League of Legends has come a long way over the last decade, with several champions, items, and sweeping changes shaping the meta. There is, however, one champion that has been seemingly forgotten by the developers and most of the player base: Zilean.
After looking through his patch history, League players have found that the Chronokeeper has not received any significant changes from Riot Games’ developers since Patch 5.23, which was released on Nov. 24, 2015. In fact, the only changes he has gotten over the last eight years are general changes from the role-wide mana updates for mages and the massive durability update.
Besides those changes, however, Zilean has only received very minimal adjustments to base health, armor, or mana, along with different bug fixes and visual updates. There haven’t been any changes to his abilities since 2015 when Riot added a new effect to his passive that gave him more experience to level up his teammates.
Many other champions have gone without major adjustments before, but Zilean remains one of the only champions over the last eight years that hasn’t had any abilities touched by the developers. Even still, Riot QA engineer Ray “RayYonggi” Williams found some humor in the thread, jokingly saying that Zilean is “just the perfect champ, perhaps.”
There is a loud minority of Zilean enthusiasts who are hoping the attention dies down around their favorite timekeeper since they think Riot will end up making changes that will gut the champion. Others agreed that Zilean didn’t need any changes, though, because in the right hands, he is a menace that can take over games.
In today’s meta, Zilean still has a decent play rate among supports with a 51 percent win rate over 39,000 games in Platinum ranks and above, according to League stats site U.GG. He might not be the most popular support pick, but Zilean can still make the time to steal your Elo if you run into the wrong one-trick.
