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A Potential Solution To Karthus vs. Edge of Night

Teridax68··2 votes·1,360 views

#Requiem

##Active: Karthus channels for 3 seconds, marking every enemy for death upon successfully completing the channel. Enemies marked for death take magic damage after 3 seconds, with a beam of death hanging over their heads for the duration. The mark's application can be blocked by spell shields, but marked enemies cannot block the damage by any means other than invulnerability.

What does this change?: Since the beam-of-death effect would be moved to the end of the channel and would take the form of a mark, enemies wouldn't be able to spell shield Karth's ult unless they see him channeling. Effectively, global targets would not be able spell shield the damage if they get taken by surprise, nor would untargetability spells like Playful Trickster or Sanguine Pool block the damage anymore (Zhonya's still would, though, due to its invulnerability).

Could this be improved?: Absolutely. The channel could perhaps be removed, since the counterplay tied to it is situational at best (Karth can always hide in a bush to ult for exactly the same effect, and his channel is uncounterable while he's dead), and it would bring the time from cast to damage back to 3 seconds. Personally, I'd like his ult to be taken to a new extreme, and make it a death mark that auto-executes every champion on the map below a certain threshold at the end of its duration, regardless of spell or damage immunity. Ultimately, though, these are likely large buffs, and the core proposal in this thread is mainly to make Karth's ult less weak versus much cheaper spell counters.

Also, Riot, if you're reading this, please make Karthus's ult globally deliver one of his quotes. It makes no sense for champions like Kalista and Kled to have global quotes and not Karthus, the king of global ultimates, especially when his ult already has a sound effect and all.

14 Comments

WoonStruck3 votes

Or people can stop overreacting to something that won't be an issue.

GULAG 4 U2 votes

Seriously people constantly act like the 1.5 seconds of channel won't make it impossible to block ults. There are no ults slow enough in the game other than karthus's that can be blocked by a shield that triggers after 1.5 seconds of channeling in which you can't cast spells.

Brutalitops012 votes

I mean, Edge of Night costs about the same as a Zhonya's right now. And if they start the channel too late or use the Edge of Night to kill Karthus easier by blocking one of the skittles or his W slow, they'll still get hit by it. Overall, while, yes, Edge of Night is a counter to Karthus, it's no more a counter than Zhonya's was because of the 2.5 second channel time (where Karthus's ult takes 3 seconds to fully channel). This leaves a 0.5 second window for people to see the channel and react by hitting the Edge of Night active, and I think that really only super high-tier players have the reflexes to hit Edge of Night in literally half a second.

In fact, Edge of Night is an even weaker counter than Zhonya's. For Zhonya's, you just have to hit it AFTER that first 0.5 seconds and you'll dodge the spell guaranteed. For Edge, you HAVE to hit it during the initial 0.5 seconds of the channel or you'll get hit by it before the shield procs, and it also has a pretty decent tradeoff for using it to avoid the Requiem instead of using it to kill Karthus, being that without it, it's entirely possible that a good Karthus won't get killed by the assassin because of his skittles. Overall, I think it's pretty balanced, and not a super big counter to him unless the assassin player has the reaction speed of a pro.

Teridax681 votes

That's mostly true (Karth's channel is 3 seconds long, though, so technically you get a 1.5-second window to cast Edge of Night reactively), but at the same time AP and AD itemization run on different rules. Zhonya's is cited by Riot as a reason why some champions are allowed to do well with AP and others aren't, because many AD champions would end up broken if they had access to its stasis. EoN doesn't offer the same protection in most cases, but it does against Karthus.

The issue with this is that AD champions tend to be more common than AP champions: until now, few enough people on the enemy team ever had the item-based means to block Karth's ult, so he still had some amount of reliability on it. With the advent of this item, though, which is likely to be popular beyond Assassins, both AD and AP champion will have the ability to negate his ult, which will just make him even less good overall at what is meant to be his greatest contribution.

More generally, at this point I feel Karthus's ult gets countered too easily, as does the champion himself. When he's in the right hands and against the right team comp, he's pretty decent, but if he's up against champions with healing, untargetability, spell shields, lane bullying potential, etc., he suffers hard, and doesn't have that many avenues besides farming and pushing, and hoping for the best when he ults. His ult has a tremendous cost, yet is far less likely to have an impact than many ults on shorter cooldowns, because its success cases are fairly narrow (he either gets at least one kill, or he wasted his ult, in most cases), yet there are so many ways to counter it that he's likely to fail even in situations where he's supposed to win, i.e. when there's at least one enemy out there low on health. The addition of Honeyfruit is just one extra universal counter to his ult, too. If he wants to become more popular, and competitively viable, his core contribution to his team needs to be more reliable.

Brutalitops011 votes

Edge of Night is a 2.5 second channel unless they lowered it since one of the people I watch on YouTube last showed it. So yeah, 0.5 seconds to react and press it to block.

Teridax681 votes

Edge of Night's channel has always been 1.5 seconds, which I invite you to verify on S@20 and the images it provides. Where/who were you getting the 2.5 seconds from?

Brutalitops011 votes

Pretty much every YouTuber who has built it showed the tooltip and it said 2.5 seconds on the tooltip in game.

Teridax681 votes

Then the tooltip is wrong. The tooltip for Edge of Knight in the shop shows a 1.5-second channel duration, with screenshots on S@20 to boot.

GULAG 4 U1 votes

I'll just copypaste this, and upvoted your post too. THe only problem I see with your suggestion is potential spagetthi coding triggering Maw.

Okay, I'd just like to clear things up.

First off, EON is meant for preparation, not reaction. It has a 1.5 channel time where you can't cast spells and taking damage cancels it. Second off, it blocks one spell. It's not enough to stop all of the CC you can throw at people. I do agree it's overtuned, but it's not outright bullshit like what people think.

Also assassins are losing upfront burst, so they have to stay longer in fights. Giving them a defensive tool (I highly recommend riot to remove the magic resist) is necessary, they can no longer blow someone up in a second, and staying in a fight longer where even tanks don't last very long in isn't a good idea. If they didn't have this they won't even be able kill someone without getting cc'd or blown up mid combo.

Anyways, I will probably be downvoted for saying this, but I just wanted to make things clear and why EON is needed in the game.

Teridax681 votes

I completely agree, Edge of Night itself is a very healthy item, and is a great tool for assassins, especially since it telegraphs their attacks even more (if you see an assassin channeling EoN, run for the hills and they lose a powerful protection tool). My issue isn't with EoN, specifically, but with Karthus, and the way his ult, which costs a huge amount of his power budget and has a high cooldown to match, gets countered far too cheaply. I look forward to playing as and against assassins, as they're a lot more fun all around. I do not, however, look forward to playing Karthus in that kind of environment, unless he gets to make more reliable use of his ult.

GULAG 4 U1 votes

Agreed. What I suggest is that Karthus's ultimate should straight off ignore EON. And make his slows more powerful so he can keep up with mobility creep.

WoonStruck1 votes

Karthus has Deathfire Touch.

If they just got out of combat with him or killed him, they can't avoid it.

GULAG 4 U1 votes

I didn't know you couldn't activate it during combat neither. This item is seriously impossible to abuse, people need to stop crying about it.

WoonStruck1 votes

You can, effectively, but realistically you can't.

If you take or deal damage or any hostile effect, the channel is disrupted and the item is put on CD.

Karthus has DFT to help with that. That means assassins will have a .5 second window where they can activate it. Completely useless if they're too early or too late. Compare that to Zhonyas users who have a 5+ second window.

Both items have the same cost, FYI.

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