatively fast and aggressive in the early portion of the game which i personally like doing then these health bots really allow you to heavy trade it allows you to maybe play a little bit more aggressive than you would otherwise it allows you to stay in lane longer to get to guarantee that you can get a really solid first base and it just gives you more options because let's just say you stay in lane for a considerable amount of time trying to burn through the enemy mages manner now if you take health pots you can stay in lane three health poles you can stay in lane for a very long time and the great thing about that if a skirmish then breaks out at five minutes you're staying late for five minutes you're definitely i'd say 95 of the time you're going to have a resource advantage and you can basically guarantee that in which you get a really nice 2v2 or whatever reason um and it just it's just more opportunities i feel like there's just more opportunities when starting the three health plots so for you guys i'll try both and really get a feel for both of them and i just had to do that as well when i learned zed now first item always when we're going serrated dirk into your moves yomoos is absolutely the quintessential bread and butter item for zed now it's super important for so many reasons first reason obviously cdr gives you a great amount of burst but the main reason is the the active on it the movement speed now the great thing about movement speed is that it's so versatile it allows you to get to skirmishes faster you can use it to get back to lane to generate more tempo you can use it to gap close so you don't have to begin the fight with w you can actually start getting range to start the fight with r which is absolutely crucial if you want to do the triple shuriken uh combo which is the highest damage combo so there's a lot of reasons why yomus is the best more mobility dodge skill shots get into the fight play fights better all of these reasons um yo muse is very very strong is your bread and butter core item once you have this item you absolutely pop in now this is where things again get a little bit controversial and i see a lot of questions saying you know which item do you go second now i've tried all the different variations and this is my conclusion that i've actually reached now i would say 90 percent of the time or 85 percent of the time dust blade is going to be your best choice if you're versing a relatively not a super tanky team uh dustbite is great because it makes your threat through the absolute roof and the great thing once you get both of these items the enemy 80 carry cannot play the game anymore you don't even need you only need to hit one shuriken so you do i'll talk about a combo that we'll do later as soon as you have these two items you're gonna need to hit one shuriken e auto ignite and you can just pop the enemy 80 carry they don't even they just can't live anymore that's what that's the luxury of having these two items the burst with these two items is absolutely amazing i i usually build those two items 90 of the games um really really solid now there are watching z99 the way he likes to play zed is sometimes if he doesn't have enough gold to finish his yo-mus he'll actually turn the serrated dirk into a humble grave because it's a lot cheaper considerably cheaper than uranus but it obviously has less damage and less utility without the movement speed sorry so um if you like to play more of a roam centric uh maybe you can't kill the enemy laner or you've already got really far ahead for some reason the enemy screwed up you're two and zero already um you can go unbelieve first item or even your moves into umbleglaive as a second item to translate your lead and be a more roam centric zed player now i actually don't like that rome centric zed style i don't think i think it's quite niche to high elo korean games and even then i feel like it's a very risky way and you've got to be extremely competent at zed to pull it off reliably i think again for 95 percent of people even in high elo and na or eu any of these regions you would be better off with these two items if you want to play the roam centric just go this one just personally not a fan now if you are versing a lot of early armor stacking maybe you have a very heavy ad composition you can actually just sit on the last whisper you don't need to upgrade it to the lord dominic's or whatever just sit on the last whisper and the great thing about this will give you quite a bit of extra burst a bit more kill thread of the skirmishes versus tanky junglers which i also do sometimes but again i would say ninety percent here five percent at five percent but actually to be honest this could actually be like eighty percent of the time and this is like maybe i'd say fifteen percent of the time and maybe this five percent for you you may never build this second and i completely understand if you're the type of player that would never build it makes a lot of sense again i'll try out all of them and get a feel for it again you need to try out all of them to get a feel for how the i what the items actually enable you to do now the third row here this is where this is in my my take on the third item this is where you most likely need a little bit of durability so let's talk about these items let's say so the most common one i usually go is here moves into dustblade into this one or this one edge of knight or last whisper if i'm versing a lot of armor stacking i'll go last whisper here as my third item but if i don't need that or i'm really far ahead and people just don't have enough gold to spend it on armor or i just want to be i'm versing a very squishy 80 carry in mid laner and i don't need that armor pen at all going this third item edge of knight is really great because it gives you durability what are these two items lack what a dust blade and yomos lack they give you no hp and they give you no resistances the great thing about this row here between either black cleaver or edge of knight is it starts to give you a little bit of hp and especially with this item gives you that spell shield um it can give you a lot more durability and skirmishes so if you're versing any burst oriented composition this is where that has like a lot of burst this is where you probably need to build one of these two items now if reversing i would say any a lot i guess champions that have projectile threat abilities or cc abilities whether it's a nautilus or a zoe or a syndra or an ash or like with for the ash ultimate zoe bubble those sorts of abilities very i guess linear projectile things that can lock you down edge of night can be an absolute game changer and can literally win you the game the only downside guys is that it does not give you cdr so it's incredibly important to understand that it does not give you cdr so you are it is coming out a bit of a loss now there are some z players that live by black cleaver third item again it feels sometimes a little slow to build and a little bit unnecessary because it's not a very burst oriented it's not a very good snowballing item it's kind of like well the game's even i'm not super far ahead but i'm not super far behind i need i can't and i need a bit of hp a bit of survivability then i'll go black cleaver um but the great thing about black cleaver gives you cdr as well which works really well with the rest of your items and you have transcendence turns into adaptive force that sort of thing but um actually a lot of the time then if i don't need that that durability which is quite often if i'm quite far ahead i'll just go straight into last whisper and then i just you know absolutely pop people so that's basically take on things and eventually you want to upgrade that and just stock standard itemization there now quickly for early recalls guys genuine if you can't afford your serrated dirk then just sit on the long swords or tier 1 boots of reversing a very skill shot oriented champion to help you dodge your skill shots whether it's syndra zoe xerath etc now for boots uh as you've probably seen if you watch z99 stream he basically only goes i only in boots of lucidity for the extra cdr and the extra access to your summoner spells which is a very viable way of playing zed but on the flip side guys you are incredibly squishy you're very easy to lock down without mercks especially when you're versing heavy cc it's a very high skill cap way of playing zed for the average player this is where i actually thought blindly i went into blindly learning zed at only building this and actually bit me in the ass if you're a beginner zed player this is not what i would recommend at all if you're very once you're all very competent on the champion and you're consistently pushing the pace of the game go go go utilizing your alt off cooldown always looking for opportunities potentially even synergizing very well with humble grave translating pressure clearing vision etc then irony and boots of lucidity are very good but um i would say again for the average zed player going tarbees or mercs is very valuable and it's actually a one trick in our server who's very very good at zed and he basically never builds irony in boots he only builds pretty much mercs or tabi's um i found myself having a bit more success recently only building mercs or tarbys as well i found like this just makes me a little bit squishy and then especially once you if you have black cleaver edge and knight combined with mercs with tubbies you actually are quite tanky surprisingly tanky so that's a um another little thing there guys nothing too complex builds are pretty straightforward note guys if you do want to play the conqueror build i would watch z99 stream i'm not going to talk about the conqueror's setup um because i'm not a really i'm not a big believer in it so head over to stream if you want to learn more about the conqueror setup now for the first combo we need to talk about we need to talk about a lot of combos and i don't really talk about this on any other champion but for z specifically it's incredibly important to understand the combos how they work why they're important when to use them in each situation really break down all the micro of this champion because if you don't understand the micro of this champion how to optimize its kit his kit sorry um again you're gonna have no consistency in your game so the first thing we need to talk about is the z w e q combo this is literally if you're trying to learn zed if you can master this combo it's literally 80 of the champion you're literally nearly there you're that close to fully mastering the champion this is i'd say 80 percent of zed now you can be bad mechanically you can have slow combos it doesn't really matter if you are great at this combo it will compensate largely for the majority of it so the amount of weq combos that you hit in lane is directly proportional to the likelihood of winning the game it's literally this important if you hit three of these combos in a row you're basically one lane sometimes there's even two sometimes and for people like z99 he's so incredibly good at hitting this combo that's how he wins his lane or that's how he creates kill through that's how he can get away with his laning phases with z because he's so accurate with his combos so as a result i'm going to go a little bit deeper on how we can increase our chances of hitting this combo and what does it actually look like so i've got a little clip here let's actually look at a few clips and then we'll go through the tips one by one so let's actually look at a few of these videos guys so the first one bang let me actually just play this again whoops let's just play this again here so z we bang next closing the angle bang another one beautiful look at that hit three in a row look at this i hit three in a row and look at look at velcro's hp bang if i miss all of these the lane's completely different now you may say that curtis calm down like it's not that big it's just a few combat it is so incredibly important it changes the game it literally changes the entire outlook of the game so let's break down what a few of these tips how can you increase your chances of hitting the combo tip number one hold for around 0.5 seconds before throwing the cube because the way the e works so you do your w actually pause it on the frame where i do it so i throw out my my w e like that so i hit the w e it gets the slow now if you rush it if you insta cast q which is all the noob zeds do they insta cast q it's very unlikely that you're gonna hit it because um again you don't really know which way they're dodging and not really utilizing the slow so if you wait for around 0.5 seconds you wait for it because the slow is around 1.5 seconds i believe if you just wait for 0.5 seconds you will see their path you'll see the direction that you're going they're going and you'll be able to hit it now so that's the first very important thing never i would say very very rarely instacast do the combo the only situations where you do the instacast we q combo is if they're literally cc'd or you know 100 they can't dodge maybe they're against the wall or something like that tip number two aim to the front right or front left hand corner of their character then force them into one direction so look what i do here let's actually play this one out again so look at this so i i throw the the the combo onto the bottom like the kind of like diagonally on the like at a 45 degree angle on his character so let's say this is this this is his character as a circle i'm trying to do it like on this corner here then i path my character this way because look he's not going to run into the shadow he's only when you put it on that corner he's only going to run one direction he's only roughly going to go this direction so now by putting the shadow on one corner of the champion of the the character's model then he can only really go in one direction so you're kind of for ushering him into one direction so it's very easy to hit the both the cues so let's look at it again i do it in every single situation so i i walk up put it on one corner and then cue to that direction that he has to go look every single example here i'm trying to do it one corner then usher him onto one direction then i throw the combo and again if you follow these steps you will drastically increase your chances of hitting the combo step number three avoid clicking forward and taking free damage another new mistake which you'll probably make for the first 20 games of zed because you're focusing so much attention directing so much attention onto doing the queue then eating waiting for the slow hitting the you're stepping in that direction and you get hitting the cue combo you're gonna find yourself naturally walking forward because you're not thinking about your where your character is in relation to this whole combo so look at this so i do that combo notice how i didn't i actually went back a little bit and repositioned because i what you'll find is when you verse maybe a lot of these lower cooldown majors or or champions that can dive back onto you if you mindlessly just click forward you'll find yourself running really close to their character and they can just trade back onto you really easily because this combo has such a high range you want to abuse that the i would say the example of this to to compare is like orianna q if you throw your orianna q you want to stay at that max range because you don't want to go too far which you know get in their range so they can engage onto you you want to make sure you're abusing that range so i know it sounds a little bit weird but you'll notice in all these combos i try to avoid just autopilot running for like that that's bad that was a bad that was actually bad in terms of tip number three this was because this was one of the the the i would say one of the earlier games of me playing zed see how i keep running forward there i keep running forward so i overstep you don't want to overset like that because then velcros could easily trade back now that was a little bit better kind of like micro back and forth i didn't really give give vocals that that um that entrance now the last tip here guys is actually think of w as a damage ability in itself a lot of people only direct attention on to the queue that they think of the q accuracy which is you know i would say a lot of where your brain power should be but you should also to help you land the combo you should also really be thinking about the w the initial cast of w as a damage ability in itself because if you have that blase mentality of i'm just going to throw them adobe you know hopefully they that hits you just not and and trust me if i could go back in time when i first learned zed i wish someone drilled me and said curtis stop missing combos literally direct all your attention on this and it because this will change the game this will change the way the game plays out as zed so take these tips go into practice tools start to really play around with this combo and you'll find yourself taking extremely good trades in lane now for we'll go over a few