Characters / League Of Legends Z

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This page contains all champions beginning with the letter Z.

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Zac, the Secret Weapon

Zaun Amorphous Combatant "Zac"

"I was made for this... literally."

Voiced by:
Unknown (English)
Roberto Cuadrado (European Spanish)
Jorge Badillo (Mexican Spanish)
Kōichi Yamadera (Japanese)
Affonso Amajones (Brazilian Portuguese)
Man-Yeong Park (Korean)

"The angrier you get, the more this is going to hurt..."

Zac is the product of a toxic spill that ran through a chemtech seam and pooled in an isolated cavern deep in Zaun’s Sump. Despite such humble origins, Zac has grown from primordial ooze into a thinking being who dwells in the city’s pipes, occasionally emerging to help those who cannot help themselves or to rebuild the broken infrastructure of Zaun.

Zac is a Vanguard champion who excels at manipulating his gelatinous body in combat, stretching, squashing and bouncing it around for great mobility, area-of-effect damage and crowd control. Instead of mana, he uses health to cast his abilities.

• His passive, Cell Division, causes a chunk of Zac's body to break off him and land nearby whenever he hits an enemy with an ability. Picking up a chunk heals Zac based on his max health; enemies can walk over chunks to destroy them. This ability also has a second effect that splits Zac into four blobs of goo upon death, each with a portion of his max health and defenses, that attempt to recombine, reviving Zac with the same total health they had if they succeed; enemies can stop this by destroying the blobs before they can recombine. This effect has a long cooldown before it can be used again.
• With his first ability, Stretching Strikes, Zac stretches one arm in a target direction, damaging and briefly grabbing onto the first enemy it hits. His next basic attack will also become a stretching strike that damages and grabs onto the target from a distance. If each strike hits a different enemy, Zac will then fling them towards each other, damaging them again and briefly stunning them if they slam against each other.
• His second ability, Unstable Matter, causes Zac's body to burst outwards, damaging nearby enemies based on their max health. The ability's cooldown is reduced whenever Zac picks up a Cell Division chunk.
• With his third ability, Elastic Slingshot, Zac anchors his arms to the ground and channels for a few seconds. When the ability is reactivated, Zac launches himself at any location in a cone in front of himself, damaging and knocking nearby enemies back upon landing; the range of the jump increases the longer he charged.
• His ultimate ability, Let's Bounce!, causes Zac to start bouncing for the next few seconds, increasing his movement speed. He bounces four times, damaging and slowing enemies he bounces upon, and knocking them back the first time he hits them. This ability also passively increases the heal from Cell Division chunks.

Zac's alternate skins include Special Weapon Zac, Pool Party Zac, SKT T1 Zac, Battlecast Zac, Empyrean Zac, and Zesty Dip Zac.

In season 6 of Teamfight Tactics, Zac is a Tier 3 Chemtech Bruiser. With his Yoink! ability, he stretches his arms at the two furthest enemies within three hexes, dealing magic damage and pulling them towards Zac while also granting him incoming percentage damage reduction for the duration of the cast. He was initially removed in season 7, returning in the Uncharted Realms mid-set update using his Pool Party Zac skin as a Tier 2 Lagoon Guardian. His Unstable Current ability has Zac burst outwards in a 2-hex radius, dealing magic damage to nearby enemies based on their maximum health and healing Zac for a flat amount. In season 8, he uses his Empyrean Zac skin and is a Tier 4 Threat. With his Symbiotic Split ability, Zac bounces up and slams down dealing magic damage to surrounding enemies based on his current health and healing himself for a percentage of his missing health. Additionally, when Zac dies he passively splits into two blobs with a percentage of his maximum health that taunt nearby enemies. He is no longer a purchasable champion in the Glitched Out!! mid-set update, but is instead a special summoned ally that appears on your board and can be freely positioned while the trait bonus for the Riftwalker origin is active. Zac gains bonus stats based on the combined star level of all allied Riftwalkers, and also gains the last-listed trait of the nearest Riftwalker, allowing him to both benefit from the trait and contribute to its breakpoints. His ability is renamed to Unstable Matter, which retains the same active effect as before the mid-set, but loses its passive component. He returns as a purchasable champion in season 10 using the same skin as a Tier 4 EDM Bruiser. His Let's Bounce! ability has him bounce three times on nearby enemies, each dealing magic damage and briefly stunning their target while healing Zac for a flat amount.

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• Asteroids Monster: His passive reflects this in two distinct ways.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: His physical size scales on his maximum HP, so despite starting off slightly taller than the average adult male, he could very well end up giving Cho'gath a run for his money with enough tank items. Conversely, just barely escaping with a sliver of health left makes him barely larger than a Yordle for a while.
• Badass Boast:
  I may bend, but I don't break!
• Bad Powers, Good People: A Blob Monster Super-Soldier created by mad scientists, and yet he's a self-described protector of the innocent.
  "Even if you don't have a spine, you still have to stand up for yourself!"
• Balance Buff: Zac has a very strong niche as a surprise ganker tank with Elastic Slingshot, but he was given a rework in midseason 7 tank updates to give him more to do once he engaged on enemies. His Stretching Strike was very originally a simple short-ranged punch that damaged and slowed enemies in front of him, but was tweaked into his current slam-enemies-together ability. Let's Bounce! was also significantly changed into a "kidnap spell" where he flattened onto the ground, trapped enemies standing on top of him, then bouncing away with them, but this was reverted in patch 9.11 due to its unpopularity^note The main reason Riot gave was that in addition to the Stretching Strikes change, Zac had lost too much damage in favor of crowd control, and given how players found the new ultimate not as fun or interesting as the previous one, they felt it was worth reverting.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's one of the, if not the nicest champion in the league, and also an absolute menace in combat.
• Big Eater: Has a large appetite befitting someone of his size.
• Boisterous Bruiser: His quotes speak for themselves.
  "It's not about how much you lift, it's how good you look!"
• Blob Monster: In appearance, sure. But when talking personality there's not much 'monster' about him.
• Bouncing Battler: His ultimate made concise.
• Button Mashing: His abilities, especially his Unstable Matter are on a fairly low cooldown especially when maxed out, allowing a Ryze-like rapid fire combo: leap onto an enemy, explode, rubber punch, 1 auto attack, explode, 1 auto attack, rubber punch, leap, etc.
  • Zac's early levels in the jungle can be summarized as "press W repeatedly until the creeps are slain".
• Cast from Hit Points: Though thankfully a small blob breaks off with each ability cast which he can pick up to refund some of it.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: His dialogue sounds the most like a Real Life person than any other champion. He actually says "How's it going?" and "Why thanks! I do work out." in the middle of beating his enemies to death.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Watch the League of Legends Mac Client commercial again. That green blob activating Caitlyn's Snap Trap? It's an early pre-announcement appearance by Zac! He also appears in the background of the splash art for Battle Bunny Riven, a skin released nearly a year before Zac.
• Confusion Fu: Not generally speaking, but his Elastic Slingshot is a perfect example. Using it, he can come in from any angle to attack, or he was walk up to where the enemy can see him, charge it up, and then not use it to drive them off an objective or just to screw with them.
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Originally designed as a living weapon, but given a moral, relatively normal upbringing by the scientists who created him.
• Dissonant Serenity: His voice is downright calm most of the time and stays that way no matter what (even as he "dies" and has to recombine). He does raise his voice whenever he's being a Large Ham though.
• Dynamic Entry: He has pretty fantastic range and speed on his slingshot ability, being able to cast it safely from several bushes and still cover a fair portion of the lane. And when he comes in, you can expect pain. It gets to the point where charging it up visibly is a good way to force opponents to back away from an area momentarily if they've experienced getting jumped on several times already.
  "WHOOOOOHOOOOOOOO"
• The Empath: Zac is enriched from the thoughts and feelings of people around him and will sometimes absorb the dominant emotions in his environment when overstimulated, for good or ill.
• Face of a Thug: Looks terrifying. Protects the helpless and innocent.
• First Of Its Kind: And until Zaun can figure out how to replicate the process, he'll remain the only one.
• From a Single Cell: His passive, although it's closer to From A Single Blob.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Zac typically fights naked in combat although this is justified given that he is a slime monster whose anatomy does not have any apparent private areas. His pool party skin though has him wear a swimsuit.
• Fun Personified: He's a Gentle Giant with a sweet tooth and a knack for hanging out with his opponents off of the Rift. In-game he uses his Elastic Slingshot and Let's Bounce! abilities like he's doing a cannonball dive into a pool and bouncing on a trampoline, respectively, complete with enthusiastic lines all the while. And then of course he shows off how goofy it can be to be able to take the form of basically anything on a regular basis.
• Fun with Acronyms: Zaun Amorphous Combatant.
• Gentle Giant: He has a serene voice and friendly demeanor, and just happens to grow in size as he builds HP and can give his opponents a smackdown just like anyone else.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Subverted; he's got glowing yellow eyes that wouldn't look out of place on a horror monster, but he's a good guy.
• Good Parents: The Happily Married scientists who created him, who decided to flee with Zac in tow and give him a proper upbringing.
• I Can Still Fight!: His passive enables this in two ways: the more obvious one is his splitting-on-death that brings him back into the fight at partial HP if the blobs survive long enough. The less obvious part is his passive restoring a percentage of his maximum health per blob picked up (dropping blobs costs the same percentage of his current health), meaning a heavily wounded Zac can still stay in lane and spam his abilities on minions to recover his health in short order.
• Incoming Ham: "Woohoo!"
  • He can literally yell "Incomiiiiiing!" during his Dynamic Entry.
• It Can Think: He showed signs of being sentient when he was just a tiny bloblet, leading his creators to realize he was more than a mindless blob.
• Jack of All Stats: Among junglers. One reason Zac isn't played much on a competitive level is because he's not the best at any one thing, and thus gets passed over for others who do the one thing a team needs better than him. But he does everything second best at once, with long-range initiation, good sustained damage, lots of AoE CC, and extremely efficient use of tank stats.
• The Juggernaut: He's not that quick, and while he is capable of Dynamic Entry, the fact that the power needs to be charged makes using it to chase a bit of a challenge, and to escape nearly impossible. However, because he's tough, can heal himself to the point that his powers are practically free, and brings plenty of pain to nearby opponents...
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: He mentions that he's "not as squishy as he looks" which besides the obvious meaning might mean he's aware that players commonly call a fragile champion "squishy".
• Leeroy Jenkins: His Auto-Revive, disruptive abilities, and sheer tankiness make Zac the patron saint of performing this trope successfully.
• Lightning Bruiser: He will slingshot himself from the bush and into your face, then proceed to punch, explode, and bounce a metric ton of goo all over you while he remains tanky as hell, and is able to heal off the blobs he leaves behind.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Most of his lines spoken when he's moving around make him sound like somewhat of a Reluctant Warrior. Once he starts attacking though...
  I'm done being nice.
• Magikarp Power: Being a more tank-oriented jungler, he lacks early combat prowess and thus a lot of initiative when compared to more focused duelist junglers, in turn possessing a very vulnerable early game that opponents may want to bully him at. However, once his scaling is allowed to take hold, he's an exceptionally bulky support jungler with ridiculous ganking potential, and becomes nigh-unignorable by the late game.
• Major Injury Underreaction: He can shred himself up like it's no big deal since he'll just reabsorb the blobs anyway.
• Nice Guy: While he was initally going to be exprimented and developed as a weapon for a chem-baron, he was taught morality and eventually spirited away by kind-hearted scientests, nuturing him to be the good guy he is.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The method to create him couldn't be reproduced, so the scientests tried to capture him again for further study. They failed.
• Oblivious Adoption: Growing up, he couldn't figure out why he was so different from the other kids, like why he could take any shape he wanted but they couldn't. Everything was eventually explained to him.
  Mom always said I was big for my age.
• Odd Friendship: He and Ekko have struck up a friendship, mainly since they are the only two sane champions of Zaun, and Ekko being interested in Zac's... Peculiar biology.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: He's only fairly annoyed when "dying" and splitting into 4 recombining chunks from his passive. One has to wonder how often this happens to him.
  I hate it when this happens!
• Percent Damage Attack: Notable for having two kinds: Unstable Matter deals damage as a percentage of his target's health and his passive mechanic which costs him 4% of his OWN current HP to use abilities (though picking up blobs to restore 4% of his maximum HP mitigates this).
• Resource Reimbursement: The Cell Division passive makes it so that all his abilities are Casts From Hit Points, but if any of his abilities damage anyone, a chunk of goo from his body lands nearby, and he can collect it to instantly regain some of his lost health, though enemies can trample on them and destroy them first.
• Retcon: Originally, Zac was directly created by a pair of human scientists who served as his "parents" and were still alive by the time of present lore. Currently, his origins are more mysterious with the scientists having merely discovered him in a chemical pond, and both were killed off in the backstory.
• Rubber Man: Most obvious with Stretching Strike.
• Silliness Switch: He's a fighting force to be reckoned with, sure, but his theme overall seems a bit comical for a fighter-type champion. Especially if one is used to playing badass warriors or terror-inducing creatures then transitions to playing a giant blob monster that bounces all over the place to splatter enemies, explodes himself regularly to inflict damage, and picks up pieces of himself as a requisite gameplay mechanic. Not to mention him being a total softie with a sweet tooth that's just as concerned with what's for lunch as he is with the fighting.
• Skill Gate Characters: Zac is a very gank-centric tank jungler who gets a lot of his early power from exploiting mistakes — enemies who really don't pay attention to the minimap or wards will almost definitely be blindsided by his Elastic Slingshot initiations since he can engage them at such odd angles. However, he's also very fragile in the early game, can be directly countered by more aggressive early junglers like Lee Sin or Olaf, and those who know where to ward may be able to make Zac's tactics harder to pull off. He also definitively lacks a niche beyond his Confusion Fu — he's still quite a strong all-rounder, he just gets outclassed by the competition in any given singular strength.
• Super-Soldier: Intended to be the living-weapon variant.
• Sweet Tooth: Loves candy and in fact stole some sweets from his "parents" in the lab. Also appeared in a recent League commercial to be attempting to steal the cupcake inside Caitlyn's Yordle Snap Trap.
• Terror Hero: Not in personality, but as far as gameplay goes, if you're against a Zac you should act like you're a participant in a Mook Horror Show and the enemy is Batman. Zac can come from just about any direction, and he's one of the most difficult enemies to ward against because of it.
• Token Good Zaunite: Before Zac, all the other champions who align themselves with Zaun fit the city-state's reputation for being rather amoral (or at the very least unstable). The lone exception (Blitzcrank) was more from Zaun than aligned with it in a concrete way.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Unlike many other champions that honed their fighting skills (be it spell or blade) from early on in their lives, Zac only took to fighting after growing up and never had any proper instruction. Good thing he's a living weapon with flexibility, durability, and brute force.
• Upbringing Makes the Hero: The main reason he ended up being a hero instead of a monster.
• Wonder Child: Zac's parents were a scientist couple who, upon discovering he was a fully sapient being, decided to hide away with him and raise him like a son, letting him grow up to become a kind (slime) man and hero to Zaun.
• Why Won't You Die?: Unless a team collectively focuses him (which can backfire heavily), he takes a while to go down, especially when he's bouncing around, disrupting one's team, and collecting blobs all the while to keep him healthy. He also splits into four blobs upon lethal damage and can stay alive if any one of them survive long enough, making killing him take even more effort than normal.
  • Heroic Second Wind: If you barely beat Zac and are unable to kill off his bloblets, he's going to perform this. If a team is prepared to go all-in for a fight, Zac will lead the initiation of that fight for this reason.

