Zed vs Zilean
How to Beat Zilean as Zed
based on 1,577 Zed vs Zilean matchupsHow We Analyze LoL Champion Counters
Zed vs Zilean Matchup Summary
Best Zed vs Zilean Counter Build
Items
Starter Items
Early Items
Core Zed Items
Optional Items
Summoner Spells
Skill Order
Runes
Guide to Countering Zilean as Zed
Tips for Playing as Zed against Zilean
Placing a Living Shadow before using Death Mark can give Zed a safe escape from combat.
Saving energy and spell cooldowns until you use your ultimate will maximize Death Mark's damage.
Quickly double tapping Living Shadow will teleport Zed to his shadow immediately for rapid escapes.
Advice to Win Against Zilean
Zilean is fragile if a team focuses on him, but otherwise he's very difficult to kill. Commit to killing him as a team.
If you're able to match Zilean's speed, it can sometimes be beneficial to wait until his ultimate has faded before landing the killing blow.
Zed vs Zilean Counter Stats
How to Counter Zilean with Zed in LoL
The stat comparisons provided here clarify several critical Zed versus Zilean counter stats that may help you interpret the differences and similarities between the pair. For instance, Zed’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is more than Zilean’s KDA ratio of NaN, indicating that Zed may be more central to his team's team fighting capacity than Zilean. This observation is in large part fueled by the difference in kills.
Zed usually has a much larger longest killing spree than his counter does. Typically, he takes more damage than Zilean. This is usually reflective of different amounts of tankyness, yet it can also illustrate that the one champ has less agility and thus is not able to kite away from additional damage when poked or engaged.
Differences between Zed and Zilean
Damage Types Compared
Champion Playstyles Compared
Who is Better, Zed or Zilean?
Both League champs are great. Both have their pros and cons. In the game's current meta, Zed usually fairs equally well when trying to fight Zilean, with a 49.5% win rate. Thus, Zed makes an ok counter for Zilean.
While Zed does have a lower win rate than Zilean, when facing one another, Zed also has a greater difficulty level that makes him a more time consuming champ to pick up and master. You still need to be cautious when picking Zed into Zileanas his relative depth means you may not be able to unleash his full potential without a significant amount of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Zed also has almost no amount of CC and other utility, a similar amount to Zilean. This often makes her just as valuable during team fights, especially when trying to counter champions with a ton of burst damage.
While there isn't one best champion overall in League of Legends, in Zed vs Zilean matchups, Zilean is the better champion with a similar win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your teammates during team fights.
Zed is a somewhat poor counter for Zilean. You will do well by focussing your gameplay on maximizing your gold income and destroying objectives. If you can do that, you should do very well as Zed against Zilean.
Other Champion Matchups Against Zed
Additional Information for Zed Players
How We Calculated Our Zed vs Zilean Build and Stats
Other Useful Resources
Further Insights to Win this Matchup
If you would like to truly master Zed in order to counter Zilean during both the lane and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should keep reading to pick up a few extra lessons on this matchup. If you listen to the build and stats presented here, you will grow your win rate significantly and be closer to League of Legends pro players.
Zed often racks up more CS relative to Zilean. Champs who typically don't take much CS usualy don't need much CS to be valuable teammates, such as sup champs. These kinds of champions are capable of scaling well off of their abilities and first items alone. Yet, champs with a lot of CS, such as hyper-carries, typically have to have several high cost items to be effective. In either case, try to surpass the values shown on this page to do well.
The ideal items to use in your Zed versus Zilean build include Youmuu's Ghostblade, Axiom Arc, and Voltaic Cyclosword. When Zed included at least these three pieces in his build, he performed a lot better when fighting Zilean than with most other commonly used item sets. In fact, Zed had an average winrate of 49.5% battling Zilean with these items in his kit.
To have the best chance of defeating Zilean as Zed, you should take the Electrocute, Taste of Blood, Eyeball Collection, Ultimate Hunter, Scorch, and Transcendence runes from the Domination and Sorcery rune sets. Of all the runes players chose for Zed vs Zilean counterpicks, this mixture of runes resulted in the greatest win rate. Notably, these runes provided a 49.5% winrate overall.
By default, tips, stats, and builds on how to beat Zilean as Zed are presented for every ranked division. If you would like to scope the statistics and builds to an individual player tier, you should use the selection menu located earlier on the page.