Item Build

Starting Items

Zed has no innate sustain or way to mitigate damage, so you should choose from cloth armor and 5 potions or boots and 3 potions. Keep in mind that Zed is painfully slow without boots, but his Living Shadow ability helps to alleviate that somewhat.

Core Items

Boots and Bloodthirster are always core items on Zed. You'll want to itemize so that you survive in lane. Ninja Tabi will help mitigate damage from champions who auto-attack a lot, or those who have purely physical damage. Mercury's Treads are useful for the CC reduction and damage reduction against AP champions. Depending on the match-up, you can change up which of the core items you get first.

Phage is always a useful item due to its stats and effect. It will give you AD, health to back up your resistances and the chance to slow on auto-attack.

If you need to, you can build a Hexdrinker to mitigate some AP damage. The MR will keep you alive for as much as your health will sustain you, the AD will help keep your damage up, and the shield will save you from dangerous situations. That being said, make sure to buy some health items because MR without health to back it up is useless.

In between items you may opt to pick up a Vampiric Scepter to have some more sustain in between spell casts. You'll have to pick it up eventually to build into a Bloodthirster.

Endgame Items

All of Zed's offensive skills deal physical damage and scale off of AD. Zed's W also increases your AD by 5% per level. That's a 25% AD increase. Because of this, you will want as many high-AD, high burst items to maximize Zed's damage output.

Bloodthirster is a great item on Riven, and possibly even more so on Zed. Unlike Riven, Zed doesn't have a way to prevent damage to himself other than dodging using shadow swaps. As a solo laner you'll want some way to sustain yourself and that's where BT comes in. BT's got lifesteal in it as well as flat AD. A maxed out BT would actually give you 125 AD total due to Zed's W passive.

Last Whisper is always a great item for physical damage champions and even more so for those who deal purely physical damage. The extra AD and the armor penetration for all of Zed's offense just help to boost his damage output.

Guardian Angel is important because you're going to be the one diving into the backline to try to take out the high-priority targets. The resistances and the passive from this item help to keep you alive long enough to get multiple rounds of burst damage out.

Trinity Force is an okay option for Zed. I personally don't like running TF on non-mana champions simply because it's a wasted stat, doubly so if the champion doesn't even have AP scaling (like Zed). However, the fact that the TF/Sheen passives add on up to 150% of your base AD are good enough reason to include this in your build. You get the move speed for chasing/running. You get the critical chance and attack speed for when you're waiting for your skills to come off CD. You get the TF on-next-attack passive that activates every two seconds off of the LOW-CD SKILLS YOU WILL BE USING VERY OFTEN. You get the health and AD, in addition to the chance to slow on the auto-attackss you'll be throwing in when your skills are on CD.

Frozen Mallet is another option because you get the 100% chance to slow and the massive health bump to survive, because what are resistances without the health to back it up? It's an alternative item to TF if you need the extra health or just don't like having the wasted mana/AP from sheen. Keep in mind that you do lose out on the TF passive, so you obviously lose out on that extra damage.

Maw of Malmortius is a nice optional item because it builds off of Hexdrinker, an incredibly useful item if you're laning against AP. The MR, the shield and the additional AD from missing health are very nice on Zed.

Infinity Edge is an item you'll want to grab to increase your damage output even more. Take it instead of Maw if you see that you can afford being more squishy.

Hextech Gunblade is an alternative item to Infinity Edge due to all of its stats, AP aside, benefiting Zed. He gets AD, lifesteal, spell vamp and the ranged active ability. This item will help Zed sustain better as well as give him increased chasing ability.

Note: Brutalizer is an optional item here. Brutalizer itself is not a bad item. Youmuu's is the problem. You sacrifice too much and given the lackluster stats on Youmuu's you would leave it as a last item or dump the gold all at once for the active. In my opinion, it's Just not worth it considering Zed's an extremely item dependent champion and you really shouldn't be spending past the brutalizer when the 1350 gold to finish Youmuu's can go elsewhere.