Zed, the Master of Shadows

Govos (birth name)/Usan (Kinkou name)

"The unseen blade is the deadliest."

Voiced by:
Donny Lucas (English)
Jorge García Insúa (European Spanish)
Oliver Magaña (Mexican Spanish/1st Voice)
Daniel del Roble (Mexican Spanish/Current)
Kenji Nomura (Japanese/1st Voice)
Kenjiro Tsuda (Japanese/Current)
Zeca Rodrigues (Brazilian Portuguese)
Choi Han (Korean)
Konstantin Karasik (Russian)
Appears in: Legends of Runeterra

"Balance is a fool's master."

Utterly ruthless and without mercy, Zed is the leader of the Order of Shadow, an organization he created with the intent of militarizing Ionia’s magical and martial traditions to drive out Noxian invaders. During the war, desperation led him to unlock the secret shadow form—a malevolent spirit magic as dangerous and corrupting as it is powerful. Zed has mastered all of these forbidden techniques to destroy anything he sees as a threat to his nation, or his new order.

Zed is an Assassin champion with a complex skillset, based around summoning shadow clones that he can use to move around and attack his foes from unexpected angles. He uses a fixed Energy meter as a resource instead of mana.

• His passive, Contempt for the Weak, causes Zed's basic attacks against enemies below half health to deal bonus damage based on their max health. This effect cannot happen more than once every few seconds on the same target.
• His first ability, Razor Shuriken, throws Zed's spinning blades in a target direction, damaging enemies in their path and dealing reduced damage to enemies hit beyond the first.
• His second ability, Living Shadow, sends an immobile shadow clone to a target location for a few seconds. The clone mimics Zed's other basic abilities, restoring some Energy to Zed if both him and his clone strike the same target with an ability. Zed can also reactivate the ability to swap places with the shadow clone.
• With his third ability, Shadow Slash, Zed spins his blades, damaging nearby enemies. Zed's slash reduces the cooldown of Living Shadow for each enemy champion hit, while his clone's slash slows enemies it hits.
• With his ultimate ability, Death Mark, Zed dashes to a nearby enemy champion, leaving behind a shadow clone at his location and marking the target for a few seconds. The mark stores a percentage of damage dealt by Zed or his clones to the marked enemy, dealing the amount of damage stored to the target once the mark expires. Zed can also reactivate the ability to swap positions with the shadow clone he left behind.

Zed's alternate skins include Shockblade Zed, SKT T1 Zed, PROJECT: Zed, Championship Zed, Death Sworn Zed, Galaxy Slayer Zed, PsyOps Zed, Prestige PROJECT: Zed, Debonair Zed, Immortal Journey Zed, and Blood Moon Zed. Legends of Runeterra exclusively includes Dark Star Zed, and Wild Rift exclusively includes Supreme Cells Zed.

In season 1 of Teamfight Tactics, Zed is a Tier 2 Ninja Assassin. His ability, Razor Shuriken, throws a shuriken up to 4 hexes away that damages all enemies it passes through. In season 2, he was changed to use his Shockblade Zed skin and changed to a Tier 5 Electric Assassin Summoner. His ability was changed to Living Shadow, which creates a perfect copy of himself behind his current target, which can also cast Living Shadow itself. He was initially removed in season 3 but returned in the Return to the Stars mid-set update using his Galaxy Slayer Zed skin as a 2 cost Rebel Infiltrator. His new ability, Contempt for the Weak, is a passive that makes Zed deal bonus magic damage and steal a percentage of his target's attack damage upon every third basic attack. In season 4, he returns to using his base skin as a Tier 2 Ninja Shade, retaining Contempt for the Weak as his ability. His class was changed to Slayer in the Festival of Beasts mid-set update due to the removal of the Shade class, though he retains Shade's innate ability to teleport to the enemy backline at the start of combat as a passive unique to himself. He was removed in season 5, returning in season 8 using his Prestige PROJECT: Zed skin as a Tier 4 LaserCorps Duelist Hacker. With his new Empowered Kill Mode ability, he teleports behind his target and reduces their armor for a few seconds. Zed then enters an enhanced state for a moderate period, empowering his basic attacks to deal flat bonus physical damage, with every third attack dealing further percent bonus damage and striking all adjacent enemies to Zed. He was removed in the Glitched Out!! mid-set update, returning in season 9 as a Tier 2 Ionia Rogue Slayer. His Living Shadow ability summons a shadow at the furthest enemy within 3 hexes, increasing with Zed's attack range, then causes both Zed and his shadow to slash adjacent enemies for physical damage. He was removed in the Horizonbound mid-set update, returning in season 10 using his Empyrean Zed skin as a Tier 4 EDM Crowd Diver. His Shadow Dance ability marks his current target and summons an untargetable Shadow with increased attack damage for a few seconds. The mark detonates after a brief delay or when the target falls beneath a percentage health threshold, dealing an additional burst of physical damage.

In Legends of Runeterra, Zed is a 3-mana 3/2 Ionia Champion with Quick Attack who summons an attacking Living Shadow (an Ephemeral unit with the same stats as Zed) when he attacks. When either he or his Living Shadows have struck the enemy Nexus twice he levels up, gaining +1/+1 and causing his Living Shadows to copy his keywords as well as his stats. His signature spell is Zed's Shadowshift.