of the zed pre-6 combo so there's not really many pre-six combos without ultimate there's not many things you can do simply put there's around three main combos the first one is the el clasico burst combo i just made the names up so i don't really know what to call them this is the we qw auto attack ignite this is basically great to use versus opponents that are basically dis that maybe they disrespect your burst damage or whether you're in a 2v2 and you know that the enemy's tunneling on the other person so they don't really see you coming so it's a really great way of bursting some with someone without really having to use flash and this is what it looks like here come in bang i know he's focusing on the silence so i just get a really good combo there i'll just play it one more time bang nothing too special just the old classico combo and a lot of people disrespect the damage because they don't expect the passive auto that's actually something i need to quickly talk about here guys this is something that is extremely underrated with z players and the average like i would say lower elo z players i believe it's called what contempt the weak or whatever it's called zed's passive order is probably one of the the best passes in the entire game and it's incredibly people just disrespect it the great thing about this combo is you're doing the w e cue combo getting the slow getting the the cue you're popping next to them and a lot of the time you're going to be getting them below 50 hp here in which your passive auto procs and then you get the ignites and it ticks down you kill someone so um very very important combo to know if you feel very comfortable with next one is a surprise combo this is really great um when you're versus opponent versing opponents that use their main form of self-peel aggressively so whether the leblanc uses their w aggressively or fears e or syndra e or even tf gold card and you want to say bait it out with your combo with your we q combo wait a little bit then w flash ignite auto let's actually take a look at what this looks like and again this is something that will come with time but it's also a really handy thing to do so here i bait out the w i run back and then pop back boom flash order e auto sorry ignite this one was a bit sloppy but the premise is still there i was trying to go for a dive i was going to flash auto there i get out it's the same premise basically your intention now here i saw um tf pulled a red card not a gold card so i baited that out with my abilities here forced him to panic now run back so he thinks he could just easily take a red card here then i'm like okay cool you have no self peel bang i get a nice little kill so it's basically you're surprising people catching them off guard by um baiting out their main self-peel ability again you're gonna have to probably go back in this guide and really break it down and practice these in practice tool but these are really important to understand the next one's just the quick burst combo this is usually good when you're coming from out of vision they don't really see you coming you're coming from fog of war um maybe they're again tunnel similar to the first combo they're tunneled on dealing with someone else this is a wwq flashy auto here and it's important guys that it's e auto because um the e auto is basically one animation it's not order e it's always e-order it's faster than doing auto e so again the same premise here it's really really quick great for assassinating people draven doesn't see the zed www boom just one shot so it's really good when coming you don't have ultimate or even your pre-six that sort of thing super solid now for the nitty-gritty zed post-six combos where we're going to get into all the details i wish when i was learning zed there was a guide like this outlining what the combos are what are the trade-offs when do you use them what does it look like that sort of thing because i literally was booming mentally i was still felt so bad as zed even after the first 40 games because i just didn't understand this stuff i wish this was i wish this resource existed when i was learning z now this is the first the standard combo is named at the standard combo this is the weq wre auto very bread and butter standard combo so there's basically two situations or two or three situations that you want to use this combo this is great when you're unseen so you're in fog of war um or the enemy has a lot of mobility in their kit which will make it really hard to hit the shuriken after if you started the fight with ah sorry so maybe reversing a champion like lucian or reversing a champion like fizz and you know they have e they have dash they have flashes or ezreal things like that generally if possible if you're out of vision out of fog of war you want to start the fight with the combo then alt e get the passive off and um kill them that way so it's a it's a very um cheesy very standard combo but note guys if the enemy has a lot of resistances and you don't burst them they don't die for this combo you're screwed because there's no way getting out because you're using your w in and then you're using your r and there's no escape you're just completely screwed and we're actually going to go over a game where this happens to me and i get punished really really hard for it and i have to flash out because i miscalculated damage or i think i missed the shurikens or something like that so let's actually take a look at what this looks like and this is my again my go-to is my go-to combo sorry when i am out of vision so i'm cinderface checks me boom then i go e and then i just finish off with the with the ultimate sorry again camping here boom e q on the back end whatever i think he was she was dead anyway so that's basically the main i'll look at that one more time again um full burst combo rounded out with r i don't even need to ignite there it was a really simple kill same process here so again again i'll probably go over this practices and practice tool very stock standard combo um make sure they're in kill threat range though or you're completely screwed next one is the triple shuriken combo for max damage so this is um the absolute max damage uh combo this is where you want to be starting the fight with r rather than starting it with the the w eq combo generally it synergizes very well with your moves to get you in range to even start the fight with r it's really good with champions that have no flash or low mobility because they can't really dodge your shurikens it's generally the go-to all-in combo within the early to mid game you generally don't do this combo in like mid to late game because again people are too it's too hard to stay in the fight for that long or they're not really going to be in a position for you to start the fire with ah it's quite hard um we'll talk about a combo that you should be doing to mid to late game um and again because this is the max damage combo it can be quite people can we can be quite hard for people to learn so it is worth the time investment in practice tool and if you don't have the q sure it can accuracy you're not going to be able to pull off this combo so again put in the time and practice tool to learn this one let's see what this one actually looks like so here i was pretending to go for rome i turn back onto the syndra w away after triple shuriken bang pop back kill this is a 100 combo here as you can see w triple shuriken one shot that was a bit overkill there i think i did not need to go that hand but it's the same premise so that's what a basic look looks looks like here we actually just break down this first one the second one sorry break down the second one here so you want to start the fight with r your w to one direction and then your q try and land the q and then you basically just pop them from 100 to zero it's like a really great 100 combos so any player any champion that doesn't have flash this is generally a or you maybe you can survive the damage in the meantime it's a really really solid combo again try it in practice tool third one the dodge combo so this one is a little bit advanced i wouldn't recommend doing this combo if you are maybe doing the first 30 or 40 maybe at least you need to pay at least 30 to 40 games of zed before you could reliably use this one but it's great for the version any champion that has a very annoying form of dodgeable hard cc so champions like cassio are velcros e uh zoe e things like that this is where you're going w to one direction then you start the fight with r you e while you're r in then pop to your your w and then q back from your initial clone let's just actually see what it looks like here now this example it i don't really dodge anything but the premise is still there because here i actually didn't think that i forgot that he actually already used um he already used his e but you can actually see the premise here so i w to one side to hopefully potentially dodge any skill shot this would be really good if i'm bursting something like a casio with her ultimate or um if she cut cassio's ultimate's kind of hard because she can always stun if she really wants to but something like even like a zoe bubble i could instantly pop back now you may ask guys why we'll play it one more time so w to the side then i pop back to that w and then i can land the triple shuriken from here and then use one shot now you may ask curtis why don't why can't you just do the same thing but pop back to your r now the difference is the reason this is such an important combo is because there's actually a delay now if i just started this fight with r i can't instantly pop back to my r there's actually a delay for like when it was like 0.5 seconds or whatever it is it's actually a delay you can't pop back to your r but if you put your w out before and then you are you get literally insta insta proc and go back to your w so it's actually way way quicker than going straight back to your ass so if your first you need to dodge something really immediately this is a very important combo to do and a lot of the time when you're doing dives and things like that it can be super nice like if you're just going for a dive you put your w away from you you do your full combo and then you pop back out to your w um again this is quite advanced but it is something that you might want to experiment with when you start to get a little bit more competency around zed's combos now this is there's actually two more combos the next one's the the delayed combo now this one's great for mid game and the great thing about this one is that when there's any scrappy mid to late game team fight or chaotic skirmish it's really really effective because it basically confuses the enemy that don't know when you're going to pop back and it's great because you actually get to wait for your cooldowns um yeah so it's basically really effective because it's so hard to keep track of so this one's you're doing the the full combo here the we q combo then you're going in with your w to get in range to r then again you do another e and then q on the back end and then pop back out with the r so let's actually take a look what this looks like in team fights or in skirmishes see it looks like a bit of a skirmish do my full combo onto the draven force draven flash wait for my cooldowns to come back up pop back out flash and he just gets one short anyway um even though i miss my my um my q here doing the same combo w eq pop back flash out here lay my q on the back end pop dead so it's really really great and this one's a perfect example here it's a team fight playing front to back here um now wait i wait for the affiliates to forget where my shadow is then i just pop back when all the other threats go in boom eq pop back dead so it's a really really solid combo in these scrappy skirmishes because the enemy 80 carry can't keep track of where your shadows are really really important um and the great thing about it by the time you're doing this combo look i have my yo moves in my dustplate i basically one shot i don't even need to land my second q i just need to land the e the great thing i wait for my e to come back up then i w ie bang auto do the the auto and then pop back down the key cue there just there's no counter play if you do it really well there's basically no counter play to one shotting the enemy a carry and most 80 carries in the elos that you're going to play are not going to keep track of the the zw as well they're just going to completely forget about it so it's a really really important combo to do in mid game skirmishing now this is the combo that actually named after the one trick that we have in oceania he's probably the best said that we haven't oc's names pardo i'll actually link his stream in the description below this one again is according to him and i've actually realized as well it is probably the best combo for mid to late game that you can possibly do now his theory is that he basically uses his combo 95 of the time as soon as the game gets past like 25 minutes so it looks it's actually doesn't look sexy at all it doesn't look fancy it's very very simple um but again i would again recommend you guys to go into practice tool test it do the combo get very comfortable with it because when it comes time to execute you've got to be willing to execute it and not mess it up the great thing about this one is that it's like it's like not overkilling the enemy it's just the perfect amount of damage and it's great for just making a pick before the fight actually starts let's actually take a look what this looks like but here just quickly ww q i e auto ignite and then pop back to your r very very simple i've got a little example here i did in solid queue just to show you the strength of it and how easy it is to execute i run a song with my yomos i know he's in a straight direction wwq e auto and they just pop like you literally you do this combo on an enemy 80 carry in basically around 20 like 25 minutes onwards in the game you will one shot them it can be you can only really do this combo when you know you're gonna hit that q so you ww you land the queue there because it's an isolated queue as well then you pop and you do the e auto and then you just pop back to other dead i don't even need to ignite that he's just dead and again ideally and this is great because generally you do this before a fight starts you do it before a team fight starts so you're coming in from the side or you've caught someone off in rotation or you're in hiding out a fog of war that sort of thing really important combo to do so if there's one mid game combo that you're going to do guys this is probably one that i would recommend learning and it's very very very very very effective so now i just want to quickly share with you some tips for all winning whether it's an early game mid game or late game now the first one here guys is try and wait for the enemy to use their cc abilities so let's just say hypothetically you're versing a zoe mid now all the way up to i would say around master or grand master a lot of the zoes will they'll eventually use their e aggressively they'll use their bubble to look for a kill to set up a gank or for whatever reason they'll just use the e because i don't understand most people reverse that don't understand that holding their key form of self-peel or cc is basically the main way to counter zed because a lot of the time you're just poking them with their we eq combo and they're getting super super frustrated so they're just going to use the eat aggressively and as soon as they do that that's your window to go in go in for a kill going for an all-in that sort of thing now or if you don't want to do that you don't want to wait for them maybe they're holding to it for a very long time since the w changes to z since how far now how fast the w is um it's so much faster than it used to be you can actually dodge so many projectiles with the w you can just w to the side whether it's a syndra qe combo you can quickly dodge it whether it's a shenton whatever it is you can dodge it incredibly quickly with this combo as long as you're matching your buttons very very fast that's one of the luxuries given the buff or you can use your yo moves get in range really really close to the enemy and then wait for them to use their key ability then dodge it with the eyes so you can actually dodge the zoe bubble with the with your eye he indulges the syndra ultimate the orion ultimate with your r just like you would with fizzy very self-explanatory but again not many people do it as well it's all about understanding all the small details guys so number two guys you need to pay attention to exhaust flashes and items now this is so incredibly important and this is not something i did when i was playing my first 30 40 games of z and it just literally changes the game what you'll find out eventually what you'll realize is through painful experiences you're going to be going in with your ultimate you're ready for this crazy dragon fight and you'll see the enemy 80 carry has a stopwatch okay it's not gg you can still play around it maybe you have to do your