About me
First of all, I am not a high elo player by any means. I don't even really play ranked (1 or 2 matches played last season). I do play a lot of Zed though; Custom games, ABAM, Arena, Urf and occasionally some normal drafts.

At the point of writing this I have 355.325K mastery (7) on zed. I used to be a Katarina main (700+k) but was looking for a more complex and stylish champion to play.

Zed last patch [S13]
Last season zed was in a very weird spot imo. Absolute dog**** early/mid, godly late game where if played right you could 1v5 a lot of games against any comp. If you (and your team) allow the game to reach late game full items (or close to) you can carry pretty consistently with conquerer, black cleaver, serylda's and ofcourse ravenous hydra. He was often described as an AD Caster and not really an assassin as how he should be played.
Really fun to play late game, but very frustrating early and mid game. Something had to change for sure.

Zed now [S14]
Patch 14.1 changed everything for Zed. Lethality no longer scales and is way stronger early now. Zed can finally oneshot early/mid now and do some pretty good damage overall. (not as consistent as some other champs right now but we are getting there).

I'm having a lot more fun now playing zed as he is way more consistent throughout the game as opposed to only being good later on. Your late game is a lot weaker now and you won't be able to 1v5 late every game now. This is due to a lot of item changes:

1. Ravenous Hydra no longer procs on abilities (only auto attacks).
2. You can't stack black cleaver and serylda's anymore.
3. Eclipse lost the lethality and armor pen stats.

Even though this is the right direction for zed it was hard at first to figure out how to deal with bruisers and tanks now. It looks like we are mostly back to oneshotting the squishy carries now and leaving the tankier opponents for our team.

But in some scenarios you are the one who has to deal with these bruisers and tanks so we needed a new build for this. 420WeeabooSlayer came up with a build for this and I copied it pretty much with some minor tweaks.

You can run Conquerer with this buiser build and do some pretty solid damage against any opponent. You also have a lot more health with this build so you can trade with champsions such as yasuo and irelia.

It's def. not as good as last season bruiser builds but it has saved me a couple times for sure.