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• A Lighter Shade of Black: An unfettered and highly dangerous assassin, but he has his nation's safety at heart. Compare this to the other major Ionian villain, Jhin, who doesn't care about Ionia in the slightest. Naturally, the two are opponents.
• Adaptational Heroism: His original lore paints Zed as a highly envious, brutal and treacherous villain who's goals were purely about self-mastery and nothing else. After the release of his eponymous mini-series, Zed is shown to be a much more noble, but no less ruthless, individual at his core, with his goal now being that of punishing villainy and keeping threats out of his homeland. He now lies more in Anti-Villain territory, unlike the Ax-Crazy Jhin or the power-hungry Kusho.
• Always Someone Better: He's noted to have been a talented pupil studying under the Kinkou. Though he's always felt overshadowed by Shen.
• Arch-Enemy: To Shen. The Zed comic claims that this is invoked — by positioning himself as his order as the enemy to Shen's Kinkou, he made sure they kept their identity as the order of balance — and that he doesn't have any ill will toward Shen personally.
• Armor Is Useless: He wears highly-visible plate armor yet has a distinct lack of durability.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He's not above boasting of his superior fighting ability.
  "My skill is unrivaled!"
  "I am a true master."
  "They will all learn to fear my order."
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: As he sees it, his assassination work is a response to the impartiality the Kinkou adopt to defending Ionia. While he and Shen agree that defending the country is necessary, their methods create a divide between their respective orders.
  Shen: The Kinkou watch over Ionia!
  Zed: Watch all you want. My order will act.
• Badass Army: Formed the Order of the Shadow to counter the Kinkou Order and Noxus, and their numbers are large.
• Being Evil Sucks: The Zed comic puts at the forefront that he does what he does out of pragmatic obligation, not because he wants to do it. In order to preserve Ionia's well-being, he even had to burn bridges with Shen and Yenvai, which is made worse by how much of it is part of Master Kusho's plan to save face as he himself turned to the shadows.
  Yenvai: If you go to see Shen... he will kill you, Usan. And with all that you took from him... he deserves that vengeance.
  Zed: I know.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: He wields a pair of katars mounted over his wrists, though considering they are mounted in his gauntlets, it'd be more accurate to call them patas.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Zed's dialogue in combat is very vicious and edgy to everyone he encounters like you'd expect from a dark-clad assassin. A lot of it is just to enhance his threatening persona rather than being how he would actually talk to a real person, which is exemplified by how the professional and calculating demeanor he has otherwise.
• Casting a Shadow: Zed and his order unsealed the ancient "Tears of the Shadow", a magical ichor that grants them access to this type of magic. Zed in specific uses it to create dark clones of himself and teleport around.
• Characterization Marches On: Zed was initially introduced as a straight-up villain, one who cold-bloodedly usurped the Kinkou and began a murderous conquest in Ionia just to prove his power. Riot has since given him sympathetic motivations and introduced the Mad Artist Jhin, whose deeds make Zed's seem outright noble in comparison.
• Cooldown Manipulation: If he lands his Shadow Slash so that both he and his clone damage a target, he'll reduce the cooldown of Living Shadow, granting him more uptime in battle and the ability to track subsequent targets.
• Crutch Character:
  • In LoL, Zed is a champ that wants to get a lead early to build his attack damage, granting all of his abilities a huge spike in power that he can use to cripple other lanes. If he falls behind at any point, it can get really difficult to pick up the pace due to how much he relies on assassinating targets.
  • In LoR; Zed is a very strong early-game unit thanks to his power, keywords that make him risky to block and the ability to summon shadow clones for offense, often being able to level up faster than other champs. But his stats pale incredibly compared to higher-cost champs who can all block him with ease, and his shadow clones have a variety of counters that become easier to exploit (namely, like Zed, that they can't bypass blocking units), making it harder for Zed to achieve his level-up requirement with more defenders on the board.
• Cutting the Knot: Zed's take on his personal philosophy, based on shooting the dog. As he recounts in "Zed #4", as an acolyte, his master Kusho set him to meditate on a spider's web for three days, then explained why beetles can't be trapped by the web and moths suffer more because of their futile attempts to escape it, as a metaphor for preserving the balance. He then asked Zed how many insects he'd saved from the spider web over the course of the three days?
  "None," I responded. Because I had killed the spider the first day.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Shadow magic was kept imprisoned by the Kinkou for disrupting the balance of Ionia, but eventually embraced by Zed and the Yanléi/Order of Shadows (Riot waffled between whether it was a technique or an element Zed discovered, but the effect is the same). It was later explained that a big reason for its ban was because it invites Nocturne, although there have yet to be visible consequences of this.
• Dark Is Evil: He has black shadow clones deal additional damage and he makes a big deal about the dark and shrouded path.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: To make his damage count, Zed players need to get really good at connecting all of his individual hits which is encouraged by Living Shadow's passive, restoring energy by both Zed and the shadow striking an enemy at the same time. Doing that not only puts out more damage, but lets Zed continue onto new targets in a single fight since he has his resources back. And the trope especially comes into play for his ultimate which scales off the accumulative damage he deals when it's active; if Zed's not hitting you, he's not likely to get that final burst to finish his target.
• Deceptive Disciple: Came back to the Kinkou to murder his old master and overthrow them, or so it seemed.
• Decoy Getaway: Switching positions with his Living Shadow is essential to escaping bad situations. Repeated experiences of this can lead to a game of I Know You Know I Know as his opponents try to anticipate whether he'll swap with his shadow or if he'll just keep running and play them like fools.
• Depending on the Writer: How antagonistic Zed is differs between which medium you're in. In League and Legends of Runeterra, he's played akin to a Card-Carrying Villain with dialogue that is often threatening, boastful, and sometimes outright malicious. In official lore like in his comic, he's much more professional, working a dirty business with an awareness of the cost of human life, and driven by pragmatism instead of spite, anger, or revenge.
• Difficult, but Awesome: While Zed doesn't exactly have a high skill floor, as his individual abilities are actually pretty straightforward and can look cool in the hands of even moderately-skilled players., he's a fragile melee assassin with mediocre base damage and punishing energy costs, and demands pulling off dizzying combos to be effective. Excelling at this unlocks a champion with incredible mobility and solid killing power that scales well into the late-game.
• Doppleganger Attack: His Shadow Clone mimics his other abilities, which goes a long way to maximize his burst before applying Death Mark.
  • LoR allows him to summon a Shadow Clone every time he attacks. And when leveled up, the clone gains the same stats and keywords Zed has, creating two high-priority threats for the enemy team.
• Driven by Envy: This was more the case in his original lore where Zed's motivations are fueled entirely by his inferiority to Shen, being the reason why he sought shadow magic in the first place. Post-retcon, the feeling of inferiority is still there, but it's no longer as all-consuming as it used to be, nor is he ever shown to be as petty as back then. Ironically, the feeling went both ways because Kusho saw more potential in Zed, causing him to neglect Shen.
• Dual Wielding: He uses his wrist blades in tandem like when casting Shadow Slash or landing a critical hit.
• Easily Forgiven: Despite betraying his clan and then marching his disciples against them, Zed's master was ready to accept him back if he renounced his shadow powers. This would turn out to be a hint that the two were already in cahoots and staging the entire coup in a Zero-Approval Gambit.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Equaled only by Shen as a ninja disciple, then he became an entirely different sort of powerful when he got ahold of the box containing the Tears of the Shadow.
• Enemy Mine: He and Shen come to an agreement to cease hostilities when Jhin's return is made known, simply because they both know they're the only two who stand a chance against him. Zed himself proposed the truce because he didn't think he could handle Jhin alone.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Despite all the damage that's been done to their relationship, Zed still cares about Shen due to their long history together. And he can't bring it upon himself to reveal the truth of Kusho's descent into villainy, knowing it would only further break Shen's idealism.
  • His mentoring of Kayn is more akin to fatherly love than a student-teacher relationship. He genuinely wants Kayn to succeed him and become a better leader than he is.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Zed is just as disgusted at Jhin as Shen is, to the point that he is willing to ally (and in fact initiated the truce) with his arch-enemy so that they could take him down.
  • He also sent out Kayn to destroy the Darkin scythe Rhaast, as it's much too destructive and dangerous for even him to tolerate (especially if the scythe ends up being used against Ionia).
• Evil Counterpart: According to the developers, he serves as an "evil ninja" to Shen. They highlight the different philosophies within Ionia: Shen is part of the Kinkou, which seeks the balance of good/evil, order/chaos, etc. as means of harmony — they do acknowledge evil must exist in society as long as it's Sealed Evil in a Can. Zed's Order of the Shadow rejects balance and accepts the possibility of necessary evil. This was deliberate: Zed thinks Ionia needs the Kinkou to remain neutral, so he set up his own order to oppose them (and drain off the disaffected who might have corrupted it).
• Evil Former Friend: More than that— Zed and Shen used to be as close as family before Zed betrayed the order and murdered Shen's father. The Zed comic reveals that he still looks out for Shen in his own subtle way, even though he knows their friendship can never be rekindled.
  Zed: "We meet again... old friend."
  Shen: "We're not the men we once were."
• Evil Laugh: Has one that players love to spam. If you hear it while he's dashing toward you and slicing you apart together with his shadow clone, he's using his ultimate and you're probably screwed.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice is deep, raspy and menacing, befitting a powerful and ruthless assassin.
• Fake–Real Turn: Zed originally faked Master Kusho's death, but when he learns Kusho turned evil, Zed kills him for real.
• Finishing Move: Death Mark deals a full 100% of his Attack Damage, plus up to 50% of all damage he's dealt to the target beforehand, making it the perfect move to blitz an enemy on their last legs. His passive also helps out with this, dealing additional damage as a percentage of max health if his target is below half health.
• Foil: To Shen. Besides their connection and rivalry in their backstories, they play opposing roles; Shen as a warden that takes the damage for his team, and Zed as an assassin that eliminates enemy threats with burst damage. Ironically, this makes them very potent when they're on the same team: a very solid initiation strategy is having Zed close in on a target with Death Mark then Shen using Stand United on him to protect Zed from inevitable retaliation so he can either escape or have breathing room to inflict even more damage.
• Fragile Speedster: Living Shadow grants Zed a very versatile movement ability; he can cross over terrain easily, chase down or escape from enemies, dodge abilities mid-battle, and so on. He becomes very tricky to avoid and capture due to this mobility, even for an assassin, but dies quickly if he can't make a getaway.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Zed was just another abandoned child taken in by the Kinkou. After everything he went through, he ended up as one of the deadliest warriors in Ionia and the leader of one of its most powerful and influential factions.
• Fuuma Shuriken: The shuriken he tosses around are pretty huge compared to his model. Justified given that they need to be big for readability.
• Glass Cannon: A Zed can creep in and make exposed squishy champions rapidly implode... and will die just as quickly to their teammates if he isn't skilled at using his shadow to make his getaway.
• Highly-Visible Ninja:
  • For all his talk about being unseen, he's blatantly visible most of the time (and had no stealth mechanics in his kit at all). A good Zed, however, can make it so that his assassination target doesn't realize they're being marked for death until it's too late.
  Zed: Without a sound.
  Lulu: We can all hear you, Zed! Silly scuzzlebloom.
  • He also wears very conspicuous and glimmering plate armor, a fact Tahm Kench is quick to mock^note To Zed's credit, it was later specified that said outfit is his war armor; he wears far more conservative and realistic ninja garb during stealth missions as seen in his comic:
  Tahm Kench, taunting enemy Zed: So, shiny attire seem like the thing to wear? You are the most intelligent ninja in the world.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Proper use of his shadows will allow him to kill a target and immediately blink to safety. Doing so requires a lot of planning so you can still maximize your damage and not get stranded in combat.
• Hope Spot: Many assassination targets barely make it out of Zed's burst combo alive then notice the Death Mark above them about a split-second before it blows them up.
• I Did What I Had to Do: In issue 5 of Zed, he finally explains why he killed Kusho and splintered the Kinkou to form the Yanléi: he believed that Kusho was right in that the Kinkou had to exist to preserve peace and order in Ionia, but Ionia itself needed an order that was willing to get its hands dirty. So he formed one, established it as opposition to the Kinkou so they would never join it, and killed Kusho to seal the deal. Even in issue 6, when Kusho was revealed to be alive all along (and not as altruistic as we had believed), Zed still abides by his principles and kills him for real once he learns that Kusho released Jhin from prison and wanted to take their violent approach even further.
• I Have Many Names: Ionians have multiple names depending on the individual culture they inhabit. He was named "Govos" as a lowly peasant, "Usan" as a member of the Kinkou, and now "Zed" as the Master of Shadows.
• Injured Vulnerability: Contempt for the Weak aids his assassination efforts by stripping durability from damaged enemies, allowing Zed to quickly burst down weakened foes.
• Ironic Name: Zed means "Justice of God", which is choice-naming for an unfettered assassin. It gets even more ironic when you realize "Shen" itself means "God" in Chinese.
• The Leader: Of the Order of Shadow, commanding a legion of trained assassins including Kayn, another powerful and ruthless champion.
• Malevolent Masked Man: He has a steel mask on almost all the time, lending to his villainous appearance. Though deep down, he's a lot more complicated than just an "evil ninja".
• Necessarily Evil: He and his order are cloak-and-dagger specialists and assassins who justify their work as small acts of violence that prevent greater suffering.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: By his word, the Order will never harm Ionian civilians or bystanders if it can be helped. Their enemy is only those who would disrupt the nation's safety. It serves to make him seem like the lesser of two evils when you have the likes of Jhin or the invading Noxian army around.
• Ninja: The first release of one since the Kinkou trio; he's got the mask, the agility and the focus on assassination all customary to the archetype. Though he directly opposes the Kinkou's goal of balance.
• Ninja Log: Before you pursue a Zed too far, remember that he can just switch places with his shadow clone, leaving you with a dead imitation for your troubles.
• Parental Abandonment: As recounted in the 4th issue of his comic, Zed's father abandoned him as a child before he was taken in by the Kinkou.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Between the Noxian invasion and his traumatizing experience hunting down Jhin, Zed grew obsessed with punishing evil and realized the Kinkou's impartial attitudes did nothing to serve his goals. The Order of Shadow is his way of pursuing justice on his own terms, through brutal and efficient assassination.
• Pet the Dog: When a young Kayn attempted to attack him in the aftermath of a Noxian battle, Zed allowed Kayn to join his order out of respect for his tenacity. In Zed #3, after years of apprenticeship, he openly declares Kayn his best student and names him his successor, even making sure there are witnesses to set it in stone.
• Psycho Electro: Shockblade Zed. You wouldn't want to end up under this surgeon's knife when all of them are supercharged with electricity.
• The Power of Legacy: As revealed in the Zed comic, he never told Shen the whole truth about Master Kusho, in order to let his friend remember his father as a good person.
• Power Tattoo: A somewhat backwards case where the tattoos are the result of power. The Tears of the Shadow used to grant Zed and his order their shadow magic physically manifests as tattoos, and in issue #5 of Zed, we can see that his entire torso is covered with them.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Zed is said to have killed his mentor, Kusho, in order to achieve the full power of shadow magic, which was certainly true of his original lore. This is subverted, and then inverted, in his revised lore. Not only did Kusho turn out to be alive, but he was the one who grew to become a power-hungry despot that Zed had no choice but to put down.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Red garbs and eyes, black shadows, and one of the most villainous champs from Ionia. Though how evil he seems really depends on who he's up against, given that some of his foes are even worse than him.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: His eyes glow a bright red behind his mask, signaling that he is not to be taken lightly.
• Relative Button: Intentionally presses Shen's if he taunts near him. Whether or not a fight between the two breaks out is entirely up to the players controlling them.
  "Challenge me, Shen. You shall not be an orphan for long!"
• Screw Destiny: Villainous example. He rejects the Kinkou's ancient tradition of balance and order and is actively working against them.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The secrets to shadow magic were imprisoned in a box by the Kinkou for centuries. Once Zed got a hold of it, his rise to power was inevitable.
• Secret-Keeper: He helped Master Kusho fake his death to control the Navori Brotherhood and Yanlei from the shadows, and later killed him for real when it became clear just how monstrous he had become. This means that Shen will never know the truth about Zed or his own father, but Zed seems prepared to take it to the grave, as the alternative would likely be astonishingly worse for Shen.
• Shadow Walker: His power over darkness lets him pop in and out of wherever there are shadows. In-game he can swap places with his shadow clones or blink to his target's location with his ultimate by emerging from their shadow. In "Wild Magic", he uses this ability to blindside Xayah and attack her from all angles.
• Shock and Awe: Shockblade Zed, giving Kennen a run for his money.
• Sore Loser: Played for Laughs in his joke. If he wins his game of janken (rock-paper-scissors) with his shadow clone, it bows and disappears. If he loses, he angrily stabs and kills it.
• Sparing Them the Dirty Work: The purpose of his Yanléi Order is to do the necessary yet amoral deeds so that the Kinkou can remain pure.
• Spin Attack: Shadow Slash has him do a quick spin with his blades outstretched to damage everything around him.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: Galaxy Slayer Zed's weapons are blades formed by manipulating an alien substance around his body. He can create a variety of claws, wrist blades, scythes, and so forth.
• Staying Alive: He uses his shadow abilities to "cheat" death. His death animation has him make a hasty retreat.
• That Man Is Dead: Cast away his Kinkou name of Usan to become Zed.
• Trauma Conga Line: His father abandoned him as a boy, and he had to perform humiliating servant work to get by before being allowed to train with the Kinkou. Then at fifteen, both he and Shen had to hunt down the deranged Jhin and saw firsthand the aftermath of his horrific crimes. Then after becoming disillusioned enough to form the Order of Shadow, his mentor turned heel and Zed had no choice but to kill him, all after he'd already accepted blame for Kusho's death and distanced himself from his loved ones. It's no wonder Zed is as ruthless as he is.
• The Unfettered: He believes that Ionia should remain strong as Noxus violently beat down its doors, but will ignore any notions of disrupting Ionian "balance" to protect it. Ironically, he's ultimately still more fettered than Kusho, who had well fallen past any concerns for excessive collateral damage in the pursuit of order, which Zed is very much against.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Zed is currently depicted as this, especially in his comic series. He's a scary assassin with scarier shadow powers, but his opposition extends to those who seek to ruin Ionia. To that end, he never targets civilians (at his worst that we've seen, he takes out hits on people who already oppose him), and he directly opposes and is thoroughly disgusted by the sadistic serial killer Jhin.
• Villain Protagonist: Zed has his own comic series, is its central protagonist, and takes place long after he's formed the Yanléi and standing in opposition to Shen. However, as it goes on, it develops him into being more of an Unscrupulous Hero fighting against an antagonist who's very clear-cut evil.
• We Can Rule Together: In LoR, he makes several offers for Yasuo to join the Order of Shadow, believing he can contribute a lot with his talent for killing. Yasuo wants to hear none of it.
  Zed: You'd do well in my order.
  Yasuo: I'm nobody's pawn.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Getting combo'd by Zed, with Death Mark always finishing you off? Zhonya's Hourglass or Stopwatch to the rescue! Once a champion has one of these items, they're usually more or less removed as a viable target for Zed unless they can be baited into using the ability before he goes for them.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Zed ultimately does what he does to protect Ionia, but will do everything from uncovering a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to use en masse to discarding his nation's traditional ideologies to do so.
  Shen: We both want what is best for Ionia.
  Zed: And only one of us pursues it.
• Working with the Ex: The Zed comic sees him searching up Lady Yenvai — Shen's former fiancé who Zed had an affair with before Noxus' invasion — in order to find Shen's whereabouts. While Yenvai is willing to peacefully invite the Master of Shadows for tea and a talk, she makes clear just how bitter she is at him having killed Master Kusho, ruining her relationships with him and with Shen. The only way Zed gets her to cooperate is by blackmailing her with the knowledge that her children were fathered not by her current husband, but by their vastaya servant she's having an affair with.
• You Are Already Dead: Barely survive Zed's burst? The Death Mark above your head is about to finish you off in a few seconds as you walk away.
• Zero-Approval Gambit: By killing the Kinkou Order's master, Zed ensured that they'd never join his own order against Noxus, thereby preventing them from falling astray from the path of harmony he considers necessary for Ionia's survival.

Zeri, the Spark of Zaun

"A spark is all I need!"

Voiced by:
Vanille Velasquez (English)
Regina Tiscareño (Mexican Spanish)
Haruka Shiraishi (Japanese)
Eun-Seo Yun (Korean)

"I belong here. We all belong here."

A headstrong, spirited young woman from Zaun’s working-class, Zeri channels her electric magic to charge herself and her custom-crafted gun. Her volatile power mirrors her emotions, its sparks reflecting her lightning-fast approach to life. Deeply compassionate toward others, Zeri carries the love of her family and her home into every fight. Though her eagerness to help can sometimes backfire, Zeri believes one truth to be certain: stand up for your community, and it will stand up with you.