combo differently maybe you have to poke with your we q combo maybe you have to go on another target there are differing ways to play the fights as long as you are understanding which targets do they have stop watchers do they have zhonyas do they have pd's what do they have that can disrupt your all-in ability because if you don't do it you're going to find yourself you're going to be ready to go you're really fed you're going on the enemy 80 carry and then you just give a shot down you screw up because they have stopwatch or they have exhaust or they have flash when you thought they didn't have flash and you're just screwed okay you can throw the game that easily it would said very very important and just watch z99 literally go to his stream and you'll see how obsessed he is with flashes because if he sees a no flash target what does that mean for z it means that it's way way easier to hit your cues and what does hitting cues mean it means you get more damage on your ultimate which means more kills which means more snowballing etc etc and the last point here i cannot stress this enough is you need to spend a disproportionate amount of time when heading into a game to identify key threats onto you now what i mean by this is when i go into a game the first thing i do i press tab and i literally just think to myself what are the specific abilities that screw me in the ass right now okay is it soraka silence is it nautilus hook is it maokai w is it shen alt is it zoe bubble what is it specifically that i need to play around i need to adapt my gameplay i need to come in from a different angle i need to wait for them to use it because if you don't assess these things you go into a skirmish and you didn't wait for the nautilus to hook then as soon as you alt in you're gonna get nautilus hook into an auto attack into ultimate and you just screwed you die you're useless go next so very very important we'll talk about that later the next one here is you need to identify the amount of armor early on to adapt your build and we spoke about that in the build section if you see the enemy stacking armor really early on in the game maybe reversing quite a few tanks then you need to build last whisper second item very important sometimes that's the case um again but if you don't do that you find yourself building double lethality against a full armor stacking team that item is basically going to be rendered useless very important next one play patient okay the enemy will a lot of the time get impatient use their key self-peel ability to wave clear or go for an aggressive trade just like i said before so and the reason this is important guys and this is what screwed me as well a lot is where i get really impatient and instead of waiting for them to slowly get whittled down by my we q combo or instead of waiting for them to use their uh their key self-peel ability i will go in very in this very frustrated state of mind go for this all-in-kill with my ah flash ignite and i don't get the kill because i'm like well they they just they have their self-pillability they cc me and i couldn't get that cue off couldn't get that extra auto attack off and i waste my full combo now if you use your first r and ignite of the game and you don't get a kill it man it's so painful it's so it will literally insanely decrease the chances of you winning that game so you got to be very patient a lot of times just be patient and that's my philosophy on zed is you don't feel don't feel the need to rush things and just go for some crazy kills like you can play zed a lot of the time like this very controlled poke mage because your we q combo is so op you have so much mobility you're so hard to gank just chill whittle down the enemy eventually they will get impatient they will get frustrated and the window will present itself trust me okay very very important and lastly guys i wish someone told this to me when i was first picking up zed don't rush your abilities the first thing i i did when i get my first 30 40 games i said i was always just rushing to hit my curious like if i go in i got a q straight away i gotta pop back i gotta do it all so quickly when you actually watch the best zed players a lot of the time they do things relatively they don't rush their buttons if they're going in with a combo they'll wait to dodge an ability with the w or with the other they won't just use r or they'll wait for the enemy to blow their their self-pilot ability or use their mobility um skill like whether it's lucian e or ezra e then q because then they guarantee that they're going to hit the queue so it's all the little details don't rush relax when you're doing your combos take your time don't just smash your keyboard don't just smash your head on the keyboard very important tip now so what we're going to do is break down the way i interpret the match ups for z now the a tier being the best ones and the d tier being the worst one so let's actually start with the atl these in my opinion are really easy super i'd say the reason they're easy guys is because they're so immobile all these champions just get absolutely railed by a we q combo they have a low base armor very easy to just destroy with poke i'm not even talking like level six i'm just talking levels one to five you just dominate these champions b tier still favorable but can be a little bit tricky if you don't understand the mad jobs and remember guys this is just all my interpretation at a somewhat high elo level some of these matchups may be harder for you in lower elo because you've got to really understand how to play the matchups but this is my interpretation like vlad for example i think vlad is actually it's quite an easy matchup for zed actually first of all not long ago and it felt quite easy because he has no lockdown he has no cc he can't set up ganks onto you can basically freely always poke with we q combo or he has to give pressure and you can just roam freely because he's wave clear so poor as well um it feels like you just have the yes if you play safe and scale you will get outscaled but a lot of the time you're gonna have so much freedom to do things in the game and i personally like that as said uh then there's a 50 50 match ups some of these actually will be favorable for you if you know how to play them for example leblanc and fizz i believe they could be beats here if you really know how to play them um seats here unfavorable i really don't like especially some of these matchups i they would nearly be dead here for me like ekko and katarina i hate versing a zed because if the katarina knows how to dodge your combo with her shampoo it's very annoying if the echo knows to like e4 when you do your combo and you don't know how to do your the proper we q combo you know what i was talking about in terms of your overstep and then you get in the echo's e range and then you just lose the trade anyway uh that could be really tricky zoe as well can be really annoying but the thing with zoe so i would say up until grand master level zed will dominate zoe but if you watch z99 he gets dumpstered by zoey basically every game it's like one of the hardest matchups in high low if you're versing a very good zoe and then lastly again lissandra's interesting because lisandra again in every i would say all the way up until like master tier level is easy it's actually quite an easy match up but if you've got the really good lassandras and in my server we have some very good um very good high elo lissandras they are so annoying to verse and incredibly annoying diverse and things like pantheon as well i find like pantheon's one of the hardest counters to said because his his uh e cooldown is actually lower than your w cooldown so he can technically use his e to block the damage of your w every single time if he wants to he can block your ultimate damage all these things it's incredibly annoying kleds also annoying as well you want to avoid these matchups at all costs essentially those dt1 so if you have any questions these matchups you know you hit me up in the discord or in the comments below now this is something actually quickly talking about my bands i actually ban uh lissandra quite often but you're not going to see much lissandra in your elo so if that's the case then this is where these other champions come into play so a lot of the time my other two bands are actually ezreal and kha'zix kha'zix is so annoying because kha'zix what do we know about zed so that's actually a very squishy champion for a very long time your moves does blade you have basically no hp no resistances uh you're very very squishy and what do we know about kha'zix kha'zix has so many forms of gap closer the ultimate's a gap closer the jumps are gap closer the w has a slow hit they take nimbus cloak and chilling smite you can't escape a kha'zix he can it's incredibly hard to hit your shurikens on an invisible target um yes you could theoretically kill him but you can't hear you can never hit your shurikens so if the cosmic is good you just get absolutely dominated you can get solar killed in the side lane really easily you can get soloed in mid lane whenever you use your w aggressively especially once he has warrior and if you die once to a kha'zix it's game over so i hate kha'zix personally ezreal is a pain in the ass the reason ezra's pain in the ass is what do we know about zed zed theoretically should be the 80 carry counter right this is where you know if you should just delete 80 carries but ezreal's such a [ __ ] champion you build i spawn you build death dance you have two forms of mobility with your flash and your e so it's incredibly hard to hit um sure it comes onto it's very hard to burst so i hate versing this champion um and i actually go we're going to go over a vod today reverse in ezreal and it just does my head in a lot of the time i ban ezreal but again if israel's not uh i guess if that champion's not popular in your elo then i wouldn't worry about it then you need to go back to the tier list and figure out what you struggle with the most so for me personally these two a lot and as you can see there's a lot of supports and a lot of top laners that absolutely screws it um the most notable one here is actually rakhan and lulu they are ridiculously hard to verse because polymorph is like a point-and-click this is basically a stun it's like a point click stun essentially rakan is ridiculous as well because the r if the if the khan sits on the enemy 80 carry you're never going to burst the enemy to carry thresh raka nautilus again all really important so a lot of the time when i'm versing these sorts of champions i try to avoid them or wait for them to use your ability or i come in from an angle out of fog or wall that they can't react to my damage that sort of thing i do the dodge combo where i have my w out and then i are in do my combo then w out or whatever there's things there's ways to play around it and then top laners fiora you can pretty much never beat set's really annoying see as soon as you alternate he can just hold you back into the team again point and click stun through maokai poppy for obvious reasons with the w and shen for obvious reasons with the ultimate the amount of games that i've lost because versus shen ultimates ruin my combo i don't get the kill and then the game booms so when i first shen a lot of time i actually like to play towards the shen and actually punish the shen and actually do that in one of these games i'll show you um and then the way i like to do it sometimes is bait out the ultimate no i'm not going to get the kill but then my top laner gets really far ahead that's like sometimes the way i like to play around that so now for my take on zed's identity the way i like to view zed is he's very different to other assassins he's more of like a solo kill assassin he's less to do with roaming in my opinion and he's the skirmish king now there are some assassins in the game like talon like kiana like pike like fizz that are very good at just roaming they can ditch waves they don't really need to have perfect cs they can just ditch waves roam get kills snowball that way but zed is a little different in my opinion zed is more like z in my opinions roaming is okay you can play that way of zed but i feel like it's like why do that why do that when you could just dominate your opponent in lane you can poke them down with we queues you can basically solo kill any opponent um you can be incredibly far now the way a lot of the time you watch z99 you watch a lot of the good zed players they don't go for risky dives unless you know they have to do something crazy to win the game but a lot of the time they farm incredibly well they've averaged like at least eight cs per minute then what they do they get to you their yo moves really really early then they continue to farm they don't force anything maybe they only have one kill sometimes z99 is actually on zero zero he's like zero zero one but he's so incredibly farmed once he gets to his dust blade and he's and he's yo moose he's so strong at this point that the enemy ada carry cannot play the game any squishy cannot play the game anymore once you get to those two items so a lot of the time because it's a misconception that zed gets outscaled and we'll talk about that later but zed doesn't necessarily get outscaled zed will always scale if you understand how to play the champion because he has such a high skill cap if you're a bad z then he doesn't scale but if you're a good z he basically always scales relatively well so my theory is that i try not to run too much and when i first started playing z i roamed a ridiculous amount i just died my cs went to [ __ ] and then i just didn't have threat on the enemy 80 carrier anymore and then i was just a useless champion so i really like to play a much more calculated slower game with z and z is all about maxima like i said this before it's all about maximizing all the small micro details in order to maximize skirmish effectiveness like the way i interpret that is that you've got to juice like you don't have your lemon or an orange like you get a juice you got to juice the kit i'm trying to you got to squeeze all the potential max damage out of this kit in order to maximize its effectiveness in skirmishes because when there's that 2v2 skirmish in the river or scrappy 3v3 zed can absolutely pop off that's why you really got to know all those combos and i view his laning he's more of a pokemage rather than a traditional assassin there's no assassin in the game that's actually similar to zed and that's why maybe a lot of people like playing zed because he's very yeah he's very he's got a very pleasant or enjoyable laning phase and the great thing about it even when you are in a crappy matchup and actually we're going to go over vodka investing a lucian mid with exhaust so it's a really hard matchup i can sit back relax i can poke with my we q combo i can even just see us with queues and when i get pushed under tower i can see us really well which a lot of majors don't have that luxury because their auto attacks do no damage but because of zed's passive content the weak or whatever it's called um you do so much damage to minions below 50 hp so it's really easy to just see us on the tower as well so it's very easy to pay passive great within multi-thread compositions the reason i talk about this one in a lot of assassin guides is that any dive champion that wants to get onto the enemy squishies or the enemy backline they're great with other threatening champions that's why if you have like a fizz and you have a camille on your team it's really good or you have a zed but you've also got an evelyn on the team there's so many things for them to worry about so if one of you go in or say my eve goes in first or my camille goes in first or my set goes in first they blow all their self-peel and then i can come in from the other direction and clean up vice versa so it's very important and that's why i don't like being the sole threat in a comp um with zed i like to have other damage sources in my composition for obvious reasons loves ap hates hard cc and tanky compositions loves versing immobile squishies because we know the squishier the opponent is it's easy to build lethality you get those those one shots off and the less mobile the opponent the easier it is to hit cues which means more damage etc and you must value farm high you cannot be behind the curve if you screw up your farm and you have really crappy farm you can have no threat you're going to find it hard to be impactful in mid to late game loves fast-paced scrappy games but you can adapt and play slow you can play a slow game equally as effective as a fast game i mean loves the side lane we'll talk about that later extra zed tips guys so always try and use w coming out of base to save time and generate tempo so let's just say hypothetically you're like 50 hp you can actually walk to the edge of the fountain and then w out here and then you know healing hit heal here and then as you get to like full hp then you can pop back your w actually is you know still actually still reduces this cooldown as