Zac vs Malphite Counter Pick

Two tanks with opposite damage profiles meet here, and the sample is thin: 105 games on patch 16.13.1, enough to record 58.1% for Zac but not enough to treat the figure as settled. Malphite owns the sturdier frame, with 40 base armour rising to 124.2 at level 18 against Zac’s 33 and 112.9, plus Granite Shield absorbing up to a tenth of his maximum health whenever he goes untouched for a few seconds. What he lacks is any way to survive sustained pressure once that shield is spent.

Zac’s answer is percentage damage. Unstable Matter deals a share of maximum health as magic damage, and Malphite’s 28 magic resist is the thinnest defensive stat either champion brings, so an armour-heavy build does nothing against it. Ground Slam converts Malphite’s own armour into magic damage and cuts attack speed, which matters little to a champion whose output is spell-based rather than attack-based. Health scaling reinforces the gap: 685 and 2,538 for Zac against 665 and 2,433. Movement decides the rest, since Zac moves at 340 to Malphite’s 335 and Seismic Shard steals move speed for three seconds, so approaches belong to Elastic Slingshot rather than to walking. Malphite’s difficulty rating of 2 against Zac’s 8 tells the other half of the story: the record rewards accurate Let’s Bounce! angles, and Unstoppable Force punishes a mistimed one immediately.