Zeri is a Marksman champion who's unique ability-based damage lets her dart around the battlefield and whittle at her oppoenent's health, enhancing her abilities by always being on the move.

• Zeri's passive, Living Battery, causes her basic attacks to deal magic damage scaling off of ability power, and to be treated as abilities. Moving and casting Burst Fire stores up energy, and when fully charged, her next basic attack will slow and deal bonus damage.
• Zeri's first ability, Burst Fire, makes her shoot a volley of bullets that each deal physical damage scaling off of attack damage to the first enemy hit, with the first round applying on-hit effects. Its cooldown matches Zeri's basic attack timer, and a percentage of attack speed in excess of the cap is converted into bonus attack damage.
• With her second ability, Ultrashock Laser, Zeri fires an electric pulse that slows and damages the first enemy hit. If the pulse hits a wall, it fires an extended laser from the point of impact.
• With her third ability, Spark Surge, Zeri dashes a short distance and energizes her next three casts of Burst Fire, causing them to pierce through enemies. She will vault over or grind along any terrain she dashes into, depending on the angle. Hitting a champion with an attack or ability reduces Spark Surge's cooldown.
• With her ultimate ability, Lightning Crash, Zeri discharges a nova of electricity, damaging nearby enemies, and overcharges herself for a moderate duration. While overcharged, Zeri gains increased damage, attack speed, and movement speed, and Burst Fire's damage concentrates into a faster triple shot that chains lightning between enemies. Attacking enemy champions refreshes the overcharge duration and adds another stack of movement speed.

Zeri's alternate skins include Withered Rose Zeri, Ocean Song Zeri, and Immortal Journey Zeri. Wild Rift exclusively includes PROJECT: Zeri.

In season 6 of Teamfight Tactics, Zeri was added in the Neon Nights mid-set update using her Withered Rose Zeri skin as a Tier 5 Debonair Sniper. Her Lightning Crash ability passively causes her basic attacks to fire a flurry of bullets that stop on the first enemy hit, each dealing a percentage of her attack damage plus a flat amount of bonus magic damage. On activation, Zeri supercharges herself for several seconds, causing her basic attacks to target the farthest enemy while piercing through and damaging all enemies struck, and also making Zeri dash after every attack. Her Debonair VIP bonus extends the buff's duration to last the entire round once activated. She was initially removed in season 7, returning in the Uncharted Realms mid-set using her Ocean Song Zeri skin as a Tier 3 Lagoon Cannoneer. Her Watershock Laser ability fires a pulse at the closest enemy within 3 hexes, or the centermost enemy, briefly stunning them. After a brief delay, the pulse deals bonus percent attack damage to the target and fires a laser from behind them dealing magic damage to enemies in its path. She was removed in season 8, returning in season 9 using her base skin as a Tier 4 Zaun Gunner. Her Surge ability passively makes Zeri execute enemies she damages below a percentage health threshold, and on activation empowers her basic attacks to chain lightning to additional enemies for a few seconds, dealing reduced damage to secondary targets. She was removed in the Horizonbound mid-set update.

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• A-Team Firing: It can be invoked against Zeri: due to her unique ability Burst Fire that is largely used in place of basic attacks, casting Burst Fire while being afflicted by a Blind effect will cause it to be aimed in a completely random direction.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: Considering how important her Burst Fire ability is (effectively replacing her basic attacks), Zeri immediately starts the game with a level in it, saving players the headache of accidentally choosing a different, non-core ability and handicapping themselves.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: Zeri has a few different variants: Spark Surge allows her bullets to pierce through multiple enemies rather than stopping at the first unit hit, and Ultrashock Laser sets off when fired at terrain to snipe out enemies trying to hide behind it (deliberately designed to resemble a "wallbang" from Counter-Strike).
• Difficult, but Awesome: Zeri's reliance on skillshots for her actual basic attacks requires a different approach to playing the game than most other marksmen, especially complicated since she's greatly based around movement and kiting enemies lest she get popped, and has relatively low range. The tradeoff to this is that in addition to having nice tools like the long-range poke of her Ultrashock Laser and high roaming potential of Spark Surge, she's just overall really fast, with the most adept players able to rapidly pump bullets into enemies with being as slippery as possible.
• Elemental Motifs: Her entire character is themed around electricity. She has electrokinetic powers and has a very industrial aesthetic with lots of bolts and conductors across her outfit. Gameplay-wise, her kit is themed around constantly building up energy and releasing it to deal huge bursts of damage.
• Elemental Hair Colours: In her case, bright yellow/lime-green hair to go with her Shock and Awe, which flares up when she's souped up with electricity.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Inspired by her lead designer and voice actor, she has a lot of Filipino influences, up to her electricity powers (her not always having her electricity was made in direct reference to brownouts in the Philippines).
• Fast as Lightning: Her powers over electricity are at the forefront, but her speed is just as integral to her in-game identity, with an extendable dash and plenty of opportunities to boost her normal running speed.
• Finger Gun: Her primary DPS weapon is her Burst Fire gun, but her actual basic attacks are delivered by her pointing at her enemies to fire a bolt of lightning at them. Charge it up from moving and using Burst Fire to damage and slow down enemies!
• Fragile Speedster: For an ADC, she's got incredible mobility thanks to her good base speed, a dash ability that can go across terrain, and a massive speed boost granted by her ult. But of course she's still a marksman, meaning she can be bursted down easily if the enemy gets ahold of her.
• Genki Girl: A very energetic and friendly girl who just can't keep still even when standing idly. Her animations really push the amount of springiness in her movement.
• Girlish Pigtails: A hairstyle that better sells her youthful, streetwise direction.
• Le Parkour: She can do this starting with the dash of Spark Surge — if she dashes into terrain, she'll vault over it. If she dashes along terrain, she'll slide alongside it.
• Life Drain: Zeri was originally launched with a variant of this, with her passive allowing her to siphon a portion of an enemy's shields by damaging them. This was removed in patch 13.12 due to it potentially making her too beefy for her Fragile Speedster gameplay.
• Mage Marksman: She's an electricity mage, but chooses to channel her damage using a gun. Mechanically, she ends up skirting the line between "marksman" and "mage" as her abilities function more like her basic attacks than her actual basic attack; using the vernacular of marksmen but relying on regularly casting abilities (as in, firing lots and lots of bullets) to do the job.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Zeri is firmly a marksman by broad archetype tropes (long range, high DPS, and squishy), but unlike every other marksmen, she's far less reliant on "normal" auto-attacks. Her actual right-clicks are programmed to act like a spell, which have a useful benefit, but are unable to trigger on-hit effects like critical hits, making them no longer the bones of her playstyle. All of the usual advantages of basic attacks (including easy farming and fast objective-taking) are instead allocated onto Burst Fire, a high-DPS skillshot which do behave like physical attacks, up to having a cooldown scaling precisely with her attack speed, which by the late game should become really low and very fast. The end result is that Zeri plays more like she's from a top-down run-and-gun Shoot 'Em Up than a MOBA.
• More Dakka: Marksmen generally have very high DPS by the late game, but Zeri has the unique distinction of having her fundamental firepower coming from an ability, itself a volley of 7 bullets per cast that tear through anyone they hit. With a low cooldown scaling off her attack speed, she can regularly smother her enemies in Bullet Hell.
• Obvious Rule Patch: From her launch in patch 12.2 and up until patch 13.12, Zeri's reliance on skillshots that apply on-hit effects proved to be a lot more troublesome for players and the balancing team than expected due to just how many different item paths it enabled her to build, with one of the bigger problem areas being bruiser items, which allowed her to be far more durable than what her run-and-gunning kit was designed around. After many balancing attempts to dance around her on-hit potential proved fruitless, Riot cut their losses in patch 13.12 by making it so that her Burst Fire no longer triggers Sheen or any of its derivative items (such as Trinity Force, Divine Sunderer, or Iceborn Gauntlet), largely preserving the behavior of her unique skillshot-based gameplay but forcing her to build for more traditional marksmen items.
• Psychoactive Powers: Her "electric charm" has a tendency to flare up when her emotions are in higher spirits, and her just being her normal energetic self has a tendency to cause power outages. She presently keeps this in check using a custom rifle designed to channel her electricity — her biography even states that "the gun's ammo was Zeri's emotions."
• Rebellious Spirit: Similar to Ekko, Zeri is a young Zaunite who sees her city as a community to be cherished, and is willing to defy those attempting to corrupt or ruin it, including the barons at the top.
• Rollerblade Good: Subverted. She doesn't actually wear skates, but she can charge her feet up with electricity to slide around and stay on the move, whether for dashing around or grinding across terrain.
• Shock and Awe: She has innate magical powers that let her manipulate electricity. This type of magic is considerably rare and currently uses a custom rifle to channel it while fighting off chem-barons.
• Super Sliding: Zeri's electric powers allow her to slide just above ground level by enveloping her feet in electricity, giving the impression of rollerblading everywhere. She can also grind on terrain like she would a rail.
• Working-Class Hero: She comes from a large working-class family in Zaun, growing up among plenty of opportunities and a strong community, but also enduring plenty of hardship and loss from rampant mad science and political corruption. With her electricity powers in tow, she's become an icon to her Entresol-level neighbors seeking to fight back against the chem-barons at the top.

Ziggs, the Hexplosives Expert

Zigmund ("Ziggs")

"This'll be a blast!"

Voiced by:
Alessandro Juliani (English)
Jorge Teixeira (European Spanish)
Oliver Magaña (Mexican Spanish)
Natsuki Hanae (Japanese)
Pedro Eugênio (Brazilian Portuguese)
Jang-Hyuk Ahn (Korean)
Oleg Virozub (Russian)
Appears in: Legends of Runeterra, Hextech Mayhem

"Ziggs? Unpredictable, dangerous, yes yes. But quite brilliant!"

—Heimerdinger

With a love of big bombs and short fuses, the yordle Ziggs is an explosive force of nature. As an inventor’s assistant in Piltover, he was bored by his predictable life and befriended a mad, blue-haired bomber named Jinx. After a wild night on the town, Ziggs took her advice and moved to Zaun, where he now explores his fascinations more freely, terrorizing the chem-barons and regular citizens alike in his never ending quest to blow stuff up.

Ziggs is an Artillery Mage champion who excels at using his powerful hexplosives to harrass enemies from afar, control the battlefield and demolish opposing structures.

• His passive, Short Fuse, periodically causes Ziggs' next basic attack to deal bonus damage, doubled against structures. This effect's cooldown is reduced whenever he uses an ability.
• With his first ability, Bouncing Bomb, Ziggs throws a bomb to a target location that explodes after bouncing forward twice or hitting an enemy, damaging nearby foes. The range of the bounces depends on how far away Ziggs threw the bomb.
• His second ability, Satchel Charge, lobs an explosive charge to a target location that reveals its surroundings and explodes after a few seconds, or upon reactivating the ability, damaging and knocking back nearby enemies. If Ziggs is within the explosion radius, he will also be knocked back a longer distance. Additionally, if the satchel is thrown at a low-health enemy tower, it will instantly detonate and immediately demolish the tower.
• His third ability, Hexplosive Minefield, scatters mines over a target location that explode on contact with an enemy, damaging and slowing them, with each explosion beyond the first to hit a foe dealing less damage.
• With his ultimate ability, Mega Inferno Bomb, Ziggs deploys his ultimate creation, hurling a massive bomb to any location in a huge radius around him. The bomb explodes upon reaching its destination, dealing heavy damage to surrounding enemies that increases against opponents in the epicenter of the explosion.

Ziggs' alternate skins include Mad Scientist Ziggs, Major Ziggs, Pool Party Ziggs, Snow Day Ziggs, Master Arcanist Ziggs, Battle Boss Ziggs, Odyssey Ziggs, Sugar Rush Ziggs, Hextech Ziggs, BZZZiggs, and La Ilusion Ziggs. Legends of Runeterra exclusively includes Hyperpop Ziggs, Wild Rift exclusively includes Cottontail Ziggs.

In season 3 of Teamfight Tactics, Ziggs uses his Odyssey Ziggs skin and is a 1 cost Rebel Demolitionist. With his Bomb ability, he tosses a bomb at a nearby enemy, dealing magic damage. He was removed in season 4. He returns in season 5 using his Master Arcanist Ziggs skin as a Tier 1 Hellion Spellweaver, his ability remaining unchanged aside from being renamed to Arcane Bomb. In season 6, he uses his base skin and is a Tier 1 Scrap Yordle Arcanist. His new ability, Mini Inferno Bomb, works similarly to his previous spell, but instead targets a fixed location rather than homing in on his target, dealing magic damage to the enemy in the epicenter and half that damage to adjacent opponents. He was removed in season 7, returning in season 10 using a TFT original skin as a Tier 5 Hyperpop Dazzler. His Chaos Theory ability throws a bomb that deals magic damage around his current target, then splits into 5 smaller bombs that deal reduced damage and shred a percentage of their target's magic resist for a few seconds. Each cast grants two more smaller bombs for all subsequent casts.

In Legends of Runeterra, Ziggs is a 3-mana 3/4 dual Bandle City and Shurima Yordle Champion who casts Short Fuse whenever he attacks, dealing 1 damage to his blocker and the enemy Nexus. When 4 allied landmarks have been destroyed in a game he levels up, gaining +1/+1, upgrading Short Fuse to deal 2 damage instead, and dealing 2 damage to the enemy Nexus whenever an allied landmark is destroyed. His signature spell is Ziggs' Bouncing Bomb.

Ziggs is the protagonist of the game Hextech Mayhem.