it's um before you even pop to it as well so not only are you saving time by getting out of base faster but also you're reducing the cooldown of your w because it's already you've already used it because you want it up ideally by the time you get back to lane what you can also do as well let's just say this is the base and let's just say you need um you need a bit more gold for an extra item let's say you only need maybe an extra 15 gold you can actually walk all the way out here w really far away while you're waiting for gold and by the time you get back here you instant buy your item then you pop all the way there so again that's another little thing you can do to save time coming out of base and generate tempo very important shadow abilities give energy back on hit so people a lot of people don't know this if you w um you dobby onto a target or like a champion or whatever even like even on minions as well and then you e whatever this clone hits whether it's a q off of it or an e it actually gives energy back so if you're in a team fight and you get an aoe w say that there's like two champions here and here and you w on them you hit e on both of them you get a lot of energy back um something that some people don't really know about and also people don't know that zed's e reduces living shadows cool down by two which is zed's w by two seconds per champion hit so again if you're in a team fight and there's two people next to each other and you w and then you e here it actually reduces um by each target each e hit so that would be four seconds shaved off of your w cooldown and that's why in in team fights if you aoe a lot of people your w can come off cooldown incredibly quickly again something that you'll probably make use of as you get a bit more confident with z now this is again something that not many people know about is that dustblade cooldown um you actually utilize the dustplate cooldown to see if you're spotted by a ward so if you buy dustplate and you're just sitting in a in a bush what you'll see if you look on like above let's just say these are your abilities let's actually get rid of this if these are abilities here and the little dust blade icon will come here if this will actually go on cooldown i believe or is it here in your item items here or go on cooldown you actually see it like tick that means you're spotted by award and if it doesn't go on cooldown then it means you're not spotted by awards so it's really something you go and practice too and look at yourself it's really good to see if if you don't have a sweeper you don't have umbil glaive you can actually see if you're sitting on a water not to know if they're setting up a kill on you or they don't know where you are and you can um make a pick on someone so very very important and especially since it's such an integral part of zed's identities making those picks out of vision it can be very a nice little tip never look to trade one for one that's actually something i had to learn the hard way a lot of games i played when i first started playing zed i was always looking to trade one for one it never leads to anything good because then you miss cs you get behind an xp your threat goes down and down and down you don't need to trade kills you can farm effectively without it never look to do that and for extra combos and skirmish improvement and optimization which you will need to do inevitably as you get better at zed i would check out two channels or check out z99 i believe he has a youtube and a twitch and there's another youtuber who has some really great zed stuff his name fiddle zaha uh on youtube if you want to just improve your combos over time um as you get to heading towards mastery on the champion now i'm just going to show you two quick creative zed tips that i found to be really useful in terms of replicating getting ahead now what do we know about zed's early landing we know that a lot of the time versus any basically immobile mage you should be able to chunk them out as long as you're hitting a lot of those weq combos using the tips that i mentioned earlier on in the video holding waiting for the slow ushering them onto one side etc etc now what will happen if that actually if you hit a lot of we q combos most likely you'll be pushing them out of lane they'll be you'll be denying them cs on the tower you're you yourself will be getting very efficient recalls in which you'll get an xp lead now what does that mean an xp lead will mean most likely you will hit six before they will hit level six and if that's the case a lot of the time you can actually look for cheesy level six kills before they even know that you're because they're not a lot of the time unless you're playing in grand master challenger level they're not going to be expecting or zed's going to hit level 6 soon so i need to play respectfully so you can get a lot of cheesy solo kills so here i knew that i was hitting level 6 soon one more auto attack bang i have my w already deep i wait for zilean to walk up too far and then i get a very cheesy kill now again i didn't play this skirmish on this all in very well but it's just the premise here this is one of the earlier z um one of the earlier zed games that i played i think was around like my 15th game but i quickly realized that this was something that is very replicable especially as you get better at hitting those w eq combos now the next one is something that you can do when escaping so let's just say you're getting chased by someone um you can actually we q backwards it's a very good escape combo like this like that and you get a really nice little trade there now this is also good for when you're trying to damage them under tower so you maybe they're trading or ceasing on the tower you can actually walk up really aggressively we q and because it's so fast a lot of the time you use w behind you um eq water or whatever the tower tau hit actually won't go through if you do your w fast enough so that's actually something that because of the w changes you can also do as well so it's a really nice little trick that you can do when looking for extra trades now i just want to quickly cover how to efficiently and effectively wave clear with z now when i initially was doing this guide i was thinking curtis surely you wouldn't need to put this into the guide but after watching quite a few lower elo z players i was concerned at the amount of them that really didn't know how to effectively and efficiently wave clear with zed so what i did i went ahead and went to z99 stream and took two clips to show you the two differing situations you'll find yourself in and how to effectively wave clear the first example that i'll show you is when the creeps already bunched up together so maybe you've come back to lane late and they've already bunched up together and the second example is when he's already in lane and they're coming out of base in a straight line in which you can just combo straight through them so let's actually look at how he does it he waits for them to settle here w e is the back line then cues towards the melees sits in the middle of them and then he's through now in this example when it's in a straight line he w eq through the entirety of it then he walks up into the middle of them to get max damage in his e onto all of them and then continues to um cue through all of the the range and then just you know order them down with the rest of them so there's there's the two biggest mistakes i see is not utilizing your e on the maximum amount of minions and the main problem that i see is that people are using abilities on the wave when they really don't need to because what do we know about z zed is incredibly focused and reliant on his w ability and w ability we don't really max it we max it last and it has the highest cooldowns one of the highest cooldown abilities so if you don't need to use your we combo on the wave and maybe it takes an extra three or four seconds a lot of the time i would just not use it because what do we do if we have it then maybe we can take an aggressive trade if a skirmish breaks out we can get there faster or we can hold it and actually take a all-in combo that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise it basically opens up your opportunities as a champion and a big misconception is that you need to wave through as fast as possible oh my god they can roam a lot of the time a lot of majors reverse it doesn't matter if it takes an extra two or three seconds to actually wave clear without using your w because then if you use your w then you're going to have to probably give pressure for an extra 15 seconds while your w is coming off cooldown because you can't contest without your w at all or z's that will just continually use q on the wave and not use it on the enemy and then the enemy is just sitting there on full hp and it's just a nightmare so please if you can auto attack or can use your ian auto attacks only for waveclear please do that or queue when the enemy's not there because that's gonna really increase your options for poking on the enemy now for mid game and team fighting with zed we're probably going to cover this more in detail using examples with the when we get to the video portion of this guide but just a few quick tips here guys you can refer back to to increase your likelihood of translating leads mid to late game team fighting the first one never make your positioning obvious you must must prioritize coming in from the side at all times okay and what i mean by this because and i say this was about all assassins you never want to be coming in front to back that say you're playing an 80 carry for example and then you see you're in the mid you're in mid lane right now and you're thinking okay the only person who can kill me right now is a zed now if you see the zed in the zed sitting on vision in the middle of the lane you're like cool chill that your your support knows exactly where to direct his attention it's super super easy it's really easy to peel it's really easy for me to dps because i know where the zed is i don't need to be scared but put yourself in the ash's position if he doesn't know where zed is and then they or maybe he doesn't know where zed is but he knows he's off on the side what's that going to do well ash is going to be scared to walk up and aggressively dps knowing that zed can just flank from the side so he has to hold abilities or maybe not posture as aggressively or she doesn't know at all in which jed can come in from the side get straight backline access and just demolish that ash or they can just demolish that ash so it's incredibly important just for threat's sake and so for threat's sake that you always try to value coming in from the flank or coming in from the side ideally coming in from the side so if it's a dragon fight you want to be coming in from the top down and i show that i'll show this in the videos later on but it's very very important and as a concept that not many people talk about threat itself can prevent the enemy from dpsing a lot of the time if i'm listening to mobile mid mage the orianna has to like keep the ball off to the side because she's so sk and the orianna's not using abilities in the front to back fire because she's [ __ ] scared that i'm just going to come and you know pump her from a different angle so threat can actually allow your team to win the 4v4 very very important number two always aim to make a pick or force to fight into a 4v5 scenario as much as you can because ideally it's not a straight front to back 5v5 sometimes they happen and you just got to deal with it but most of the time you want to be either picking someone off on the side picking someone else before the fight starts or just making it a 4v5 after killing someone this is where you want to be using that pardo combo refer back to the video the pado combo getting that pick into mid to late game 25 minutes onwards you ideally want to avoid those straight front to back flubby fires because then it's you know then that's where the control mage can kind of outperform you in those team in this team fights third one if you do have a high 5v5 i highly recommend using the delayed combo or the dodging combo or the paddle combo powder combo is usually better for picks but in straight team fights the delay combo is probably better because it's a little bit more chaotic um it's very unlikely in this mid to late game team fight so you're gonna have the time and space to use the triple shuriken combo because then you're gonna have to running in forward with your moves and maybe you can get cc that sort of thing so it's very unlikely that you'll be using that combo and plus it's overkill at that point in time you don't need that much damage like your combo can just mostly pop most squishies without hitting all three of the um shurikens number four and i said this four constantly update yourself on itemization key self-peel abilities and summoners don't go on about that five side lanes are your best friend if you are strong don't necessarily always split though one of the big misconceptions i actually learned this from z99 as well is that zed is just a split push champion and z9 i was watching his stream he was saying as well he says he hates one through one he thinks one through wanting is like it's just it's like a bait it's like a game losing play if you're strong you just shove the wave and threaten and try and always push and roam you don't necessarily sit in the side and yes there was actually a buff a few patches ago that increased zed's base attack speed so he can actually shred towers quite well but in saying that it's i it's very rare that i find myself in a position where i'm literally splitting down towers and i will go over this more with examples but i just find myself always wanting to play the 4-1 where i'm on the one but i don't sit in the one i try to like push and roam push and roam like deny cs but i'm ready for the fight because i don't have tp i don't want to come in late to the fight like i want to come in relatively as the fight's just starting um or six and six or eight wait for others to go in first to make the new self-peel abilities and that's how we spoke about multi-threat compositions ideally i don't want to be starting the fight ideally the flight's just starting or someone else's start of the fight they've blown their first rotation of abilities then i go in now i want to quickly talk about zed's item journey i'll do this and all my guys but i think it's very important for zed now as we can see on the left hand side here you're you know you're not really weak but you're not really strong your first somewhat decent spike is your straight a dirk then as you build towards your moves if you have to base on caulfield's hammer then it can feel really bad ideally you want to be staying in lane off this item straight into your moves and even then as you get your movies you're not really god tier strong that doesn't really come into play until you get your dustplates you're relatively strong then you turn god mode strong if you farm really well and get these these items now and very important to note guys if you get behind the curve whether you die early um you you miss a bunch of cs or for whatever reason you get behind early you're basically never going to be strong again like i learned the hard way is that z is a champion that's like feast or famine you either farm very patiently you're very calculated you play very slow calculated aggression game um you're farming very well you're on the curve or maybe you get a solar kill that sort of thing in which you're going to be ridiculously strong or you're basically going to be rendered useless because you've died early and then they start building seekers they start building zhonyas you can't one-shot people anymore and you then you start getting zoned from cs your cs goes further and further down and you turn into a piece of poo so it's very important that you don't have the mentality where it's like i've got to do some crazy i'm gonna be like z99 to go some crazy kills in the early guests you don't have to do that it's okay if they don't if opportunity doesn't present itself maybe you just get pressure but you farm really well you will turn into a god-tier strong champion by not forcing just being on the clock in terms of cs so very important guys you understand the downside or the risk of going for that crazy play and screwing up and getting really far behind this is also why i don't like those crazy roams and don't like playing like a kiana or like a fizz or a talon because i'm not willing to miss two waves mid for a 50 50 roam i don't want to do that i know i can win the game doing a more calculated way of playing the game so now i just want to quickly talk about the biggest mistakes and biggest misconceptions i'll try and speed this up guys first biggest one guys and i wish i wish people um said this to me when i was first playing this champion is that i always felt like i had to unnecessarily like push the pace of the game zed does not get out scaled it's a big misconception it's only you only get out scaled if you don't