Best current Zhin deck vs rapid firing champions.
by KingCrimsonTime
Yomi
Your heavy hit with Inferno Blade deals an additional 150 damage.
Weapon
Viciousness
Reduce the Cooldown of Counter by 15-75% after successfully hitting an enemy with Counter.
Counter
5
Footwork
Increase your Movement Speed by 10-50% for 3s after activating Counter.
Counter
4
Master Stance
Reduce the Cooldown of Whirl by 1-5s after successfully hitting an enemy with Counter.
Counter
3
Blade Dancer
Increase the travel distance of Whirl by 8-40%.
Whirl
2
Infamy
Increase your maximum Health by 50-250.
Armor
1
Guide
Why Yomi?
Smolder is terrible (got nerfed to the ground), Guillotine is also terrible now if the enemies are decent, besides ulting tanks is not as important as it was a couple of patches ago, they're weak in general and there's almost no difference between ulting a support, damage or flank with ot without Guillotine other than handicaping your damage potential for some reason. Yomi is the best and only talent you should be playing as of the time of this guide even if it's somewhat lame in terms of design, the damage really adds up, charges your ultimate faster without having to invest in morale boost because more damage=more charge and makes poke shots from a really far distance cause havoc and enough fear to make a player retreat or pay attention to you.
Footwork 4: Zhin's best card right now is footwork, there's no reason not to run it. The speed stacks to billow's 30% and 40% is the sweet number, not too low, not too overkill.
Viciousness 5: This card is one of the current Zhin deck builders, this card is basically retaliation 2.0 in the sense you can spam counter, the main difference is that now you don't have to get on someone else's face for it work and don't have to commit to the resets as the only way to get stuff done since you can still rely on Yomi's bonus damage to get kills. This card can be very good or very bad, it really depends on who you're facing, hence why this deck is primarily recommended against champions who fire at a high fire rate and can't humanly react in time to avoid shooting the counter. Slow firing projectile champions have a chance to react and ignore or flick the shot to make this card useless, though it all depends on the mind games and if you can bait the shots and land the counters on either the same person or someone nearby. This card is vey important to run at level 5 specifically in this build since every level makes a major difference, each point is more than a second off the cooldown reset.
Blade dance 2: Whirl's base distance is quite terrible, other Zhin decks would probably run this card at 3 or 4 but there's just not enough space to fit it, 2 is just enough if you can get used to it.
Master stance: This card is also very important since you really really really need to reset both whirl and counter to make this build work. After all they're your damage tools to combo and both offer quick mobility and dueling potential. There's a different variation of this deck that's basically the opposite of this build with master stance 5 and viciousness 2, said deck is the more stable of the 2 but I believe this one has more potential mainly because counter ups your damage by a little, you can reset footwork and you can block ultimates or high damage abilities in a snap and save billow for the absolute last case scenario or to retreat and cleanse Zhin for heals. I found that running this card at 2 is risky but can be done. 3 makes it much more consistant to start the loop repeteadly since you only have to stall 4 seconds shooting or 3 if you counter twice thanks to viciousness and whirl right afterwards, I will explain the tech later on.
Perfect block 1: This is a filler card, although a very good one, after the cauterize nerfs some cards like this one have had a chance to shine, this card is worth running above infamy since in the worst case scenario even if under caut 3 25% of 100 is 25 hp (not counting dead zone) that means if you're in a duel and you manage to land 2 counters you get the value of infamy which is not a very hard thing to accomplish. Early game this card really helps to give you that extra fuel you sometimes need to finish off someone, out-live health sponges like Tyra or simply turn around a corner and give you a slightly more forgiving timing to billow/whirl and stall that small yet noticeable window the post-counter lockout takes place and refill health with the help of a support. If you for some reason want to change the filler (which I wouldn't recommend) go for infamy, malice or kindling, they all provide slightly different bonuses. Infamy is more stable; malice allows you to prefire for heavy swings more comfortably and kindling is the only ammo card worth running since it can activate more than once in a single sequence and doesn't require you to do something really dumb like Embers (2 ammo while billow per level) to get it.
How you should play this deck:
You should always prefire IF YOU CAN so you can do unexpected high damaging combos that start from 1250 hp (heavy swing+whirl or counter), learning when to reload is very important, 9 shots at base is enough even if you waste a couple on nothing.
Don't be afraid to go mid if you can't dive backline because of a bulky comp, Zhin can momentarily act as a damage backline (don't do this for the whole game) your heavy shot does wonders against champions like Barik or Io. It's fine if you're forced into farming ult from tanks for a second if they're all too grouped up, try to hit either the dps or healer with the piercing effect. After that you have many options to get kills such as: Ulting towards your target vertically and prefiring 1 shot mid air so you only have to fire once to get heavy again and finish off with combo; whirling through tank and countering incoming backline shots as a surprise right in front of the victim and reset cds again to gather attention and make space for your team; keep firing the tank if they don't react at all to being dealt 850 damage (less if blast shields) and lower their hp pool by 1700 (less if blast shields and heals) then dive quickly, slay or if you can't eliminate anyone at least that makes them get distracted and get out through resets or billow.
Don't be afraid to get among 2 or more enemies, Zhin is the only champion who can go right through the entire formation and come back alive while dealing some poke damage and making some space for your homies to capitalize. This is not me telling you to do it every single time, be smart, you need a good support who can pay attention and aid you and time your abilities perfectly so you don't literally explode in half a second by the amount of burst you'll most likely eat.
Don't be afraid to waste billow if you want to make sure Zhin escapes, it's an added token in this build and really in all the other viable Zhin decks (including hideout decks which is whirl reset on billow) use it even if goes to waste YOU DON'T NEED IT unlike what most legacy Zhin decks used to run back when it was a bs ability stalled for so long with no actual risk *cough cough fan the flames is a bad card now, please never run that card or any other dedicated billow card* but please if you can, save it as long as you can, it's very useful as crowd control and cauterize clensing or to dodge ultimates.
The ideal combo order is shooting, whirling, countering, shooting, countering, whirling and looping/retreating (You can always cheese duels with ultimate if you really need to or aim somewhere else to retreat if absolutely everything else is down). You may also start the combo by ulting and surprising enemies from a different angle. Of course the ideal combo is not always what you end up getting, the good thing about this build is that even then at least 1 ability is almost always up and footwork really really really helps with stalling.
Finally remember to reset abilities or else you're not playing him correctly and doing very mediocre damage by just shooting.
If you have any doubt or want to tell me how wrong I am message on Discord as KingCrimsonTime#7583