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• A Day in the Limelight: Is the star of his own solo adventure, "Hextech Mayhem", a rhythm platformer using his bombs to create the music.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey: Compared to Jinx, his partner in crime and explosives. While they both revel in destruction, Ziggs wants to destroy buildings, not people. Jinx considers people blood-filled buildings.
• Anti-Structure: His Satchel Charge instantly destroys towers if they're below a certain health threshold, and his Short Fuse passive doubles his damage against structures. Combined with being one hell of a wave pusher, he can ideally back enemies into hiding behind their towers only to destroy them with his unrelenting spam. This also makes him a common pick to be played in the botlane role in place of a marksman, since one of the primary roles of a marksman that a lot of other AP champions are lacking at by comparison is tower damage.
• Adaptational Nationality: His lore establishes him as working around in Piltover and Zaun, but despite the fact both cities exist as one region in Legends of Runeterra, the game instead lists him as a half-Shurima card for game balance purposes.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: His Mega Inferno Bomb.
• Birds of a Feather: Finds an odd friend in fellow explosive nut, Jinx.
• Bomb Disposal: He has an... unorthodox way of dealing with them.
  You wanna see how to disarm a bomb? *eats it*
• Cartoon Bomb: Throws them for his basic attacks and most of his abilities.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: So apparent that his placeholder icon in development was basically a different picture of him doing his tremendous grin while facing straight at you. It even extends to his glamoured human disguise.
  Customer: You claimed your pyro-gel would clear out my chimneys. The bloody stuff blew up my entire east wing! And you're smiling!
  Ziggs: (grinning ear to ear) This is how I express remorse.
• Death by Irony / Hoist by His Own Petard: In his death animation the bomb on his back malfunctions, lifts him into the air and explodes, as he leaves behind the bombs he carries in his hands on the ground.
• Death from Above: If you see a skull where you're standing^note Or a smiley face in case of Pool Party Ziggs, run.
• Demolitions Expert: His auto-attack boosting passive deals extra damage against structures and his excellent waveclear makes him a good pusher. Oh, and he uses bombs. That probably helps. He's even called the "Dean of Demolitions"!.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?/G-Rated Sex: In "Paint the Town", his first encounter with Jinx has the two of them tossing ammunition at each other when laughing. When two collide and they're both thrown back against the wall, the first thing Jinx asks him is whether that was "good for [him] too". Almost immediately after a scene occurs with the aftermath resulting in Ziggs straddling Jinx with a huge multicoloured explosion going off in the background (though the two are fully clothed). These two scenes break Ziggs resolve to ignore Jinx, and the rest of the night they spend together then has the structure of a date.
• Eat the Bomb: Played for laughs as his joke animation.
• Endearingly Dorky: Ziggs is an unkempt Yordle with a fascination with explosives that Heimerdinger considers psychopathic. None of these traits stop Jinx from finding him adorable and fancy when she meets him.
• Everyone Has Standards: He won't let children get harmed, putting himself in harm's way to make sure two Zaunite children aren't hurt by his explosives in Bombs: A Tribute.
• Everything Makes a Mushroom: Ziggs' ultimate, Mega Inferno Bomb, produces one, just as its icon indicates. Getting hit by it is generally ill-advised.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In lore Ziggs doesn't deliberately set out to kill people and gets upset when Jinx wants to blow up a police headquarters filled with Enforcers. He also goes out of his way to not hurt children. In-game there is nothing stopping Ziggs from going on killing sprees and murdering child-aged Champions.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Ziggs' Satchel Charge in-game is one of the few abilities that can affect turrets, flat out destroying them once they are under a certain percentage of HP.
• Glass Cannon: Capable of frightening amounts of damage in a short period of time if he gets going, but he's screwed if anyone comes near him for more than a second. At least his Satchel Charge and Hextech Minefield help him out to blast himself to safety and slow pursuers down, respectively.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Ziggs' conscience is represented by these in "Paint the Town", and pop up as he considers whether to join Jinx's explosion-filled crime spree or not. At first, both are represented by his superior, Heimerdinger, but later, the "bad angel" becomes Jinx. Similarly, Jinx's good and bad angels are both represented as Ziggs.
  Heimerdinger!Angel: If you weigh the moral pros and cons with a verisimilitudinous eye towards utilitarianism, the act of taking lives is itself a contradiction and therefor-
  Jinx!Angel: DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT THEN EAT TEN CAKES DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT
• The Hyena: He has quite a range of maniacal laughter. Notably, he's the only one that unpredictably laughs when ordered to move or attack- all other champions either only laugh on command or do so reliably on kills and the like.
• Hypocritical Humor: One of his movement lines is "Impatient? I'm not impatient." Another is "Come on, come on, come on!" Needless to say, Hilarity Ensues when the former is spoke and coincidentally followed by the latter right after.
  • Another strike against him is having a passive named Short Fuse.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Not only is his Mega Inferno Bomb a largely prediction-reliant skillshot for players, but for Ziggs himself, aiming it over a long distance would require him to know the exact arc trajectory that a hand-thrown bomb must take in order to hit a target that will often be outside of his direct line-of-sight.
• In Love with Your Carnage: He and Jinx end up having a blast together in blowing up the city, although he panics when she acknowledges there are a lot of people inside one building, but intends to blow it up anyway.
• Kill It with Fire: All of his spells (which is just throwing bombs, really) result in some kind of fireball occurring.
• Laughing Mad: Minor example since he's not quite as insane entirely... though he's a certainly bit unstable. His /laugh animation is rather indulgent in its enthusiasm, and as stated by a fan-made wiki... "...Ziggs makes several laughing noises as he moves about and attacks on a regular basis, with no determinate script or occasion as to when he does so. This is unique to other champions, whom only play audible sounds on action by the player."
• Mad Artist: In Hextech Mayhem he describes his explosives as art, not science, and gets distressed when Heimerdinger tries to rationalize them with science.
• Mad Bomber: Well, not exactly mad per se, but not quite all there and definitely loving the explosions his job lets him produce, even if they end up being too excessive for he and Heimerdinger's customers.
• Mad Scientist: More manic than mad, but his Mad Scientist Ziggs skin evokes the trope. The skin was eventually canonized with his "Bombs: A Tribute", showing that it's his look ever since he took up residence in Zaun, specifically at Jinx's lab.
• Morality Pet: As of "Paint the Town", he ends up becoming one to Jinx, and she even assumes he's just a semi-real figment of her conscience. He doesn't manage to stop her from blowing up a Piltie warden station (though he stalled long enough for there to be no casualties), but he does manage to make her "feel bad about it for, like, eight seconds. Which is a new record."
• No Kill like Overkill: Official art depicts Ziggs using explosives to go fishing as part of Bandle City's annual Great Hunt contest.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: He was apparently the "Dean of Demolitions" at Piltover's Academy at some point before the events of Paint the Town.
• Not So Stoic: He's deeply hurt by Heimerdinger's rejection of him after the events of "Paint the Town", which lead him to fully embrace Jinx's chaotic lifestyle.
• Not the Intended Use: Professionally, Ziggs is rarely played in his intended midlane due to him being rather prone to shutdowns in spite of his potential damage output. Starting from Season 7 however, he's seen occasional play and success as an AP botlaner in place of a typical AD marksman due to his low-risk and VERY spammy playstyle, having much more options for zoning (with his Hextech Minefield) and pushing (with his Satchel Charge) than other AD carries, and having a support that can give him more much-needed survivability.
• Only Friend: Serves as one and as a Morality Pet to Jinx.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Turns out "Ziggs" is a shorthand for "Zigmund" according to Legends of Runeterra.
• Pinball Projectile: A minor example in his Bouncing Bomb ability, which bounces in arcs up to two times and then explodes or immediately explodes when it hits an enemy target. This can give the ability a range far beyond the range indicator for casting it. The ability can even bounce over walls!
• Recursive Ammo: His Hexplosive Minefield ability totals in at 11 bombs.
• Retcon: In Ziggs' original story, back when yordles were a more commonly-known race in Runeterra, he was originally a brilliant, if carelessly volatile scientist who saved a group of kidnapped professors from Piltover's Yordle Academy using his hexplosives, earning a title as the "Dean of Demolitions". After the mass Continuity Reboot made yordles more secretive, Ziggs instead developed a new backstory where he was working with Heimerdinger in Piltover under a disguise, but ended with him becoming friends with Jinx, getting outed as a yordle, and travelling with her back to Zaun. However, his solo game Hextech Mayhem still describes him as the "Dean of Demolitions".
• Rocket Jump: Using Satchel Charge while he is in range of the ability does not damage him, but knock him away to make the ability double as a potential escape.
• Science Foils: With his mentor, Heimerdinger. While the two respect each other and collaborate together (running a shop in Piltover, building mecha Malphite), Ziggs is more chaotic and prone to bending the rules to enjoy his experiments. He also specifically specializes in explosives, which can get on Heimerdinger's nerves.
  Heimerdinger: Have you considered making quieter hexplosives?
• Ship Tease: His and Jinx's meeting as depicted in Paint the Town involved the two fighting with explosives, with plenty of Visual Innuendo and Double Entendre. Then they go on a date.
• Snowball Fight: Snow Day Ziggs lobs snowballs and exploding snowmen.
• Spam Attack: Bouncing Bomb has a short cooldown for the damage it does, so expect to see one thrown over and over again. At max rank and 20% cooldown reduction (a reasonable amount for an AP Carry build), he can do it almost every 3 seconds- heaven help you if he builds even more!
• Squishy Hexplosives Expert: His bombs deal magic damage and they hurt. His health pool is small and a lot of things hurt him as significantly too.
• Stealth Pun: He has a line getting annoyed and yelling out "Come on!" while his Short Fuse passive is active. It apparently doesn't just refer to his bombs.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Just... look at his title. Of course his abilities have Stuff Blowing Up!
• Token Good Teammate: Between him and Jinx. He likes to blow buildings up and objects to killing people, while Jinx just sees people as buildings with blood.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Ziggs' abilities in a nutshell... if his title didn't give it away for ya.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • His method of disposing a bomb in his joke is by eating it. His taunts are only slightly better since it consists of him clapping the two bombs in his hands together causing them to explode intentionally.
  • His W ability is one of few abilities in the game that can affect the caster, knocking Ziggs in a direction if he's in close enough range of the explosive satchel. Learning to place them strategically to peel dangers off of Ziggs or his allies and to keep him spaced away from danger is key in playing him.
• Water Guns and Balloons: His Pool Party skin, replacing his bomb explosions and dynamite charges with balloon pops, splashes, and a duck float.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Bombs, bombs, and more bombs, of course.
  "Don't worry! I got this!"

Zilean, the Chronokeeper

Zilean Icath'un

"I knew you would do that..."

Voiced by:
Unknown (English/Original)
Christopher Swindle (English/Current; Legends of Runeterra-)
Roberto Encinas (European Spanish)
José Lavat (Mexican Spanish)
Masayuki Omoro (Japanese)
Pietro Mário (Brazilian Portuguese)
Jeong-Hwan So (Korean)
Andrey Yaroslavtsev (Russian)
Appears in: Legends of Runeterra

"There is no greater grief than for a loss that is yet to come."

Once a member of Icathia’s governing council, Zilean is a prodigious elemental mage who seeks mastery over time itself. After using his powers in an attempt to save his people from the Void, he now drifts through the past, present, and future, bending and warping the flow of time around him. Zilean has traveled from Runeterra’s mysterious creation, all the way to its seemingly inevitable ending, searching tirelessly for any strand of fate that might undo his homeland’s destruction.

Zilean is a Specialist champion that uses his mastery over time to support his allies and impair his foes, slowing or speeding up time, bestowing experience or even reversing death itself.

• His passive, Time in a Bottle, causes Zilean to store experience over time. Once he has stored enough experience, Zilean can impart it upon a nearby allied champion, granting them enough experience to level-up; Zilean himself gains as much experience as he bestows. This effect has a long cooldown before it can be used again.
• With his first ability, Time Bomb, Zilean tosses a ticking bomb to a target location that sticks to the first target that walks close to it, prioritizing champions. After a few seconds the bomb explodes, damaging the target (if they're an enemy) and nearby foes. Placing a bomb on a target that already has one will instantly detonate the previous one, briefly stunning enemies hit by the explosion.
• His second ability, Rewind, greatly reduces the cooldown of Zilean's Time Bomb and Time Warp abilities upon activation, allowing him to quickly use them again.
• With his third ability, Time Warp, Zilean bends time around a nearby champion for a few seconds, either massively increasing their movement speed if they're an ally or greatly slowing them if they're an enemy.
• His ultimate ability, Chronoshift, places a rune on an allied champion for a few seconds, rewinding time if they are killed while under its protection, bringing them back to life after a short delay with a set amount of health.

Zilean's alternate skins include Old Saint Zilean, Groovy Zilean, Shurima Desert Zilean, Time Machine Zilean, Blood Moon Zilean, Sugar Rush Zilean, and Winterblessed Zilean. Legends of Runeterra exclusively includes Zilean Wisewood.

In season 4 of Teamfight Tactics, Zilean is a Tier 5 Cultist Mystic using his Blood Moon skin. His Rewind Fate ability places protective runes on the two allies with the lowest health. When protected allies die, they are resurrected after a few seconds with a flat amount of health, are cleansed of all negative effects, and gain bonus attack speed for the rest of the round. He was removed in season 5, returning in season 6 using his base skin as a Tier 2 Clockwork Innovator. His new ability, Time Bomb, places a bomb on the closest enemy, briefly stunning them. When the stun expires or the target dies, the bomb explodes dealing magic damage and reducing the attack speed of adjacent enemies for a few seconds.

In Legends of Runeterra, Zilean is a 2-mana 1/4 Shurima Champion who creates 4 Time Bombs (a 2-mana Landmark that draws a card and advances the Countdown of other Time Bombs by 1 when summoned, with Countdown 1: Deal 1 damage to all enemies and their Nexus) in your deck and Predicts when played. When he's seen you destroy 2 Time Bombs he levels up, gaining +1/+1 and creating a Fleeting copy of each non-Fleeting card he saw you play in the previous round in your hard and the start of each round. His signature spell is Zilean's Careful Preparation.

