Top 5 Tips and Tricks To Climb On Zoe

Zoe is one of the best champions to one-trick or two-trick due to her flexible and long-range abilities, and this guide is meant to help you be more efficient in playing her. By the end, you will have learned how to truly climb with Zoe.

At first glance, Zoe might appear as the typical cookie-cutter mage champion that almost every other mage is, but in reality, she has much more skill expression than most mages, along with a reliance on landing a specific ability and being very useless without having said ability or without landing it.

Due to this, many players outright hate Zoe. Currently, her place in the meta is not very abusive. But previously, when it was, you would often hear players ask Riot to “delete her” or “gut her”, especially because she was a 300-year-old celestial being with the personality and form of an 11-year-old girl, which made it much worse dying to her in the lane.

Although she is not as strong as she once was, winning the mental game against your opponent is often just as crucial as the actual game itself. Since Zoe’s abilities (Q and E) have (potentially) a huge range, many people who play her abuse them. This enrages the enemy laner sometimes to the point where they might take a stupid play just to feel good, something which you can utilize to win the game for yourself.

Also read: Yasuo climb tips

5. Win The Mental Game

Further elaborating On the point I made before, You can get a huge advantage over your opponent just by having the mental edge over them. since Zoe has many ways to annoy her opponent, with abilities ranging from her q to her e and her mere existence alone in some scenarios.

Zoe is very good at being annoying with her poke and her high burst damage if you manage to land her e. She’s also very potent at being fast and deadly with her combos, with one spell rotation doing upwards of 2000 damage with one or two items.

Zoe being a mage feeds into this fantasy of being 2 miles away and one-shotting your opponent, akin to lux. And since she does magic damage and magic resist is a much worse stat than armor is, she is free to poke whoever she wants all game long, from 2 screens away, all while staying out of harm’s way.

Winning the mental edge may as well mean winning the entire game in some games. The higher up you go, though, the less the players will become bothered by Zoe, so this trick essentially works in elos lower than diamond or platinum.

Also read: Zed climbing tips

4. Using Combos Properly

Zoe may have one of the highest damaging combos in the game, but essentially her entire damage lies in one ability; Her Q. if she misses a long-range Q in a 1v1 that ends up being very close, she likely would have won if she landed her Q. this is how reliant Zoe is on landing her abilities (or in this case just the one ability).

A good way to use your e q combo in lane is to go behind the jungle entrance walls on either side of the midlane and use the added range from your e to try landing it on the enemy laner and then following up with a ton of magic and true damage.

A good way to use the combo later into the game with her R is to go behind choke points and throw your e into said choke points. This way, someone is either forced to walk into it or they risk losing the objective or the team fight. When someone hits your e, you follow through with the insane burst damage and get them low or take them down.

This trick will also work better in lower elos since the players might panic at the sight of Zoe E blocking their path to an objective, but a challenger player won’t. That being said, Zoe’s combo potential makes her a very good champion on her own.

3. Just Roam Lol

Even though this is a generic tip, Zoe’s ability to roam is not that apparent to anyone who tries her at first. However, this is far from the truth. Zoe may not have all the bells and whistles in terms of reliable movement speed buffs or infinite dashes, or a ton of upfront damage, but what she does have is an E that can travel through enemy walls to land smack on an enemy’s head, allowing you to one shot them if they are anywhere below 50% health.

The process of roaming is very simple. Just walk top or bot lane. However, you always have to keep your lane in mind upon attempting to roam. Always push out the wave and then leave, and make sure you are back in your lane if you don’t find any kills in the lane you roamed to by the time the minions start to accumulate near your tower.

Zoe’s long-range also plays a role in her roaming capabilities. See, most mid champions who roam actually have to fight their opponents, while on the other hand, there is Zoe, who can spell cast and poke her opponents from a mile away.

This, among other things, is what makes Zoe enticing for players who are looking for a one-trick but cannot find any champion that is suited to their particular needs.

2. Use Summoners Before Your Opponent

Although it may not seem serious, using your summoner spells before your enemy in an early game fight can make them panic and spam out their spells as well, which will give you access to whatever spells they have.
Say you use ignite on someone, and then they ignite you 3 seconds later. You pick it up with your w and ignite the champion again, giving you a really big edge over everyone else. Did they flash? Just pick up theirs and use them yourself to run or chase after them.

This tip is so crucial that you will often find that Zoe players will get a summoner on their W from a minion and instantly use it if you use one of your own because they want to pick up yours as it gives them access to a power level that the game is not balanced around (2 ignites, 2 smites, etc.)

If you believe this is something you can pay attention to, it makes Zoe very exceptional and skill-expressive in fighting and confusing her laners to the degree that they are forced to use their summoner spells, only for you to pick them up and use them against the enemies.

1. Proper Spacing

If you turned on some pro player playing Zoe at this very moment, you would notice the tactics he uses are similar to the one listed above, and you will also notice how he does not let himself into the range of enemy champions, for Zoe’s attack range is not that big, and some champions like Orianna have bigger ranges than her minimum Q as well.

Proper spacing (distance) between you and your opponent can be the difference between getting hit by a Yone r and dodging it. It can be the reason you live instead of dying and handing over gold to the enemy. It can act as a buffer to prevent taking unnecessary damage to abusive laners like Viktor.

Furthermore, when you try to space correctly, you learn more about the enemy laner’s champion as well as yours. So the next time you face the same champion, you have a rough idea of how much their range is.

Having proper spacing is an essential part of climbing with Zoe, and it makes Zoe rewarding to play in a time when not many mages feel good to play anymore.

Final thoughts

We don’t think you need to be a pro player to know how to play Zoe. Rather, you need the right idea about what to prioritize when you do pick her. We hope you find these tips as useful as they are intended to be and that they do help you climb in your ranked games.

Zoe is not as simple as some of the other mages in League of Legends, but enough practice can make the impossible seem possible; it’s only a matter of time.

Do you agree with our picks for the top ways to climb on Zoe? Have you always wanted to climb on Zoe but didn’t know how to? Let us know after giving these tips a try, along with any other feedback you might want to leave in the comments section below.