know how to do damage on zen that's very important failing to identify and identify key self peel abilities with photograph before rushing queues and combos i did that for the first 40 games instead i just rush cues and combos go go go gotta hit my q instantly just relax sorry w out pop back to my arm my w shadow is still going to be there then i can queue after i can just relax wait for them to use their mobility then iq um incorrectly positioning a mid game like people coming from the front they're never coming in from the side now this one is massive if there's like one thing you take away from this guy guys it's similar to azir in the sense that your offense is your defense now if you just mindlessly use q every single time to cs what's go what are going to happen what's going to happen is that you're never going to find an opportunity to use your we q combo aggressively so sometimes what you actually need to do is give or fake pretend you're walking up to qrcs but instead of queuing the cs you just walk forward and then we q combo so sometimes you actually got a fake cs to get a really good trade or maybe you have to give one or two ucs to get a really good trade and what does that really do that twice maybe you missed two cs but then they're in kill throat range by level six or you blow both their pots that sort of thing very important um not utilizing your image ghostblade it's very important that you find ways to utilize a movement speed buff very important now the biggest misconceptions guys zed actually isn't ultimate reliant it's funny that people think it is and i initially thought it was as well you are somewhat but you're actually not so let's just say you use your ultimate in a team fight but you don't kill them you're still fine because you can actually pop back you can actually sit from a distance and w eq auto somewhere you the surprise combo you can do the just the poking from a distance you can do the w eq um then pop to it um contempt the weak auto attack ignite you can actually do a lot of burst damage even without ultimate you're not 100 ultimate reliant that's actually a big misconception the other misconception is that zed needs a split push you do not need to split push a lot of the time i'm just catching waves and grouping zed needs to get solid kills otherwise it's gg that's complete hogwash as well that's not the case as you know you can play quite slow sydney gets z actually gets pressure against mobile mages that's not the case in a lot of matchups even when reversing an orianna or any form of a mobile mage they can choose to get pressure on you but they will lose trade so a lot of the time because zed's waveclear isn't super reliable because you want to be using it on the enemy rather than the wave you will get pushed in a lot but it doesn't mean you're losing trade so it's this it's a misconception that you do get a lot of pressure and people think that zed doesn't need blue that's [ __ ] zed is so good with blue buff really really good with blue buff i beg my jungle a lot of the time for blue buff sometimes i don't get it because i don't understand this but zed is very in mid game very very good blue buff now how to learn zed now this is very very important the first 25 games guys i want you to focus a ridiculous amount of time and energy onto hitting that w eq combo in your reviews i would look at every single w eq combo and look at it okay was it because you didn't hold long enough to utilize the slow was it because you didn't aim the w on to one side was it because you didn't posture onto the one side so you usher them on to one side was it because you rushed the combo cast it instantly what which tip did you not follow why are you missing these combos or did you overstep and allowed them to trade back onto you you need to get very comfortable with hitting this combo this is all you need to be focusing on and also focus on hitting shurikens in general shuriken accuracy so when you use your combo i don't care if you kill them or not as long as you're getting good at hitting the queue itself and use practice tool use practice tool to practice combos and i didn't do this and it really messed me up i think if i would have actually been way better zed earlier on if i use practice tool much more effectively to get used to the combos because if you don't know how to do the combos and the kill the kill actually presents itself and you don't execute you look like an idiot you feel like an idiot and again you're most likely just going to lose the game um make sure you push limits when going for all ends like don't be afraid because that's the only way you're going to get good at z quick is that you go for the kill that you thought that was a kill and if it wasn't a kill they weren't killed at range then cool you learn you go on to next you learn and improve you can't ever learn then test the limits of z if you're not pushing a limit or testing the kill thread that's how the learning cycle happens you test you see the result you review that and you refine again and again don't feel rushed slow down the game pace is completely fine again very very important don't feel the need to do fancy combo stick to the basics okay it doesn't have to be sexy and again focus on the first 10 15 minutes now as you start to get to the 20 between 25 and 40 games then this is where you need to play devil's advocate with your skirmishing really start to optimize your skirmishing you know which combo should i've used how could i have played it could have played slower why did i miss that queue could i have done a different combo here could i have come in from a different angle that sort of thing always think of positioning before the fight so now rather than just mindlessly going in with a combo you're thinking a bit bit more creatively thinking okay if i actually come from that way and get backline access that sort of thing start to think about your positioning a little bit more now your we q combo should be relatively you know muscle memory by now you should be starting to expand to more of the complex combos and know when to use each one now maybe he's like oh okay here i can actually use the triple shuriken combo and in review you should ask yourself was this the right combo to use here could i have done this differently could i actually flash or use my yo moves better here that sort of thing now you should be understanding the key threats onto you now you've really realized especially getting to 30 35 40 games you should know okay okay nautilus queue screws me in the ass right now okay oh now soraka silence that is annoying over khan i need to avoid that now you start to know what to avoid how to adapt that sort of thing um and also it should be aiming to categorize how to approach certain matchups then what you'll realize is that there's certain matchups that actually beat you at level two level three kiana actually can beat you at level three um there's some changes like fizz that if if you're not careful can beat your level three or there's certain trading patterns or slight ways you'll be like okay i need to push really high level one and these ones i don't really need to push in these matchups that sort of thing and last one again fake cs for trades this is what you should be doing around 25 to 40 games now 40 plus this is where you need to be not trying not to overkill your opponent that pardo guy that oceanic um challenger zed player we have he said to me he said his philosophy with the best zed players they know the perfect amount of damage to do in a fight they don't overkill their opponent they don't unnecessarily stay in the fight for too long they don't unnecessarily waste ignite that sort of thing if they don't even need to use ultimate maybe they can just full combo someone with the we flash auto attack type thing um understand the intricacies of the match up so there's a match up with fizz for example where you can if as fizz queues onto you if you actually hold your queue you can guarantee to hit q order e auto sorry onto the fizz and he can't avoid any of the damage a lot of people in that matchup they'll just throw their cues mindlessly then fizz cues and then you lose a trade but if you hold your q then fizz queues onto you you can throw your q because fizz can't flash or dodge or anything while the q animation is going through you can guarantee the the qe auto and proc electrocute before fizz can get really get any damage so again these are the intricacies of the matchups you'll start to understand in 40 plus games um pushing limits with roams dives jungle invades skirmish and team fight optim optimization again guys this is where all of your time and energy where all my time and energy goes 40 plus games in like that's all i think about now when i play zed it's like how can i play the skirmish better how can i play this teamfight better and you know what you know the reason this is so important if you screw one skirmish as zed then your game can be over because again we know as that if you get behind the curve and you screw up a skirmish it can be really hard for you to get back into the game the very face of famine champion and then lastly here creative pick plays in the side lane this is where you can be a bit creative and maybe you know pink like maybe sit in the side lane brush or maybe pink in some area pick them in rotation find ways to punish people from overstaying just do little creative picks in the sideline that sort of thing now guys i literally have played so many zed games now this is just this is when i was still learning so look at this this is actually this is 68 games of zed i recorded at this point i still have another like 40 50 games that i haven't even recorded now the first 35 games here i was trash these first 35 games i was i couldn't i was just terrible at it then between 35 to 56 i was still pretty i would say pretty still pretty average feel pretty bad as dead but i was starting to start to see the strength of zed as a champion really understanding okay all right now i'm getting to understand my killer threat how the matchup starts work maybe how the cue combo works a little bit it was until around game 5657 that's when i really started to um feel like okay what sort of game pace do i like because i had to figure out all this stuff on my own i didn't have anyone telling me how to do this i had to figure it out i had to grind vods i had to just play test limits and eventually i spoke to a one trick like eventually down on the line but um again i'm just saying i'm a player that's played the game for quite a long time and i'm not the best mechanical player but it literally took me 56 games to even feel remotely confident so guys don't feel bad for losing on zed it takes a lot of games to really get comfortable and yes this is playing at a higher level around master t level but for you guys like i don't want you to have unnecessary expectations about your gameplay and literally look at my account opg i have an account called test1234 i want you guys going oh opg look at that account test it's called test one two three four look at that i literally spammed 60 games in a row of z on that account blind pick and i i got punished so many games but this is the painful experiences you've got to go through when playing a champion like zed you can't you gotta all in on it it's a champion with a very high skill cap and i just don't want you to feel bad for taking such a long time to pick up this champion now just for jungle combos guys for me my three personal favorites are elise nidalee and karthus the best ones karthus so speaking to the one trick as well i was saying how karthus especially in korea um karthus that is so strong and the reason being is that when you go for that level six kill a lot of the time or sometimes you're not actually going to be able to get the full kill like they'll be just surviving on like five percent hp if you have karthus then it basically guarantees a kill every single time because it's too early in the game to have stopwatch they won't have enough armor you're gonna have serrated dirk um carthage is gonna have alt and it's a really great way of snowballing both of you really ridiculous basically no opponent can survive that burst uh nidalee is good and at least good for differing reasons the reason i like nidalee personally is because she's a very control oriented jungler that gets a lot of she's very fast jungle clear she gets a lot of river control that sort of thing when i have a lot of river control with zed i feel like i could use my w's very aggressively and play very greedily but conversely elise doesn't get as much river control but her gank threat is so high so if she comes mid we can basically guarantee a kill so the kill threat and the burst is insane so it's good for differing reasons and notable mentions eve said silas zach all other really juicy champions when played with zed now for countering zed guys i usually do that in the guide but for this specific guide i'm actually going to do a whole separate video specifically on countering zed i'm doing a long extensive video on how to counter zed because i feel like there's so much information there i don't want to drag this guide on any longer so that video will be out hopefully in the next week something like that so stay tuned so what i'm gonna do now guys is dive into some gameplay breaking down showing you with real examples all these fundamentals these combos these sorts of things that we mentioned in this guide if you have any questions about anything that i mentioned in the guide feel free to hit me up in the comment section below join the discord ask a question there or if you want to get more specific personable questions and answers then sign up to my patreon um again guys remember my this guide it's not the gospel this is just my interpretation of zed i might be wrong with certain things but again this is my experiences try it for yourself we might not have the same experiences it's very likely so your elo or the way you play zed might be very different so don't take it as gospel try all of it watch other resources as well and get a different opinion this is what i think this in my opinion might work might not so let's dive straight into the gameplay guys so what we're going to do now guys is break down an entire game from start to finish this was a game i played recently this time playing zed into lucian mid the solution i believe is around a 350 or 400 lp grand master player he was an ex like rank 1 pro player he's a very very good solo queue player so i knew this was going to be a very hard lane match up and especially since he actually opted in for exhaust i knew i was going to get bullied a lot in the early laning phase but what are some of the great things about this composition i'm actually one of the sole forms of ad on my team kaiser has a lot of ap especially if she chooses to build nash's or something like that nunu's ap nico's glacial she's going ap as well so it's a really really good sign for me because if i'm the soul ad it's going to be hard for these guys to build much armor so my lethality is going to be a lot more effective now what is the first thing that i do when heading into a game is it like i said in the guide guys i try to break down and identify already in my mind and specifics which are the key abilities that i need to you know play around how do i adapt my gameplay to play around them so what do we know what are the key threatening abilities well first one's exhaust from lucian but other than that lucian doesn't threaten me too hard in mid game because he has no cc can't lock me down sejuani is a bit annoying with the especially with her ultimate canon's annoying with his ultimate uh ezreal is actually annoying in the sense that i can't burst ezreal because he builds i spawn so that's something i need to be thinking about in terms of my itemization bar is quite annoying because they build tank they go guardian he has a lot of cc with the q and the r as well which can actually screw my ultimate so there's a lot of key threatening abilities that i need to play around i'm gonna have to play fights very slow now the great thing about this vod guys is that i don't play perfectly there's i think this is a very good representation of certain things done really well and then certain things done really poorly so my intention with this void is to show you okay if i were to review my own zed game what would i look for and really break down the specifics of what i'm doing and why i'm doing the things that i'm doing and we're going to look at mid game some mistakes in mid game some great things done in mid game some mistakes in late games some great things done in late game i think it's a really solid representation of you know my my some mistakes that i make but also some good things that you can take away and and implement in your own games and it's really gonna hopefully solidify a lot of the concepts i mentioned in the guide so diving straight into this one lucian's very annoying especially his levels one to two now what do we know about z guys zed as a champion is very weak levels one