---

• A Day in the Limelight: After being left to the side for most of the lore he gets a moment to shine in the Legends of Runeterra: Guardians of the Ancient tailer showing off his personality and his personal philosophy.
• Absent-Minded Professor: While very intelligent, he's also a bit spacey both on account of his age and the constant time-traveling he does jumbling his short-term recollection. His introduction in the "Guardians of the Ancient" expansion display this as he monologues the entire video, only to lose his train of thought and have to pick up the pace again.
  "Time, like so many things, is a construct. A convention of those who fear... Oh, confound it! Where was I?... Ah yes-"
• The Ageless: He's specifically stated to be immortal - although he looks old, not Age Without Youth old, but old enough to avert Immortality Begins at Twenty.
• Ambiguous Situation: Legends of Runeterra depicts various working personnel in Zilean's tower, including several apprentices, but it's unclear where they actually came from. Zilean's biography suggests that after separating himself and his tower from linear time, the other inhabitants inside it were left frozen in a single moment, and Zilean was described as being unable to help undo things and make them re-stuck. Were the apprentices people that were previously in the tower he managed to unfreeze and enlist in his cause? Were they complete outsiders from the past (or possibly another timeline) that Zilean somehow managed to invite into his anomalous tower? Or were these chronomancers who also became Unstuck in Time somewhere else and just happened to intersect with Zilean and his tower at some point? The exact rules and capabilities of Zilean's time-manipulation has yet to be precisely explored, so until then, this matter remains unanswered.
• Art Evolution: Legends of Runeterra gives Zilean a robust redesign from his League appearance, giving him aesthetics that makes him fit more in line with ancient Shurima. In particular, all clockwork aesthetics have been phased out — the large device on his back has been replaced with a much sleeker Magitek series of future-seeing gates that nonetheless fit his traditionally-recognized silhouette. He would also receive a VFX update in League to make his abilities reflect their designs and artstyle from LoR (though because it was an effects change, the giant backpack clock on his model still remains).
• Ascended Meme: Zilean's hatred of Volibear comes from Riot Games' design director Tom 'Zileas' Cadwell, who was strongly (though jokingly) against the inclusion of an armored bear champion in the game.
• Auto-Revive: Chronoshift, his ult, gives allies a permanent example if it's timed right.
• Bears Are Bad News: If you play as Zilean in a match against Volibear, he gains the buff 'Armored Bear Hater.' The buff secretly gives him a bonus 10 gold if he kills Volibear.
  "In my day, we would never have allowed an armored bear into the League of Legends."
• Boring, but Practical: His kit is extremely bare-bones, with his Time Bomb being his only skillshot, damage, and (if landed properly) hard, immobilizing crowd control, with the rest of his kit either being point/click buffs and debuffs, a cooldown management buff, or a long-cooldown experience-dispensing mechanic. In spite of this and his poor early game, he's extremely consistent and powerful in his niche of fusing burst damage and support power come mid-late game, with Chronoshift being one of the most powerful abilities in the game in terms of raw value and utility. It's telling that while he doesn't have great playrates and is often written off as a bore, Riot has rarely felt the need to re-balance him^note Ever since his 2015 rework, aside from bugfixes and shifts from global standarizations, the number of times his actual numbers were changed can be counted on one hand as he always has solid winrates and his in-game impact is that palpable.
• Combos: His Time Bomb actually has quite a lot of potential for combos with other Champions, such as putting it on an allied Pantheon just before he leaps, adding an extra bit of burst upon arrival, on an ally under stealth for an extra surprise on arrival, or a minion before Syndra picks it up and throws it at the enemy. He can also use enemy Champions' features against them, such as placing one on a teleporting enemy Shen to harm whoever Shen is going to aid, possibly securing a kill since Shen is likely to have teleported to a low-health ally, or placing it on Malzahar's Voidlings to snag Malzahar himself.
• Cool Old Guy: Especially in Legends of Runeterra, Zilean possesses both sagely wisdom and eccentric wit, showing a sense of humor as he acts on his complicated mission to correct the future.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Chronoshift is surprisingly hard to land, as dying players often instinctively run away and a badly timed ult just makes enemies kill an ally again. A well timed Chronoshift can pretty much turn teamfights into 6v5s.
• Failed Future Forecast:
  • Several of his "defeat" quotes in Legends of Runeterra greatly imply that despite being potentially all-seeing of what the future has in store for the world, he might still be wrong, a possibility that really worries him.
    Zilean: ...oh dear...
  • Him and Ekko have a Commonality Connection-forged Intergenerational Friendship going due to their time-travelling. So if Zilean and Ekko ends up on opposing sides in Legends of Runeterra, Zilean quickly deduces from Ekko's confused response that he messed up big time somewhere along the line.
    Zilean: Oh dear.. I don't like this timeline at all...
• Father Time: Zilean evokes this image. He's an ancient Icathian scholar with chronokinetic abilities, identifiable by his bushy white hair and massive clock-like device that floats behind him. In-game, his ultimate can restore himself or his allies after death, and he can also slow or speed up the units around him with basic abilities.
• Foil: He's highlighted as being one with Lissandra in Legends of Runeterra — both of them are seers who predict that the Void will unleash hell onto Runeterra and are determined to fight against it, but while Lissandra sees their arrival as an inevitability that they can only prepare for, Zilean believes there's a way to avert this future entirely.
  Zilean: Above all else, we must be patient.
  Lissandra: This is our duty... to wait and watch.
• Fragile Speedster: Tends to build for speed, due to it synergizing well with Time Warp, but is VERY squishy.
• Hope Spot:
  • Can give his enemies this when they barely win a close fight with someone, slowly realize that the Announcer Chatter hasn't mentioned their kill yet, then die to the person that he just Chrono Shifted.
  • phew, I got away! Wait.. Why am I Tick-- BOOM
• Intergenerational Friendship: If Legends of Runeterra is to be believed, he's good acquaintances with fellow Time Master champion Ekko, who's at least several generations younger than him.
  Zilean: "Let's not go back to that timeline. Oh! Hello, Ekko."
  Ekko: "'Sup, Zil."
• Magikarp Power: Rather vulnerable and squishy early game, especially due to high mana costs meaning he can't effectively lob Time Bombs around for harassment, but once he gets enough levels going, with some items to offset the mana costs and boost his AP, he can become a force to be reckoned with, especially once he uses a standard combo of Time Warp to slow you down, lobbing a high-scaling Time Bomb on you while you can't move, Rewind-ing himself to lob another one for the stun, which might hit your allies if you decided to group up, and if that doesn't kill you, his allies are likely not far off. Even if you do manage to shrug off all of that and chase after him, he still has Time Warp handy to speed away from the fight. And even if you manage to kill him, chances are he used Chronoshift and will just continue running. The biggest downside to Zilean at this point is that he needs to get within an ADC's "Instant Death" Radius to use any of his spells on them.
• Mentor Archetype: He serves as this to a large swath of young mages throughout time, assembled in a network following his separation from linear time to dispense his knowledge should they need it if the unthinkable happens.
• Multiple-Choice Future: Zilean is able to perceive multiple different timelines laid before him with massively different outcomes, and he generally treats them as all being valid possibilities. Using this knowledge, he intends to steer the main timeline which Runeterra as we know it occupies away from the many potential apocalypses that loom before them.
• Old Master: He's visibly one of the oldest champs in the game, and happens to wield magic of cosmically powerful origins.
• Only Sane Man: During the days of Icathia, while he was a patriot who understood the discontent his city-state had of Shurima's ever-increasing encroachment, he also understood that attempting a rebellion alone would be a terrible idea against Shurima. When he sought out help from other factions (only to be rejected), he came back to learn the new Icathian mage order elected to instead access The Void for power, which he understandably saw as an even worse idea. Sure enough, they should've listened to him.
• Power Floats: He always floats above the ground in League, never touching down. How he does it is never really explained.
• The Red Mage: Two of his skills define him: one is a spell that deals high AoE damage upon exploding with a four second delay and has nice scaling, another one revives the target and heals it for an amount of health, and the scaling on that is just absurdly high — technically a healing spell, but used mostly to give the carry a second life.
• Reimagining the Artifact: As time went on, Zilean's giant clock floating behind him became more and more goofy and out of place in comparison to the rest of the League's appearance. Legends of Runeterra reimagines it not as a clock, but as a series of Cool Gates which he uses to see the different timelines.
• Reset Button: Are your non-ultimate skills on cooldown? Pop Rewind and they suddenly aren't any longer - and your ult just got ten seconds closer to being ready once more. Ten seconds might not sound like much, but with enough cooldown reduction and use of rewind, you can reduce his normally 180-second-cooldown-ultimate to a mere 28 seconds of cooldown.
• Retcon: His original lore had him be a part of a city of indefinite location called Urtistan (or Urizan), with the increasing approach of the Rune War prompting him to study time magic, only for an accident to cause him and his tower to become Unstuck in Time. His current version changed the location to Icathia and tied him in with the lore of the great Shuriman/Icathian/Void war, also changing the circumstances of him becoming Unstuck in Time to be more purposeful in nature.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Legends of Runeterra plays with this a bit in showing that he's quite forgetful of things, but this appears to be less to do with advanced age and more having to remember when things are.
• Screw Destiny: His separation from the linear timestream has given him vision of many futures, including ones where the world ends in complete and total disaster. He does not, however, think that they are preordained.
  Zilean: Should you find yourself in despair, the solution is simple: Pick another fate, for victory comes to those who choose their outcome, not those who let it choose them.
• Spinning Clock Hands: Appears on the target of his Time Warp ability. Red and slowing means that you aren't going to escape anytime soon - yellow and speeding up means you just got Super-Speed'ed.
• Stepford Smiler: He's depicted in Legends of Runeterra with energetic optimism that the future can be saved, but his Flavor Text reveals that the countless lifetimes he investigates through in order to determine how to do so has also made him weary, occasionally breaking from encouraging and leading his apprentices to seek quiet solitude. He also expresses a deeper sorrow that in his findings, he's never found a way to recover his beloved home of Icathia.
• Time Is Dangerous: His ability to manipulate time and create anomalies separated from the concept from it are described as powerful, but especially dangerous, not helped by the fact he has no idea how to reverse the effects of his actions.
• Time Master: His lifework and fundamental power, with his greatest feat in using magic to separate an entire tower from time itself, away from the threat of the Void.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: As befitting of someone who is Unstuck in Time, Zilean's speech is.. peculiar
  "When am I?"
  "I suppose soon should be now."
  "It is now as it would be then."
• Unstuck in Time: In a last-ditch effort to save Icathia from the arrival of the Void, Zilean completely separated an entire tower of him and many Icathian citizens from time. Zilean is the only one who knows how to move freely through time as a result of this, although he's unsure of how to become re-stuck back into time and prevent the even bigger unmaking to come.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Time Bomb makes the target tick down on hit, ticking for four seconds before exploding. This can be cast on anyone, including friendly minions and champions, even stealthed ones. He can even apply two bombs on the same target using Rewind, immediately detonating the first followed by the second moments after.

Zoe, the Aspect of Twilight

"Yes! This'll be fun! Right?"

Voiced by:
Erica Lindbeck (English)
Laura Pastor (European Spanish)
Melissa Gedeón (Mexican Spanish)
Sumire Morohoshi (Japanese)
Bianca Alencar (Brazilian Portuguese)
Chae-Ha Kim (Korean)
Tatyana Ermilova (Russian)
Appears in: Legends of Runeterra

"I bring a message for you all — a warning, a sigil. But first, I wanna see the sparkleflies!"

As the embodiment of mischief, imagination, and change, Zoe acts as the cosmic messenger of Targon, heralding major events that reshape worlds. Her mere presence warps the arcane mathematics governing realities, sometimes causing cataclysms without conscious effort or malice. This perhaps explains the breezy nonchalance with which Zoe approaches her duties, giving her plenty of time to focus on playing games, tricking mortals, or otherwise amusing herself. An encounter with Zoe can be joyous and life affirming, but it is always more than it appears and often extremely dangerous.

Zoe is a Burst Mage champion with a chaotic skillset, popping around the battlefield and confusing opponents with sparkles and bubbles before steamrolling them with a heavy-hitting spell.

• Her passive, More Sparkles!, causes Zoe's next basic attack to deal increased damage whenever she uses an ability.
• Her first ability, Paddle Star, sends a star in a target direction, which explodes upon hitting an enemy, damaging surrounding foes. If the star doesn't hit an enemy it will linger for a short duration at its final destination, during which Zoe can choose to reactivate the ability to redirect the star towards a location near her, once again exploding upon hitting an enemy. The star's damage drastically increases based on how far it traveled before hitting a target.
• Her second ability, Spell Thief, causes enemies that use summoner spells or item actives near Zoe to drop a corresponding Spell Shard that she can pick up; enemy minions will also sometimes drop a random Spell Shard on death. Zoe can activate the ability to mimic the effects of the collected Spell Shard. This ability also passively grants Zoe a short burst of movement speed and summons three bubbles that she then hurls at the closest enemy, damaging them, whenever she activates Spell Thief or uses one of her own summoner spells.
• With her third ability, Sleepy Trouble Bubble, Zoe kicks a bubble in a target direction, with its range increasing the first time it crosses a wall, that stops upon hitting an enemy, damaging and making them drowsy, briefly slowing them before causing them to fall asleep for a few seconds. The next ability or attack that hits a sleeping enemy deals increased damage and immediately wakes them up. If the bubble doesn't hit an enemy, it will become a trap at its final location, applying the same effects to the first enemy to walk near it.
• With her ultimate ability, Portal Jump, Zoe opens a portal at her feet and hops into it, teleporting to a nearby location for a short duration, during which she can see over walls, attack and use abilities, before returning to her original location. This ability has an extremely short cooldown, allowing it to be used repeatedly.

Zoe's alternate skins are Cyber Pop Zoe, Pool Party Zoe, Star Guardian Zoe, Arcanist Zoe, Prestige Arcanist Zoe, Edward Gaming Zoe, and Winterblessed Zoe. Legends of Runeterra exclusively includes Corrupted Zoe, and Wild Rift exclusively includes Mythmaker Zoe.

