Welcome, I have been a supporting with Zilean for as long as I have been supporting and he is by far my favorite support. I am making this guide because I decided to make this guide because for ***** and giggles I decided to look at a guide for him and I felt most of them left out items I feel are crucial for Zilean to max out his power & potential. Also I will be sharing some tip & tricks that will help you to control you enemy's and allies.

The Good
Teleport My favorite, I feel this is crucial this allows minimal time between retreating to base and getting back in the lane, maximizing heightened learning allowing you to get your chrono shift faster, and well just being a higher level. Also if you are feeling like a bad *** teleport to one of your wards and come up behind an enemy and eqwqe making them low hp and slow as a snail allowing your allies to get an easy kill.

Ghost This is a personal favorite combined with time warp make escaping a loosing fight, just the right amount speed to reach your ally in time to ult, or to save a tower from a mob of minions.

Flash would also make a nice escape but travels less distance.

Clarity only if you want to just go crazy and powerbomb the life out of bot lane. "best if you discussed this with your adc and try and coordinate heavy pokes to maximize the mana regen"

The Bad:
Exhaust if some one asks you to get this, do me a favor and laugh at them. Zilean has one of the best slows in the game and if all goes well mid game you will be pumping time warps out so much this will be utterly useless.

Ignite don't try to mudurlate your enemy's yes you are a bombing mad man but you should not try to out kill your adc. Besisdes your bombs are going to get you a kill here and there because of the timer.

To keep your foe's at bay during lane you should bomb them "duh" you can bomb one of the 3 back minions so they don't want to stand next to them pushing them back "try not to double bomb one early game because it might kill it and take a cs from you adc". If one of your own minions is next to a foe you can stay just out of range of there poke and double bomb, or single bomb a dieing minion so the enemy adc will walk back then kill "possibly loosing the cs or take poke" also if no enemy minions are in the path you can send bombs on one of the front 3 melee minions and they become homing bombs because they will try and attack a enemy champion forcing them to flee, or stop and kill the minion before it hits them.

Time warp It is the perfect flight or fight skill, it can be used to transit allies from lane to lane, quickly get in bomb get out, or slow a target who really needs to die, or any fleeing foe. This spell should be used to allow you adc to flee NOT to advance if a foe is fleeing don't risk your adc's life go in with time warp, rewind and slow allowing your adc/ flimsy ally to not enter a trap. You have a much better chance at escaping alone than them trying to escape with your help, you also might get both of you killed trying to save them. You can use it allow a tank or heavy cc champion to enter a battle very quickly changing the tides of battle.

You can use your ult to tank towers if needed, you might get a kill that your allies don't want risk tower diving for, if you have good communication you can ult an ally in your place. Also on the topic of tower diving if you have ohmwrecker you can use your speed to quickly place a bomb on a tower hugging foe with little or no damage taken.

If you ult yourself and you a for sure going to die try double bombing yourself you might just take some one down with you or encourage a ally to whoop *** on foe who has taken the full force of your bombs.

VERY IMPORTANT!
I don't expect you all to know this so I'm going to share this EXTREMELY important tip when playing Zilean.
Hit alt, yes you heard me right Zilean is a heavy Alt + R, Alt + E, and sometimes Alt + Q
What does Alt + spells do you might wonder?
While holding Alt Q,E,R it will cast the spell on yourself saving precious milliseconds.
If you still don't understand while holding Alt and hitting Q it will automatically place a time bomb on yourself, or Alt E will place a time warp, and holding Alt R will ult yourself witch will probably save your ***.

I believe F1 will also select yourself but on my keyboard its quite far away...
On the subject of the F# buttons F2-F5 will select your allies, I personally like to hit R and click on the pictures of my allies on the left side of my screen "if they are in a mob of other allies"

Well that's it for now, I hope my guide helps some of you not look like total fools, and hopefully allow you to change the tides of battle with my favorite support champion. -Zilean