and two he basically very rarely beats any champion in the entire game levels one and two very similar to echo is that both of these champions spike at level three so as a result very similarly to how you play echo you want to minimize the amount of damage you take levels one and two ideally i just want to be catching waves on the tower at levels two level three get to my level three power spike then i can start to take decent trades with my we q combo so um ideally i want to be letting the wave come into me minimize my damage and ideally really avoid using as many pots as possible minimize the amount of pots i have to use as possible like if i can get to level three and not have to use any pots then i'm in a really really good spot because then i know i can play aggressive heal back up with my pots and my taste of blood i'm in a decent spot it's not bad to take any like no damage but you can just take take a few autos or whatever because you still can heal back up with taste of blood levels one and two but in saying that i still try to minimize the amount of damage taken at levels one and two um 95 percent of matchups now actually something again i want to go very in detail here just for the sake of you guys replicating leads whenever i'm versing a champion that beats me level one and two i gotta be very careful with how i use q if i use q through the wave and this person doesn't order the wave and then this lucian actually pulls the wave and has it down here he can actually walk past the wave at level two and chase me down or just zone me completely from the wave so i'm going to be very careful so in a lot of these match ups i actually like to um only use my q on the wave after they've hit the wave so i know i can thin it or i know i'm not going to get the wave frozen on their side um so i can safely see us on the tower by level three that sort of thing otherwise i just want to be poking with my cue procking my scorch if it's an isolated queue that's great otherwise just csing with my cue to level three so this guy specifically that i'm versing he's very good with wave manipulation he really knows how to build waves very very well so i'm just csing here from a distance if i have to miss ces and sacrifice cs just to stay healthy levels one and two i will do that but i still want to maximize the amount of cs that i'm getting here ideally so now i know he's slow building into me i'm just csing from a distance here i know he's going to end what do we know if they slow burn onto you they're going to get level 2 first and it's always off the first creep of the second wave so look at that as soon as i know this creep dies i know he's going to get level 2. so you can see how he's already posturing up at level two so i know i need to respect even before he's hit level two so if because if i walk up here i'll stay here and he's hit level two he's gonna eq auto or e auto q and destroy me so i walk all the way back so he can't punish me at level two just stock standard laning stuff nothing too specific to said anyway but this is the great thing about zed is that even in hard matchups similar to echoes that you can minimize quite well without taking too much damage now majority of the time you want to be going e level two if you are in a position where you did shove the enemy in um levels one and two sometimes you do that into um i would say match ups like range match ups that have low wave clear sometimes you do it into like vlad or sometimes you do it it's like ahri if they maybe started charm on an invade or something like that you can actually get level two first in which you would go w level two and you can actually qw the enemy but i would say 95 percent of games you're going to be going e level 2 and then because it's really great for csing under tower and prepping cs but here i'm still trying not to take too much damage like i'm okay i i'm okay to give cs and not to stay relatively healthy here because i know i need to be as healthy as possible by level three and that's just a trade-off and a lot of people just take way too much damage and not willing to to give up ces and then when they do get to a strong point they can't take trades so now um i'm really trying to wait for a position or a window to trade aggressively but because i know this is a cannon and this is actually something i've learned from experience my default response a lot of games was at level three i'll just walk up and posture aggressively go for a combo but then what i realized in the process of doing that if i am versing a very strong level two level three champion they will know that okay zed zen use the combo i can zone him from the cannon so a lot of the time i actually wait till i get the cannon first with my q then i look for a combo because cannons are just worth so much gold i'm not willing to um i'm not willing to give that up now you'll see now i've got the cannon i've got the wave coming back out a little bit i know the sejuani is top side from basic jungle tracking now i can go for those trades look at that now this is what i'm talking about so first thing that here i see lucian postering aggressively so i go to this side i try aiming it to one side to usher this solution onto towards me so that's fine then instead of rushing my q because i know that solution is going to dash i wait for lucian to dash with the slow then iq so i can actually proc the electricity so look at this bang i wait for the q then i queued and then i get the really good trade with the electric and it falls the pot out of um lucian already now just look at that that's one combo and that's what nearly half h that's like what 40 percent of hp and one combo this is how strong this combo is and you can already see if i were to land two or three of these in a row the lane's over so again trust me the difference between zed players is the amount of these combos you win eighty percent of z is literally that combo so now i've taken a good trade that's relieved a little bit of pressure here now my w is on cooldown very very crucial if your w's on cooldown you have to play around it alright guys it's very important you identify when your w is on or off cooldown what do we know if your w is on cooldown not only do you have no threat you have no escape you're nothing you're just a bot you're a pawn you know chest those little pieces there's pawn that's what you are very important that you play around this cooldown so i i'm willing to respect here not take too much damage i have to lean heavy on to bought side knowing that the sejuani is on the top side here i'm just chilling so i get another beautiful trade there look at that now there's actually something wrong with this trade look at this so this trade is great but why is this a bad trade this is a bad trade for two reasons it's bad because lucian wasn't going up to cs so generally you want to be timing your w eq combo just like you would with any other champion just like you would with orianna q or victory etc when they go up to try and cs then you would do your combo because then they'd have to make a choice do i give up the cs or do i take the comment of the face now that's the first reason this is bad and quite an unreliable um combo even though i do do it quite well i aim it and then i posture down and then i get the double q but the other reason is that my electrocute was still on cooldown and i thought that like intuitively i thought that the timing was right but it wasn't it was just off so it's actually sometimes really bad to do a combo when your electrocute is still down so if i waited an extra second here the electrocute would have processed and would have done a lot more damage because look at this just it's just coming off cool down there so i get the trade but it would have been much better if i just waited a little bit a few more seconds there so now it's actually again going toward top side but then i realized it's too dangerous so i just chill back onto bot's side here so i'm just chilling now you gained so i just walk away with my w as you can see this is quite a rough match up but i'm doing quite well in terms of minimizing the early game i've still got one pot here lucian has no more pots i believe you maybe one or two biscuits i think maybe one biscuit and one pot and i actually screw up my all in so i hit another combo look at that hit another combo so this time i tried to time it with this cs here i knew that lucian was going up for an auto attack so then i time with the auto attack there and then i go up and then i land a double hurricane i get a really nice trade so here you'll see me screw up and all in but i mean this was just i just disrespected the amount of exhaust damage you'll see it in a second so again they had to miss time my cue i could definitely could have tied my cube better there now i knew in my mind what do we know the way is pushing into me i know lucian needs to recall so i was semi panicking in this way so i was like okay i need to like thin the wave a little bit i don't want it to be so big that i can't all in but i know that the waves gonna be in a really good spot for me to all in so i'm like okay this is perfect right now so i was looking for an all-in combo now i believe oh i know why this didn't work my electrocute it's the electrocute so i look for an all-in i do the perfect combo i think i don't even miss that do i hit those two shurikens those played out as little you see it so close one more auto as well so i actually would have killed the solution if i waited for my electro again the same mistake and the reason i made this mistake against this guy specifically is because like i have a little it's like a little like a grudge against this guy specifically like it's always whenever i reverse this guy i try super hard so i think i was tunneling a little bit too hard on that but as you can see here the combo was good the thought process behind it just a little bit of details there and this is the perfect example guys of all the small details matter right the the the shuriken's hitting waiting for the electrocute taking into account exhaustion sort of thing i believe that i think that second cue misses i want to pause it on that oh i don't know i think the second one i don't know and anyway i was thinking okay here there and i think he exhausts really early as well so the i think he actually exhausts the cute initial q damage as well and i was like okay i can get the the contempt the weak auto with the ignite but then um maybe i thought electric it was going to come through i don't know if electric come through he died if that second shuriken hit i think he dies as well so either way nunu comes clean up on the back end i think in theory though you guys can see the fundamentals of the zed there end up getting my um selling my pot there for refillable getting a pink ward using my w out of base and got my serrated took so i lose quite a bit of cs here which is a little bit annoying but um and then i talked to my jungle here said we can kill at six i time his flash so i know he has no flash so i know there's gonna be i'm gonna get six very soon he has no exhaust beautiful this is actually something i didn't even talk about my guide as well it's so important if you go for an early kill or they use exhaust their exhaust is gonna be on a higher cooldown than your ultimate so if you use your ultimate once they exhaust they escape your ultimate is going to be back off cooldown where you can use your ultimate again here i blew the exhaust early i knew that i could we could definitely go for a kill again not only because he didn't have flash but he also doesn't have exhaust so i tell my jungler communicate with my jungle way in advance and look what i do as well because i know i want my jungle to gank i also pink as well so i ping for my jungle to guarantee a gank for onto this guy then i'm trying to bait look at this so i'm actually trying to bait the solution in i know this lucian doesn't want to let me through the lane so i'm playing like an idiot like you know you know oh god you let me in please please let me in and then and i'm just just chilling here and i bait him in and i've got the pink water as well and then he just ease in dashes in and we're gonna get he's able to clean up that nice little kill on the back end so i think that's just clean fundamentals there we know he has no summoners we haven't we know he has no flash that sort of thing getting the pink cord on the correct side et cetera et cetera anyway that happened so i believe it just gets wave in nothing too special go for another recall here i was kind of uncertain whether i needed boots a cloth armor for tarbys or just more threat with the with the long sword so i end up deciding on a second long sword um instead just because i like screw it like this is a very aggressive lane i just want to play for kills actually and in terms of coming out of base here i should have been using my w way more aggressively there i should have used my w then thought about what i was going to buy rather than the other way around i would have been able to save maybe like two seconds of tempo there which is actually pretty big so nunu is actually quite strong this game now i know that he's still not going to have exhaust for a little bit so we'll come back to lane i'm just chilling so this is actually not a great zed game with the way it's gone so far get another beautiful combo here guys look at this again beautiful and i'm always walking to the side that i know this solution is going to go on because the see how the shadow it's slightly there so if this is the shadow that solution why is that so that's that's the shadow of that solution so i know it's very unlikely that he's going to walk this way or walk that way it's unlikely majority of the time just the way psychology works is that they will most likely go this somewhere in this like funnel this direction so that's why i'm already and especially when i pass down that way and i start walking this way it's really easy for me to hit that second cue now if you land the w in the center it's really hard for you to know which way to queue because then it could be anywhere they can walk back they can walk that way they can walk that way also um yeah and it's just so it's very very important that you're you're very you're really aiming that that combo very important so i get a nice little trade again just csing from a distance but yeah this is actually not good for zed because my cs is not good this game because it's been so chaotic and i actually missed so many cs when i just died or traded kills so i'm just pinging missing here and again i don't want to use my we q combo on the wave right so if this solution goes missing i know it's highly unlikely he's going to go rome and let's say he just sits here if i use my w e q combo on this wave or even just my w e this is gonna well he's got nothing so again i'm i know my w is on such a high cooldown i'm careful with the way i use it if i can just if i can just farm with autos and ease i will okay that's just the uh an underlying fundamental that i try to apply with that at all times and also for escape reasons i don't have a ward i don't have a side to lean on to so if i don't have a side on the side to lean on to i'm going to be very careful with the way i use my w and how aggressive i want to use it so here i do that i do a shitty combo that's a terrible combo curtis um so if you want to know what not to do that's what not to do once it that's the first bad combo that i've done now what do we know here so here my wave's in a really bad spot he's actually gonna freeze it potentially now i want to give you a little tip guys when this happens and you're versing someone who potentially wants to freeze the strength of z is that you can actually roam again you can roam quite well and let's just say i don't have the tools or the vision or the ability to actually break this free without getting all in then what i'll do i'll just leave am i right you can freeze i'm just gonna roam and now i saw a bot skirmish actually happen and then the enemy panics the enemy will then panic and a lot of the time they'll have to leave and try and follow you or they'll try and break the fee or like you know or you'll be able to get a roam off a lot of the time you can make the enemy panic so here i just walk and then what happens because he's trying to follow that wave he can't hold it and then it just crashes on the tower so i try to come here and then they escape which is fine and then i'm deterring and then i see lucian potentially in river what's the first default response time flash time flash to tell my jungle he has no flash because i didn't know maybe he was camping river so the um wave actually crashes that's a nice little tip here end up clearing a bit of ward some wards fast forwarding getting ward on to one side so i can lean i'm still timing this guy's flash i'm really down like 10c at like 9 or 10 cs so it's not too bad here again i didn't want to use my w look at that so here this is how discipline i am with my w i know my nunu and my thresh in the area i know the enemy recalled so instead of