In season 3 of Teamfight Tactics, Zoe uses her Star Guardian Zoe skin and is a 1 cost Star Guardian Sorcerer. With her Sleepy Bubble Trouble ability, she kicks a bubble at the enemy with the highest health, dealing magic damage and stunning them. She was removed in season 4, returning in season 7 using her Prestige Arcanist Zoe skin as a Tier 5 Shimmerscale Mage Spell-Thief. She has no set spell of her own. Instead, her unique Spell-Thief class causes her to randomly cycle between four different abilities used by other champions in previous seasons after each cast and at the start of each round. Her pool of spells includes Lux's Final Spark from seasons 2 and 6 (minus restoring mana on a kill), Janna's Howling Gale from season 3, Kayle's Divine Judgement from season 1 (albeit renamed to Intervention and buffed to increase affected allies' armor and magic resistance for the rest of the round), and Ivern's Daisy! from season 5. In season 8, she uses her Cyber Pop Zoe skin and is a Tier 3 Gadgeteen Hacker Prankster. Her new Trouble Bubble ability launches a bubble at the nearest unaffected enemy, dealing continuous magic damage over an extended period and causing them to take increased percent damage for the duration. She was removed in the Glitched Out!! mid-set update, returning in season 11 using her Mythmaker Zoe skin as a Tier 3 Fortune Storyweaver Arcanist. Her ability, Calculated!, fires a star that deals magic damage to her current target before bouncing to the farthest unit within two hexes for reduced damage. Each round, the spell gains one more ricochet whenever Zoe kills an enemy.

In Legends of Runeterra, Zoe is a 1-mana 1/1 Targon Champion card with Elusive and the Nexus Strike ability to generate a Supercool Starchart in your hand if you don't already have one, or reduce its mana cost by 1 if you do. When she sees 10 different cards played she levels up, gaining +1/+1, changing her Nexus Strike to create a Behold the Infinite that costs 0 mana for that turn instead and, until the end of the game, causing any unit you summon to grant any keywords it has to any other allied units in play. Her signature spell is Zoe's Sleepy Trouble Bubble.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: Ezreal considers her one due to her age; he's not into the Mayfly–December Romance and considers her far too old for him.
• Absurd Phobia: When Nocturne taunts her with her greatest fear in Legends of Runeterra as he does several other champions (and after she laughs off his attempt to threaten her with being left all alone), it turns out that her worst nightmare is Ezreal and Lux getting married and living Happily Ever After.
  Zoe: Nooohohohooo!
• Achilles' Heel: As powerful as she is, she has little to no escape tools if she gets cornered by an enemy; her Portal Jump won't do anything since it just teleports her back from where she started, and while her Sleepy Trouble Bubble can allow her to get some distance from the enemy, it takes a bit to activate, only affects one target, and can be dodged or negated by certain effects (i.e. Zhonya's Hourglass). Unless she has some sort of movement-based Summoner Spell or Item Effect at her disposal, like Flash or Youmuu's Ghostblade, if she gets trapped, she's pretty much done for.
• All-Loving Hero:
  • Sort of. While she has a few petty not-feuds like with Lux, Zoe is all too eager to make friends with everyone; she even has a bunch of exclusive quotes towards human females, like asking "Do you wanna be sisters?" However, as her short story indicates, mortals react to her with fear, and considering her method of befriending a small animal is to merge their current self and sleeping self together, and her response to several angry guards attacking her is to casually chuck a meteor at them, vaporizing the settlement, likely along with the very people she was interested in befriending, this seems entirely justified.
  • Legends of Runeterra delves into this more by displaying a group she gets along with much more: other children. Several cards show her being close friends with child followers of both the Solari and Lunari, making her one of the few individuals interested in bridging the two sects together.
• Ambiguous Situation: There's a lot of prevalent ambiguity surrounding Myisha, an incarnation of the Aspect of Twilight during the Great Darkin War described as suspiciously similar to Zoe (a young girl with mismatched eyes and a long scarf, but with blonde hair and a pink scarf), with the biggest question beyond her relationship (if any) with Zoe being "What happened to her?" Naafiri — when first encountering Zoe — refers to her as Myisha, thanking her for assisting in her "curse", but this doesn't clear up if Zoe is meant to be Myisha's direct reincarnation or a separate being (a possibility that Zoe jokes about in one line that may or may not just be a joke), as well as whether not Zoe as we know her is aware of Myisha and what she did.
• Anti-Frustration Features: If you end up copying a spell that you already normally have, the game will ensure you spend the disposable Spell Thief version and not the one in your possession. Even if you end up hitting the button for your own personal version of a spell (such as say, Flash), it will only expend the Spell Thief shard if you have one, saving you from a very long cooldown.
• Arch-Enemy: While Lux (presumably) considers her an Unknown Rival, Zoe really dislikes her because of her imagined rivalry over Ezreal.
  "You are my rival! Prepare to be destroyed!"
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Zoe sometimes gets distracted when she sees something interesting, like... butterflies.
• Baby Talk: To Yordles:
  "What a wittle wovy thing you are!"
• Badass Adorable: A little ball of fluff and fun. Also a Targonian Aspect.
• Big "NO!": Screams a huge and melodramatic one of these when Nocturne taunts her with her greatest fear in Legends of Runeterra: Ezreal choosing Lux over her.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Zoe's way of taunting people often has her resort to childish insults and name-calling.
  "You - were - a - POOP HEAD!"
• Blowing a Raspberry: One of the things she can do to an enemy when she pops out of her Portal Jump. Also one of her responses when another champion taunts her.
• Boring, but Practical: The full in-game description of Portal Jump, her ultimate ability: "Blink to a nearby position for 1 second. Then blink back." Doesn't sound very exciting, but unlike most ultimates, it has a very short cooldown (only 11 seconds at the most), and while not great for escapes, this can allow Zoe to safely extend her range to land some crucial abilities on enemies, or to quickly grab a Spell Thief shard, or even just to scout over walls for vision.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: By her own admission:
  "Psst! Hey! Can you tell me your secrets? I promise not to tell them to... everyone."
• Cloudcuckoolander: Zoe can be very... out there, sometimes.
  "There are holes in reality. And... in donuts."
• Confusion Fu: With gimmicky projectiles that can strike in unexpected ways, the ability to warp between locations on a short cooldown, and the power to unpredictably steal item actives and summoner spells, a competent Zoe is hard to get a read on, and even harder to take out for good.
• Continuity Nod: On her belt appears to be a Moonstone, one of Bard's chimes, and weirdest of all, a key that Fiddlesticks used to wear around his neck in his old splash art◊ (in his current one, he's wearing a noose).
• Create Your Own Villain: One of the regional variants of Fiddlesticks' origin was that it was "a ragged, whispering horror" that unleashed hell on the world after "a child of twilight" stole its only joy. If the story is actually true, this greatly implicates Zoe as responsible for it (or possibly a previous Aspect of Twilight), not helped by the fact she carries around a key that it used to carry on its neck.
• Cuteness Proximity: She reacts this way around Yordles...and Aurelion Sol, bizarrely. Makes a bit of sense if you think about it: Aurelion Sol was enslaved by Targon. In Zoe's mind, she thinks of him as her pet dragon.
• Deity of Human Origin: Like other Aspect champions, Zoe was originally a mortal who ascended and became merged with a celestial Aspect. Unlike other Aspect champions, Zoe did not fulfill the requisite scaling of Mount Targon to do so; rather, she was directly invited to the summit by the Aspect of Twilight via portal. This is recognized as an extreme deviation, likely signalling an important paradigm shift in reality itself.
• Difficult, but Awesome: While not cripplingly so, Zoe's kit is focused on exploding enemy champions and not much else, lacking other valuable traits like damage-per-second, waveclear, durability, or escapes. This effectively requires her to properly harass enemies by regularly landing her skillshots to be useful, which is a lot easier said than done since Paddle Star is small and can be easily blocked. If you do manage to land them properly, however, Zoe's crazy burst damage is some of the nastiest and most rewarding in the entire game, and her Spell Thief and subsequent potential combos can give her an edge of unpredictability for her enemies.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Cyber Pop Zoe seems to be completely convinced that Summoner's Rift is just a highly advanced VR game that she's playing.
• Feel No Pain: She laughs at the idea that magic hurts people and when slain, she collapses from "dizziness".
• Fluffy Tamer: Sort of a weird example with her and Aurelion Sol, who's a planet-sized, star-creating dragon with an egotistical god complex. She sympathizes with his plight of being enslaved by the Targonians and offers to do her best to keep him safe, but in a way where she treats him as her trained "space puppy," albeit out of kindness, not malice. This dynamic is not lost on Sol, who alters between annoyance, humiliation and genuine gratitude towards her generosity, even if she is irksome.
  Zoe: I've got a present for you, but you gotta go and fetch it!
  Aurelion Sol: Of all the indigni— is that my asteroid belt?!
• Forced Sleep: Zoe's Sleepy Trouble Bubble introduces the "sleep" debuff to the game. In Zoe's case, it first renders her target as "drowsy", slowing them for a few seconds before they properly fall "asleep," leaving them effectively stunned for another few seconds. Should they be hit by a single attack in this state, the damage they take will be multiplied, but it'll also immediately wake them up.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Her Legends of Runeterra flavor text doesn't lean on the fourth wall so much as smash right through it.
  "Hey hiiiiiii! Whatcha doin'? Is that a CARD GAME? Can I play too? What?! I'M in YOUR game? Ha! What a silly dimension..."
• Genki Girl: Enough pep to put Pinkie Pie to shame.
• Glass Cannon: As with most burst mages, but with a lot more emphasis on the "cannon" part. She's relatively squishy and she's deceptively immobile even with her Portal Jump (since it blinks her back to her original position, making it bad for escapes), but a properly set-up Paddle Star can utterly vaporize entire chunks of enemy life bars.
• Great Gazoo: Very mischievous and an immortal Aspect of Targon, making her very powerful. The end of her short story features her obliterating an entire village in an attempt to make friends with a few mortals, and her discovery of a World Rune in the crater where it used to be is treated with a casual shrug.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Think you just barely escaped an enemy Zoe with your Flash? She's almost certainly chasing after you now thanks to Spell Thief, likely with damaging stars and a ricocheting Paddle Star in tow to wallop you with now.
• Immortal Immaturity: Became an Aspect when she was a child, and seems in no rush to age after over 1000 years.
• In-Series Nickname: "The Everchild."
• Innocent Inaccurate: Her childish, carefree attitude means her comprehension of the centuries of activity across Runeterra is pretty skewed. To her, the Ruination of the Blessed Isles was just a "spooky ghost party", and the Rune War was a "war for sparkly rocks".
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While picking up a Spell Shard, Zoe might occasionally ask "Am I the only one who can see these?" Technically, other players can see them, though they can't interact with them in any way.
• Legacy Character: Zoe is one in a line of presumably several vessels for the Aspect of Change. One of her predecessors, named Myisha (who is curiously described very similarly to Zoe, but wearing a "vivid pink" scarf in contrast to Zoe's blue scarf), was instrumental during The Great Darkin War, as she orchestrated their imprisonment into Living Weapons.
• Lighter and Fluffier: The most lighthearted and flighty Aspect introduced so far.
• Magikarp Power: Paddle Star has four separate scalings (The ability's level, Zoe's level, an AP ratio, and a distance multiplier). Having her throw it straight at you in the early game won't do much. If she lands a rebounded one in the late game, especially if she gets ahead, it's going to hurt. A lot.
• Mental Time Travel: Zoe is able to "traverse the streams of time with only a thought," allowing her to observe the last few centuries' worth of activity on Runeterra that she missed.
• Me's a Crowd: Zoe teases this in one line, which may or may not be true.
  "Dusk and dawn are the same. So there's actually two of me! Orrr I could be totally lying!"
• Motor Mouth: Not only does she talk a lot, she talks really fast at times.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Zoe has spent the last millennia hopping around dimensions and realities beyond human comprehension to the point where she's now bored of them. Having just now recently returned to Runeterra, her amazement with the vastly-changed "regular" world is palpable.
  Odin "WAAAARGHbobo" Shafer: Emotionally, she’s still a young girl, but it’s like she grew up in Tibet, experiencing metaphysics and transcendental meditation, and now she’s in Manhattan like, "This is a hot dog. Have you ever seen a hot dog? THIS IS AMAZING!"
• Obvious Rule Patch: Spell Thief gives Zoe access to a lot of potentially powerful abilities from not just enemy champions, but the occasional enemy minion. However, two spells were removed from the latter method not long after Zoe was first released due to being too disproportionately powerful to receive from random chance: Hextech Gunblade (due to its powerful trading/chasing power), and the Teleport summoner spell (due to it providing far more global threat power than anything else in her potential kitinvoked^note Due to an oversight, it could also be dropped in the Howling Abyss map for a time despite the spell being normally unavailable in ARAM).
• Older Than They Look: Zig-Zagging Trope; despite looking no more than 12, she's an ancient embodiment of Targon who's been around for centuries (confirmed to be even older than Kayle and Morgana, and thus the formation of Demacia), but according to her bio, she only experienced a year in the celestial realm before returning after a much larger time gap in Runeterra, making the disparity between her chronological and biological age a little vague. Whatever the case, Ezreal rejects her because she's too old for him.
• Physical God: Her presence alone warps the fabric of reality on top of being the avatar of imagination and change. She's so powerful that she can treat even Aurelion Sol like a little puppy to be brought to heel.
• Pinball Projectile: Paddle Star can be redirected mid-flight to a new target. Aim it around tanks or throw it behind you to swing back forward and rack up its bonus travel damage.
• Portent of Doom: Symbolically, Zoe as the Aspect of Twilight represents change in general, and her very presence in Runeterra indicates that something very colossal is about to happen, and chances are it won't be good.
  "Hey guys, so, cosmic change time, possible armageddon, twilight of the gods, Blah, Blah, Blah. You've been heralded!"
• Power Copying: The gist of Spell Thief, which allows her to pick up shards of recently-used summoner spells or item actives (or randomly-distributed ones upon killing certain minions) and use them against her enemies. Enemy champ using Flash in an attempt to escape your wrath? No problem!
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Courtesy of her celestial powers.
  • In her vanilla skin, her hair fades from a bright orange to a dark purple, much like an actual twilight sky.
  • Cyber Pop Zoe's in-game model has it fade from orange to green, and her splash art gives her more rainbow-colored highlights on top of it.
• Precocious Crush: Zoe is Older Than They Look, but mentally and physically remains an eternal tween crushing on Ezreal.
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Wears funky little "boots" that cover part of her soles, but expose her toes, heels and most of her soles, leaving her essentially barefoot. Given her personality, she's also most definitely a Barefoot Loon.
• Pretty Butterflies: She mentions a fondness for butterflies in some lines, and her Sleepy Trouble Bubble creates a few particle effects resembling them.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: While she's still very lighthearted, "Meet Zoe" illustrates just how dangerous a hyperactive, childish being with her kind of power would fare to mortals. To boot, her attempts at making friends with a few regular humans catches the attention of several guards, leading her to chuck a meteor at them in self-defense, turning the entire village into a crater.
• Retcon: A fairly minor one: When Zoe was first introduced, the wording of her biography was ambiguous on whether or not she — following her ascension and adventures across dimensions beyond Runeterra — experienced time at the same pace as mortals, but overall suggested she actually did live through the millennia that had passed by until her return despite physically and mentally not aging very much. Her biography has since been rewritten to phrase her interdimensional excursions as having only felt like a year to her, with time being warped in her absence.
• Skip of Innocence: She has a few different walking animations, and with an adorable skip as a few of them. An additional animation has her hop along while using a skipping rope made of stars.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: She's got it bad for Ezreal.
  "Hi Ezreal!!! I mean that is you over there, right? I'm over here. I'm Zoe. Nevermind..."
• Sweet Tooth: She has an affinity for chocolate mooncake, and cake in general.
  (singing) "Heyyyy! I'm gonna have new friends, new friends here, and it's gonna be awesome 'cause they are awesome and we'll have an awesome party with cake and stuff! (gasp) Should I make chocolate mooncake or strawberry mooncake? (gasp) CHOCOLATE STRAWBERRY CAKE!"
• Techno Babble: Her interactions with Viktor in Legends of Runeterra:

