10/26/18 Update: Check out this update post to address some of the more common concerns

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Hi all,

Today, I have some changes to Karma I want to preview to you. As a note, these changes are work-in-progress - we’re still creating the visuals and tuning the numbers, so they won’t be hitting the PBE with pre-season update. When these changes land on PBE eventually, we’d love to have you test them out and give us your feedback at that point.

First, let’s talk about some of Karma’s issues, and our goals with these changes:

1. When compared to other champions, modern Karma doesn’t have many defining elements that set her apart, from both a thematic and gameplay perspective. Since she doesn’t really have anything uniquely hers, our first goal is to give Karma a unique mechanic that reinforces a core part of her identity.

2. Karma is a difficult champion to keep in a healthily balanced state. When she is tuned appropriately for the average player, she can become dominant at the pro level. Our second goal is to file down some of the sharper edges on Karma’s existing mechanics to let us buff her elsewhere, making her relatively more powerful for the average Karma player.

3. Karma players can feel like their Mantra choices don’t offer the flexibility promised by the champion, with certain Mantras becoming much more useful for different Karma builds or at different points in the game. Our third goal is to make Karma’s mantra choice feel more meaningful in most situations.

  Let’s talk changes, starting with the biggest - we’re giving Karma a unique mechanic in line with her identity. Karma is a spiritual leader of the Ionian people, and like all great leaders, Karma has the ability to see the potential in those she works with and help bring out their fullest ability. Realizing this mechanically, we’ve added a new ally-cast mode for Karma’s W. When she targets an ally with W, she reduces the cooldowns on their basic abilities by a flat amount. The mantra, Harmony, increases the amount of CDR and grants the ally mana. We’re pairing this with a Karma-only visual effect - as a passive, Karma will see an indicator representing how far an ally’s spells are on cooldown. In conjunction with W, she’ll have a better idea which allies are good targets for her W at a glance. We hope this mechanic will inspire Karma players to craft unique lane combinations and team compositions.

With these changes, we also want to level the current playing field between pro players and average Karma players in two main ways:

1. Much of Karma’s power is rooted in her Mantra usage - optimizing her passive’s Mantra CDR is something pros are quite good at, allowing them to gain significantly more power than the average Karma player. We’re changing her live passive to operate on a charge model similar to Spellthief’s Edge, triggering on any damage on champs or monsters. This will allow Karma players to not have to spend their entire time basic attacking to gain max passive value, freeing up time to reposition, ward, etc.

2. We’re generally reducing the benefit of movespeed in the kit, most notably by changing her Mantra-E, Defiance, to reduce the movespeed given to allies near your primary target (the same as the reduction to shields). Movement speed, especially Defiance’s shared AoE movespeed, is much more powerful in highly coordinated play than standard ranked play, so stripping power out here will free up a lot of power and allow us to buff her elsewhere.

The last set of changes are a set of tweaks aimed at each of her Mantra spells, to give more flexibility of use in a variety of situations.

• For Soulflare (Mantra-Q), we’re loading more of the damage into the initial hit of the projectile, and less into the detonation damage - using Soulflare to poke should remain powerful even later into the game.

• For Renewal (Mantra-W), we’re changing the scaling to scale both with Missing HP and directly with AP - even if you’re building AP instead of tanky, your healing should be substantial.

• For Defiance (Mantra-E), the shared shield (and movespeed) percentage will be much higher than live, but will be split evenly across all nearby allies - now using Defiance will still be quite effective in a 2v2 or 3v3 scenario.

  So with this gameplay update, here’s what Karma will look like overall:

Passive - Gathering Fire Kindled Spirit - When Karma deals damage to an enemy champ or large monster, Mantra’s cooldown is reduced by X seconds (to a cap of Y times over Z seconds).

Souls Alight - Karma can see her allies’ total basic ability cooldowns.  

Q - Inner Flame Functionally, the same as live  

W - Spirit Bond Ally Cast: Karma reduces target ally’s basic ability cooldowns by up to X seconds. Mantra - Harmony: The cooldown reduction amount is increased by Y seconds. Karma restores Z% of the ally’s max mana.

Enemy Cast: Karma deals X damage to target enemy. If they don’t break the tether, they are dealt X damage and rooted for T seconds. Mantra - Renewal: Roots for longer. When this deals damage, Karma heals for Y% missing HP + Z% AP.  

E - Inspire Grants an ally movespeed and a shield. Mantra - Defiance: Grants the target bonus shields. Other nearby allies split X% of the shield and movespeed between them.  

R - Mantra Functionally, the same as live

  As for a specific numerical changelist, we’re still working out tunings for the changes, but along with these changes, you should expect a healthy amount of buffs to Karma’s base stats and ability numbers to bring her into a balanced state.

Thanks for listening! I’ll post another update when we’re heading to PBE. -NeuroCat