using my w to escape because i know if i use my w to escape i'm not going to be able to follow up on a gank so i'd rather take the damage knowing that okay i've still got my w so then if my i can bait the enemy in and then i can follow up on a gank and then thresh because i know he has no flash and i've timed it before they come through and now i'm able to follow up on the gank because i have um because i have my w and i wouldn't have had that i would have been able to have that luxury if if i use my w but if i knew this was an isolated 1v1 and my team wasn't in the area then i would have doubled away and i wouldn't have taken barely any damage from that from the uh the coal culling is it i think it's called the culling so now um i feel quite safe to get the wave out so i end up queuing through the wave here i believe i don't use w because i didn't have enough energy to even use the full combo anyway so i just spend the the energy just um on the c on the uh q and the e ninja gets this i really need to recall now this is a big mistake that this may seem this may seem like this may seem small but it really matters you really want to ideally not use your w like this to get into a safe rate it's better just to walk like you save more time by just walking the reason being is now i don't have w looks on what 20 second cooldown i then base we know uh zed is like an eight second cooldown i get my euro moves and uh save for a pink quart here in a second now my w is not on cooldown so i would have been able to w at a base here way earlier uh so i use my urimus anyway it's just a little thing there and then i use my w and by the time i get back to lane my w is not of cooldown so just a little thing there my like but if i actually used it earlier then my i would actually have w as i get and if something happens then i don't have my w you know it's just like just little things like that just kind of matter yes it doesn't matter in this specific moment but um it's just the premise behind it so now i'm quite strong got my uramus so i'm ready to i'm ready to pounce so i thought he was going to be here and then he ends up just getting the scribes boom or something okay not too bad not too bad oh this is how do i get this convert oh yeah i get that nice combo that was a bit sketchy this is actually not a good combo that was a dead center combo and i was just a wrist i was just a bad i was just like a feel thing i got that combo i should not get that combo off i think i'd go for an all in here soon as well because i knew he had exhaust but so i couldn't have gone for that combo and now wait for my q to come back up and i miss my q no again all right let's look at this so a few things here if this guy doesn't have exhaust i would actually probably go on this right now i would actually probably pop back to that w like fake pop back to that w insta alt e and then flash q ignite he dies without exhaust super easy but because he has exhaust i can't do that so i wait away from my q back up and away from to disrespect a little bit so i want to wait for my w cooldown so then i e e auto and now here what i should have done because i actually wasn't sure in my mind i didn't think that if he had flash or not if i knew he didn't have if i knew he had flash i probably just would have popped back to my r then maybe like throughout my w then w q and then or something like that or even like w q or they'd pop to my w and then flash auto or something like that but my perm my thought process here was okay my w is coming up in two seconds maybe i can withstand some of these auto attacks keep auto attacking him and then maybe like wq but then i realized i was taking too much damage so i have to pop back this was just a miscalculation of him um he played it really well and i missed my cues as well so i panicked whenever i missed my cue my brain just panicked so here i thought okay ah because he he dodged forward instead of backwards as well which is really good by him so he did his weight and i thought his default response in a lot of situations people want to go back to the tower but in hindsight the reason that he actually went upwards is because look at my my champion my champion's actually cutting him off this way so it's actually default his default response is going to be path top side so i should know if i'm on the deeper side of him he's going to pop up but if i'm on this side of him then he's gonna go down so here i should have known that he's probably most likely gonna to dodge upwards here so um i miss my q and then he just survives again i thought and my premise here was if i order him a few times if i order him a few times that's going to do more damage because the more damage you do through in your ultimate it does more damage on the pop so um i thought that would be able to kill him so there's so many ways i could have killed this guy better here and as you can see this is again the perfect it's the perfect thing of like small details matter i could have got the first solar kill so much easier i could have got this solid kill much easier um and again yeah same thing here i didn't even factor in electrocute my electric was on cooldown i think here i just thought he was gonna base or something or he'll back up with too many orders with his lifesteal so i didn't wait for electrocute um but to be honest here i should just wait for my w cool down a little bit longer or just or just hit my cue curtis that that works as well or here i just alt and then i'd flat i just flash q here i honestly just flash q like point blank and then i just get it i shouldn't have waited for my w i should just screw it and just flash q auto and he just dies whatever whatever man but as you can see there's the premise there i'm thinking about the cooldowns i'm i'm trying to assess my um i knew that i had my spike i had my um so i really wanted to go for a kill but he ended up using exhaust so and i still have flash so i thought it wasn't too bad so i end up um trying to find lucia in here he ends up backing up i think i thought he backed up so i went back to lane here all right i'm just gonna play for the wave because i didn't have vision and then i see him again so i'm like i'm killing this guy man come on give me the kill i was very blood bloodthirsty this gang so i wanted to kill this guy then i go i'm looking for a combo because i know he has flash it's like mind games he has flash and i have flash so i gotta be very careful here and then said just pops over and i was trying to hold my w thinking that a little bit think that lucian might get a range and then sedge just flashes on me and kills me god damn it man that just tilted me so that happens nico cleans up on the back end here which is really really good come back to lane so um as you can see what could have been a really easy snowball super lane easy lane for me from a few little micro mistakes um the game is much harder like yes me and lucian not neither of us are kind of that strong right now because we've just traded kills a lot but um as you can see yeah it's been a bit of a bit of an uphill battle and that's why i think this vod was so good to show us because again the higher elo you get as well people are better at dodging queues and they're better at understanding your kill threat and they're better at both itemizing and taking exhaust a lot of people in the lower elos as well they're not going to dodge queues well they're not going to take exhaust they're not going to understand your kill threat things like that so um very important see i get chunked and instead of um just basing or using my pots i just quickly get the um get the fruit so now what do what's next so now it's a dragonfly so everyone's looking to group for this dragon and the high heel you get people get obsessive over dragons which is very um which makes a lot of sense because it's such an important objective so my thought process here is when there's a dragon fight i need to be coming in from the side any objective i don't want to be coming front to back i need to be coming from the side so look what i do here i sit on the side up here even if they know where i am it doesn't really matter i'm like cool you know where i am but still i'm still there and you're not going to be able to play the front to back fight so then i'm coming from the side here like this boom full combo on solution bang really easy and then let's play the front to backfire now yes this fight probably would have worked front to back anyway but even maybe not because canon would have zoned me it would have been really hard for me to get back onto the back line but here as you can see it's a perfect example there's the 5v5 or the 4v5 but then i'm coming in from the side ideally it wouldn't even be in this position in the first place ideally i'd even have a pick but you don't always have that luxury so then i go for that combo i wait for them to use their abilities then i go in i feel like here i actually could have did i play that well enough don't even hit what did i even hit my combo fully i think i'd w eq i think i did it quickly i hit it fully and then he just pops cool okay so as you can see that's the that's the theory of how you want to play those those mid game fights very important distinction um to make and it really will increase the effectiveness of your kit and getting that damage off so now as we talk about wave clearing i know the waves in a straight line now so i'll do the the we q combo through the entire thing now i can just use my passive orders to to hit get them down now here end up greeting for tower because again zed is a champion if you end up breaking the enemy's tower mid lane tower it just booms the game the reason being is that it gives you way more room to roam they're way more threatened way more room to chase down you have more pressure more jungle control just overall just a super super a massive objective so even if it comes at the cost of tempo if you ever get the opportunity to break mid tower i would highly highly recommend doing it so here i ever say my temper is completely screwed lucian's already coming back on the map but you know what screw it like i i got the mid tower and that's game changing so i go back now i'm in a decent spot i'm pretty much even cs with this lucian but um is ezreal's very strong and he's someone who's kind of counters me so it's going to be quite hard and nunu has all the kills so it's a bit bit tricky here so i end up going for tabby's this game i think tarby's in hindsight was a it was a and i ended up realizing i didn't have sweeper so i ended up are they here one of these games anytime he was on my next base i i'd go back for sweeper um here to be honest i actually could have swapped sweeper now because i am relatively strong i usually swap to sweeper when i feel like i have pr i get pressure but i wasn't 100 sure that'll get pressure because i know lucian as a champion is very good into zed because of how much mobility he has and how hard it is for him to uh how hard it is for me to hit my shurikens plus he has exhaust plus he has actually bulk finished so um maybe that was a reason but a lot of the time this is the time where you would be wanting to swap to sweeper especially for your passive as well even though i already have five stacks of my zombie ward i want to be stacking that up to 10 as fast as possible because you get that extra bit of adaptive force i believe but anyway here i'm actually matching lucian in the side lane um end up going tarbys which i think is a mistake i think i'm just again tunneled on the 1v1 tabi's is good if it does help me get pressure in the 1v1 but i still think mercs is probably better because they have a sejuani they have a bard and they have a um a cannon all those champions mercs would be very valuable so the reason here i'm not going aggressively because i wasn't actually sure if he had exhaust or not anna and i knew his team was i didn't actually know where sejuani was in the moment i actually didn't see sejuani x i was tunneling so much on csing so my thought process was okay his team most likely is going to be trading sides of the map because my team is doing rift herald so either it's a 4v4 topside or they're trading that off and they're going to be looking to dive me on the bot side so when you're on weak side of the map you really don't want to be heavy trading um because then it just gives the enemy a play opportunity but then when i see bard here and i see sejuani start to pass up towards the top side of the map you'll see me start to use my w a little bit more aggressively but anyway nothing too special here says on the tower then i asked for blue and he asked if it actually gives me blue which is very big for me now this was actually a big game-changing moment i actually wanted to go for this play mid so i end up partying i was parting on my way mid but then nunu ends up going bottom to lucian so i'm like okay i gotta i gotta help my nunu because he's gonna get solid otherwise so i end up just going to help my nunu for the play even hindsight this is probably the wrong i know this is the wrong call but it was just my call it was just my decision in the moment so get the double shuriken there get his exhaust out which is really really big into rifting on the side lane getting the side lane here and notice how my default response in all of these situations though is always to be in the side lane and then group here regardless if i went for this bot line play or not i could have come and come up from the side here and had backline access this would have been a really really good play if me and nunu came up from the side because lucian wouldn't be here i'd be coming in from the side it'd be a really really good play for me i've flash ignite everything because nunu went for that bob play i'm like oh then maybe they can disengage and i can just get the free pick here um but as you can see regardless is about the position that i was in in the first place so i ended up using this rift overstaying getting this tower escaping and then spacing now i've got my dust blade which is incredibly important swapped to my sweeper here got my pink ward absolutely popping now next fight here is a dragon fight again so what i want to be doing if the next play is a dragon or the net would it i want to be on the side of the next objective so here dragon's up in 45 seconds i want to be pushing out the side then coming in from the flank i want to be threatening from the side lane here so i get to the sideline get some wards down get a pink ward now i know i can use my w eq aggressively here for the wave because i have a pink water in the uh in the tri bush here and now i'm trying to look for a pick if someone chose on the sideline i can look for a pick if they over position that sort of thing so here i was actually going to look for a pick on the canon here using my sweeper just to make sure there's no vision now and i was going to use my w eq aggressively here but then bard pops through here uses the the uh q onto me then sejuani ends up coming and then i blow flash now that may seem really really bad which i think it was a bit of an over extension for me i think the only reason i went for this is because i actually thought they were trading objectives because lucian shows top so i'm like all right kenneth just bought they're just giving the dirt the dragon completely maybe they all the most likely they should be all top side right now looking for this tower while we go for dragon or something like that or establishing baron vision for 20 minutes as it's like 1850 right now um and they just traded the dragon off so i thought canon was actually alone so i was just trying to posture and actually here i i actually wasn't going to w i was trying to push him all the way back um but then they just popped behind me so it's fine they use everything now they have no alts anyway so they can't contest dragon regardless so here i end up getting another wave or whatever recalling swapping lane assignments because now i need to be top side because dragon ball as the next objective now something to note here me and the solution had even cs the entire game net around now but this is where he really started to get a lot of cs from this moment all the way back here so he starts to get a lot of says because he he just just this lucian does a really good play from behind when you're behind it's really good to just trade objectives because now this whole time while we're [ __ ] around playing for this objective he's just farming up a storm top side for some reason nico's grouped so early maybe because niko wants to punish people who face check but he just shelves top this whole time gets all this cs and now he ends up getting like 20 cs up ahead of me right now when i press tab he's 162 i'm 142. so he's actually got a lot of cs right now so now i have to nikko tp's top i have to back this whole time he was ceasing top side and now lucia's been farming the whole time i haven't had any farm so and they take blue off me for some reason as well he actually gets by accident and now nico's got the wrong lane assignments i've had no farm so i'm