  Zoe: (upon being summoned with an allied Viktor present) You know the fundamentals of space-time only apply to realities with less than five dimensions right?
  Viktor: You have my attention, shiny child.

  • Used extensively by Cyber Pop Zoe:
    "The sine of 2a times the sine of b minus c times x plus the sine of 2b times the sine of c minus a times y plus the sine of 2c plus the sine of a minus b times x equals 0... yeah, that's pretty!"
• Time Master: Her Sleepy Trouble Bubble works by merging the target with their sleeping self from last night.
• Thinking Up Portals: Can create portals with her powers to briefly teleport to another place using her Portal Jump ability.
• Troll:
  • In the form of a sassy little girl who also happens to be a Targonian aspect, and goddamn is her kit built for this. Zoe's personality, playstyle, and aesthetics are seemingly designed to deliberately tilt the enemy laner off the face of the earth.
  • Cyber Pop Zoe has kill quotes where she calls her defeated opponent a noob.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Chocolate mooncakes.
• Unknown Rival: To Lux for Ezreal's affection. Lux doesn't seem to know who she is, and she doesn't even seem to have any interest in him (though the feeling isn't mutual). Despite this, Zoe's interactions with her consist of Zoe mostly talking smack about Lux and reacting gleefully when she kills her.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: To her perception, she only spent a year away from Runeterra after merging with the Aspect of Twilight and exploring the celestial realm. When she returned, centuries had passed.

Zyra, Rise of the Thorns

"Feel the thorns' embrace."

Voiced by:
Karen Strassman (English)
Mercedes Cepeda (European Spanish)
Irina Índigo (Mexican Spanish)
Atsuko Yuya (Japanese)
Fernanda Crispim (Brazilian Portuguese)
Hui-Eun Park (Korean)
Elena Kishchik (Russian)

"Closer to the flower, closer to the thorns."

Born in an ancient, sorcerous catastrophe, Zyra is the wrath of nature given form—an alluring hybrid of plant and human, kindling new life with every step. She views the many mortals of Valoran as little more than prey for her seeded progeny, and thinks nothing of slaying them with flurries of deadly spines. Though her true purpose has not been revealed, Zyra wanders the world, indulging her most primal urges to colonize, and strangle all other life from it.

Zyra is a Catcher champion who plants seeds around the field that sprout into vicious vegetation through her spells, granting her significant area control and sustained damage.

• Her passive, Garden of Thorns, periodically causes seeds to spawn around Zyra's location, lasting for a long duration and being destroyed when an enemy champion steps on them. These seeds sprout into plants through Zyra's abilities, attacking nearby enemies at her command for a few seconds.
• With her first ability, Deadly Spines, Zyra sprouts a patch of thorny vines at a target location after a short delay, dealing damage to enemies inside. Nearby seeds will sprout into Thorn Spitters that fire sharp thorns at enemies from range.
• Her second ability, Rampant Growth, passively stores charges over time, up to two; killing an enemy speeds up the generation of charges, and instantly grants one upon killing an enemy champion or monster. When activated, Zyra spends a charge to plant a seed at a target location — these seeds last longer than the ones from her passive, grant vision of their surroundings and briefly reveal enemy champions that step on them.
• Her third ability, Grasping Roots, sends entangling vines in a target direction, damaging and immobilizing enemies in their path. Nearby seeds sprout into Vine Lashers that hit nearby enemies with slowing attacks.
• With her ultimate ability, Stranglethorns, Zyra summons a twisted thicket of vines that spreads over a target location, dealing damage to enemies inside. After a short delay, the vines snap and contract, knocking up enemies still inside. Additionally, any Thorn Spitters or Vine Lashers inside the thicket are enraged for a few seconds, healing them, refreshing their duration and increasing the damage they deal with their attacks.

Zyra's alternate skins include Wildfire Zyra, Haunted Zyra, SKT T1 Zyra, Dragon Sorceress Zyra, Coven Zyra, Prestige Coven Zyra, Crystal Rose Zyra, Crime City Nightmare Zyra, Mythmaker Zyra, Street Demon Zyra, and Blood Moon Zyra.

In season 2 of Teamfight Tactics, Zyra uses her Wildfire Zyra skin and is a Tier 1 Inferno Summoner. Her ability is Rampant Growth, which summons multiple Flame Spitters at a random location along the edge of the arena that attack the nearest enemy for a few seconds. She was removed in season 3. She returns in season 5 using her Dragon Sorceress Zyra skin as a Tier 3 Draconic Spellweaver. Her ability was changed to Grasping Roots, which sends a surge of vines toward the farthest enemy, dealing magic damage and stunning all enemies hit. In season 6, she uses her Crime City Nightmare Zyra skin and is a Tier 2 Syndicate Scholar. Her new ability, Grasping Spines, raises vines in the row with the most enemies, dealing magic damage and stunning all enemies in that row for a few seconds. She was initially removed in season 7, but returns in the Uncharted Realms mid-set update with the same ability, but instead reusing her Dragon Sorceress Zyra skin as a Tier 2 Whispers Evoker. She was removed in season 8, returning in season 11 using her Mythmaker Zyra skin as a Tier 2 Storyweaver Sage. Her Paper Thorns ability summons two Vine Lashers that attack the nearest enemy three times, each dealing magic damage and wounding their targets.

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• Assimilation Plot: Her ultimate goal, and despite being a plant, she's shown to be disturbingly effective at it. In "With the Flowers", a single sapling manages to in a single night consume an entire house and its inhabitants.
• Balance Buff: Zyra's identity as zone-control mage who could mark battlefields with her plants was originally a lot less refined when she was released, mostly tied to her Rampant Growth ability. Her first passive, Rise of the Thorns, was considered one of the worst in the game as it was only available if she died, dealing an unreliable amount of damage to potentially take her killer with her, but was otherwise completely useless. Zyra's rework during the midseason 6 mage update killed two birds with one stone by replacing the passive with Garden of Thorns, allowing her to more frequently grow plants to swarm her enemies with.
• Botanical Abomination: The Zyra collective is depicted as very close to this, a morally-divorced Hive Mind of inhuman plants who wants to turn everything into its garden, consuming any other life in its wake.
• Combat Stilettos: Despite not actually wearing shoes, she has protrusions from her heels that resemble stilettos.
• Combos: Most players use Rampart Growth to lay seeds right after using Deadly Bloom or Grasping Roots (but before the ability actually hits) so opponents can't step away from the resulting plant. A common combination is to use Grasping Roots plus a seed to snare, Deadly Bloom plus a seed to damage, then Stranglethorns for damage, knockup, and supercharging the two recently spawned plants.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: On the receiving end of one from Ahri in A New Dawn, a pretty accurate representation of a camp-reliant catcher going up solo against a mobile mage assassin.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • She was one to Maokai in his original lore: both are plants brought to life by magic, but while Maokai despises his existence and wishes to be turned back into a plant, Zyra relishes in the opportunities brought by her new form and has no intention of abandoning it. In-game, Maokai is a tank that focuses on protecting his allies, while Zyra is a mage that focuses on causing as much harm as possible.
  • Her origin story is also similar to Ahri's original lore, but where Ahri used the power of a dying mage to ascend to a humanlike body and gained a human conscience, Zyra consumed a sorceress to create a body that, while technically smaller and less powerful than she once was, puts the whole world within her grasp — and she doesn't seem to have any conscience at all. Fittingly, they fight each other in A New Dawn.
• The Evil Genius: Of the Evil Sorcerer variant in A New Dawn on Darius' team.
• Fertile Feet: The lore states that new life springs from her footsteps, and fittingly, her in-game passive causes her to spontaneously spawn seeds around her every few seconds that she can convert into plants, just like the ones she places with her W.
• Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Could hardly be MORE form fitting since her "clothes" are actually part of her body (meaning she's technically stark naked).
• Gaia's Vengeance: It's unknown what directly motivated the original Gardens of Zyr to become the destructive presence they are today aside from elemental magics tainting their soil from the Rune Wars, but Zyra herself is more explicitly angry of her existence being rejected by every realm, being too monstrous for mortals and too corporeal to be respected by capricious ethereal beings.
• Garden Garment: Although it's not just her clothing that's plant.
• Genius Loci: The sentient, carnivorous magic plants formerly of the Garden of Zyr are collectively known as "Zyra", with the champion we know as Zyra being a unique, humanoid manifestation of it.
• Green Thumb: Those seeds she plants can grow into full-grown plants in less than a second.
• Hive Mind: "Zyra" isn't merely the identity of one character, but the collective identity of all the magically-enhanced carnivorous plants of the Shuriman jungles. In-game, she even speaks with an occasional Voice of the Legion-style effect to her voice.
• Humanoid Abomination: Zyra (the champion herself) is implied to be a result of natural magic of the Gardens of Zyr colliding with human sorcery circa the Rune Wars. The result looks somewhat human, but it's pretty easy to tell that she's about as far from anything recognizably human beyond appearance as you can get.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: In "With the Flowers", she demonstrates the ability to sedate a woman with blissful visions of a natural paradise free of poverty, war, and death as she becomes one with the flowers.
• Man-Eating Plant: A Hive Mind of flesh-eating plants that assimilate magical energy. And now, after consuming the energies from a sorceress, she walks.
• Ms. Fanservice: A scantily-clad humanoid only barely covered up by the leaves on her body. She definitely has one of the most shamelessly erotic dance animations in the game.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: Not in all of her skins, but most of the time just the side and nipple of her breasts are covered (although we're not sure if she even has nipples).
• Not the Intended Use: She was originally designed to be an AP carry, but is seen as a common bot-lane support, using her plants for poking (aggressive) and zoning (defensive) purposes. She provides some decent peel with her Grasping Vines and Stranglethorns abilities, making her a caster-turned-support with actual viability.
  • Less-commonly, she's also sometimes played in the jungle, using plants to tank the jungle monsters for her so she can clear safely then gank with her potent CC. Riot even buffed the damage her plants do to monsters as one of many changes in a patch designed to increase the variety of junglers.
• Organic Bra: Since she wears a Garden Garment grown from her own body, including over her "breasts".
• Pointy Ears: Although they may not actually be ears, she has two pointy petal-like growths on each side of her head.
• Squishy Wizard: She's a strong nuker that's fragile and depends very heavily on a snare to keep her safe. If she botches this (or the enemy circumvents it), she's screwed to an even greater extent because she completely lacks defensive abilities.
• Starfish Language: In "With the Flowers", she manages to impart that her name is "Zyra" to a normal woman through her fragrance.
• Stripperific: Notable for only having leaves covering (or rather, growing over) her body. Also has a gratuitous Toplessness from the Back in her preview art.
• Turns Red: Any plants within the Stranglethorns area of effect get greatly buffed (with a visible red indicator) for several seconds, making them to attack faster while her opponents are knocked up and slowed by the ultimate itself.
• The Turret Master: For a given definition of "turret." Her seeds will turn into one of two kinds of aggressive, stationary plant depending upon what spell she hits them with: either a Thorn Spitter that spits thorns at distant opponents or a Vine Lasher that strikes and slows enemies at melee range.
• Unflinching Walk: In A New Dawn, she advances towards Ahri while constraining the latter with her vines.
• Unusual Ears: Four ears, and even then they look more like leaves.
• Voice of the Legion: Gets this on occasion at the end of some of her normal lines. All her taunts and jokes also possess this quality.
• When Trees Attack: While not a full tree like Maokai, she is a humanlike plant. And a particularly malicous one.