like screw it we need to force something so i'm thinking barracks i'm like well i have no lane to farm cannons all the way both let's force a tp because niko doesn't have tp right now so he noticed my intention with my mindset when playing zed is like i'm always trying to again like if i'm not farming in the side lane i want to force an objective let them come to us so i can get a flank or something like i'm always trying to find a way to push the pace of the game in some form of way um when i've got a lead but if i don't have a lead i don't need to i can just continue to farm um so as you can see here guys generally this is not the way i would play mid game generally i'd play a lot slower i would be on the sideline but because the lane assignments were so cooked like i just felt really rushed i didn't i knew we're getting really far behind a farm and i know as a champion zed if he gets behind the curve and farm you're going to have a really really bad time so i knew that if they tried to contest i don't want to be stuck in the pit right now so my my initial response here is like i need to get into a position and try and look for a pick because we lose this fight so i see z i see sorry lucian coming so do the w e eq combo r and then pop back and he just dies so again this combo here i should have done the pado combo i think the pardo combo would be my ah nah the powder combo actually doesn't kill yet i don't think because he has too much he has that that [ __ ] ruined so i just i actually get really lucky into a full combo into him and kill him even through the exhaust i think niko damaged him as well but i get the kill but then we end up losing this fight so we just take way too much damage here but now i know i'm still not useless like i'm not backing out of the fight because i still have my i can still poke but then we just get rinsed by the uh we get rinsed by the um by the cannon all kill him but you can kind of see my intention here but at least we got the tp out of the cannon which was really really good so i get some farm here i back up wait for my last whisper farm a little bit more gold get my last whisper now i've got my last whisper because i saw that they had quite a bit of armor at this point i mean anyway ezreal anyway that's the main culprit and they've got tabi's and things like that and i saw a stopwatch onto canon now notice how i'm coming out of base i'm always clicking tab so i'm always clicking tabs i said what do they have how much armor they have now i actually believe i don't upgrade this slash whisper into a lore dominic's i just sit on the last whisper if they had a lot of armor i would actually probably swap this to a i would actually upgrade this fully to a little dominic's but that's actually not the case here as well because i actually had a considerable amount of burst i was kind of thinking should i have actually just got like a um a last a uh black cleaver or a edge of knight i actually think either of them would have been good but because i saw them starting to get a bit of our mind you kenan will get those on you soon this guy's already got an iceborn this guy's got a rant he's got it with dead man's plate um and people getting targets and things like that i'm like it's good to have a little bit of armor pin here but anyway i'm always checking items out of base to see who has stopwatch who has zhonya's that sort of thing now i know kennen's uses e so he has no self peel so i look for a big i try to look for an aggressive trade here wait for the cd cc to come down then i get the full combo off i'm not going in because i know i can get one shot through the ultimate we end up getting a nice little pick there get that i actually have to quickly recall because i get absolutely chunked now again i need to go on the sideline because i know the next objective is a dragon so the next objective is the dragon so i'm trying to position on the side that where the next objective is so i get a pink ward down i'm trying to put my maneuver myself in a way that i can get backline access use my we q aggressively here because i know i have a bit of time to do so in a bit of space now here i know that we are actually looking for a cloud i believe this is the the soul dragon it might be i'm always checking itemization always checking itemization trying to find a way to look for a pick here i was going to look for a pick here but then kennen doesn't walk the greedy way he goes a long way so i just back up a little bit here i don't want to show on the wave so i'm just kind of hiding out of vision now i use my um i use my uh oh look at this by the way look at this so you know i was talking about that dust blade thing to show you vision notice how this is the dustplate's there notice when i go into vision it will go on cooldown which will tell me that um you know i i'm spotted by the enemy so look at this you'll see in a second as soon as i get envisioned look at that the dustplate goes uh off cooldown goes on cooldown so it's very important that and that's that little gimmick so if that bush was watered i didn't have a pink or i didn't have a sweeper i could tell if that was water or not by that little passive just a little tip there but anyway look at this now i'm going to come in from the flank i've i've come here i'm threatening through any threatening now i don't need to commit now even if i know they saw me but they just know i'm here so now these guys can't go deeper because i know that i have backline access so if they were all alive even if they were all alive someone then has to deal with me so then then if someone has to deal with me either i can take that 1v1 or i can just blast going or and go this way or i can look for a poke poke damage and make it a 4v like a 4v4 or like a advantageous 5v5 something like that i'm distracting them uh i'm trying to to pull them in certain directions make it harder for their enemy carriers to get into the fight anyway that gets the dragon now we're looking towards the baron here now again the same thing i'm trying to put myself in a position to make a big now i see lucian up here so i know lucian's gonna walk up here now this is actually i i do a really bad i miss my combos here and i think i would have hundred to zeroed him so now i know lucian's going to come through so i sit in this bush i believe i now do the the um the unseen combo because i know lucian is as a champion if i start this fight with r it's going to be way too hard for me to get the triple turrican combo because i know he can just dodge it this is going to be really really hard for me to get the triple shuriken off so i decided to do the unseen combo now ins i screw up my combo i actually missed both my shurikens he actually would have died here now this just shows how big mechanical misplay is um and you know how i was talking about um in the guide how how dangerous this combo is if you miss the one shot with this with this combo you're screwed like there's no getting out essentially so i end up um using a combo missing it he ends up exhausting i run one way flash the other and then knowing that my my clone's all the way back here so just another little tip if your clone's all the way back here you want to be running in a direction opposite to your clone i wouldn't really be running this way because then if i pop back he's still here so my default response is to run as far away as possible from my ultimate clone so i can always jump back to it and create that space so i miss my combo whatever he exhausts me i flash the other way pop back and try to cue him on the back end even if i hit that q still doesn't die but then he heals back up on the blue so it just shows you how important it is to be very just i mean first of all hit them know what combo to use and more importantly hit the hit the queue so i think that was a really good example of um the right combo but wrong execution and that's something i would spend a disproportionate amount of time if your 40 plus games into is literally looking at those skirmishes so the skirmish kind of like goes out a little bit it's turning into a very sloppy scrappy um fight here again i'm always trying to position myself around the side to look for a pick i see them overextend now i come from the side bang get another pick on i'm always trying i'm just being that annoying ninja in the background but then kennen ends up like teeping and then killing me here which is pretty annoying but anyway you can see the premise so all because i miss that combo that fight ends up being very very rough now as you're always very very fed at this point in time they and the same thing happens i'm trying to sweep vision around the baron get to the objective first so i'm trying to get to the objective first we get to the objective first i wait for bard to come and then we look for a nice little pick here onto this bard we get a nice little pick beautiful and what happens here thresh gets caught kaiser takes blow off me for some reason because he doesn't understand how important it is now again i'm trying to find a way to get onto this ezreal because he's actually the only person i can kind of threaten right now so look at me i'm coming from the side here waiting for them to over extend and waiting for someone else to engage here then i saw nunu come in like all right i'm going to go in for a little combo here i don't know if i was going to commit so i do this is the delayed combo i was trying to do the delay combo and force out the ezreal e here so i use my combo to chunk and i end up getting ezreal's e and then i pop back and then go on to the ezreal here with e and then i just exhaust me and i can't really do anything he nearly dies but it's not enough i think here i just went too early i think i need to wait like i still had plenty of time on my w if y'all if i actually look at my w here i think this was really good but i should just w e the q and l look at the cooldown you guys see that little yellow bar that's how much time i have i should wait for my team to come forward a little bit here because they're actually getting screwed by cannon or i just don't go in whatsoever and just play a little bit slower here because um i played too fast with my team because the cannon actually just flanked out team yes or or i don't go on the edge where i go on the lucian but lucian was positioning really far away so i couldn't really get in range of the lucian how do i play this better maybe maybe i just hold my w eq comment maybe i just wait here i wait i wait for israel because ezra has to walk up and eat aggressively here to get in range to do damage so maybe i just wait if i just wait maybe they're gonna i stop them from being able to do damage maybe i peel back onto the cannon or something or just literally being here and you know how to talk about threat my threat of presence maybe i just just be patient and this is something that is comes with time as you get from 40 plus games onwards all your this is all i spend my time on it's like skirmishing skirmishing like my landing's fine like i can optimize my own lens and things like that i think about but like largely most of my time and energy in my games is revolves around skirmishing and team fighting how can i optimize juice my kit do the right combo um play in a really optimal way so here on this fight i think the premise was good but the execution was poor i think i just could have played a little bit more patient and because my q wasn't up as well that's the other my chromosphere here because i threw my q and i panicked because i thought okay he has no e now that's my go time but i should wait another like two seconds here because my w still be up and then i'd go in then i eat auto then my q will be up because when i go in here my queue is actually just not up in time so then it just comes up and by the time it comes up i'm like dead so i actually could have killed this ezreal if i waited another two seconds there as well for my cue so just like little things like that so as you can see reversing ezreal is a pain in the ass they end up getting barren here they end up kind of cleaning them on the back end and then again i'm always trying to position um sneakily around the next objective we start this but now it's getting really hard now ezra ends up seeing me i thought ezra was going to walk all the way around but he sees me he lands a really max range cue on me and they're just pumping me around now it's so hard for me to position in these fights now versus ezreal like it's really really hard this is why i ban ezreal a lot as well so we end up killing the cannon sorry it's such a hard game for me right now and the only reason it's so hard is because i'm behind the curve if i had a lot of cs this game i wouldn't have to worry about that i'd be way more durable i'd probably have my black cleaver by now probably have more dominic's and black cleaver um you know it's just that this is the this is the sad reality of getting behind as it uh it's just a sad reality of the situation so we end up getting the elder here and then pushing out the sidewave nothing too special here i'll get my my black cleaver for more durability again coming in trying to come in from the side as much as possible prep the side wave what happens here boom and then we end up ending the game so this was a really solid game to go over i think it highlights a lot of the great things it also highlights a lot of the mid game misplays so what i want to do now quickly is just quickly go over to another vod here of just i just want to go over two or three minutes of again another mid to late game because i get a lot of questions about mid to late game on a champion again here 15 minutes into the game i'm actually versing this shen me and this jax temporarily swapped lanes but i saw that he actually had no armor he actually had built no armor yet and i had finished my ghost blade so i knew there was actually quite a bit of kill threat so i'm just playing slow here wait for the cc dodge the taunt sorry because i identified that as a kill threat wait get the slow get a really good combo boom really simple kill onto the shin now my default response is to shove out get towers then um again here recalling out of vision trying to look for a pick now okay this is that's what i want to talk about here so after i get that kill and i get the tower my default response if i know my team is looking for a rift held i'm always trying to position off the side to get myself into a position where if they come or face check i can get a pick here so i pink here this is why it's always going to have pinks on hand so we have it handy to have pinks it's always handy to have sweeper although i don't have sweeper here um we move all the way down here then um then i start to recall my team's recalling then i believe at least face checks do a full combo one shot so it's just again this is the importance of positioning and just thinking about where you need to be in mid game very very important now i know the next objective i believe was was this dragon so i end up swapping lane to bot side so i end up going oh sorry top side sorry next objective was baron it was actually baron so i needed to be top side temporarily here so i end up shoving out top and then my default response i don't want to sit in the side lane and split push i just want to be pushing and coming from the side push and come to the side push and come to the side so here i'm trying to look for a pick and rotation he's not biting at all so i just catch more waves here and then again the great thing about this is what i said before is when i versus shin i like to play towards the shen so get a nice little trade pop back on that w get a nice little combo i think i get double shuriken ignite and then we end up killing this [ __ ] so as you can see my four person mid game i'm not trying to necessarily split i'm always trying to like be create chaos by pushing and looking for picks and transition i'm i'm looking for that skirmish i'm looking for that flank i'm not just grouping mindlessly but i'm not just splitting mindlessly i want the flight to be played around me and i'm always just playing around these side lanes being created with my place and if i no my team is playing on the opposite side of the map i'll push and just rotate i won't just sit there forever because i know i don't have tp so guys um hopefully you got quite a bit from this guide i know it's quite heavy very intensive um and if you have any questions about zed feel free to let me know it's a very fun champion uh hopefully this can speed up your process of learning this champion um but yeah really appreciate the support guys and cheers

Channel: Coach Curtis

Views: 243,405

Keywords: Zed mid, zed mid lane, zed mid guide, zed guide, zed runes, zed build, zed soloq, how to carry with zed, how to play zed, zed step by step, challenger zed, high elo zed, zed99, zed coach, zed combos, zed combo, zed matchup, zed teacher, zed in soloq, zed pro, zed electrocute, zed conqueror, zed items, korea zed, coach curtis

Id: s_WAul76a0A

Length: 137min 39sec (8259 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020