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How to Balance Katarina without completely nerfing her

The Paulrus·10/25/2014, 7:03:48 PM·3 votes·2,040 views

There's a lot of people complaining Katarina is OP, and more often than not, I'm in line to agree with them.

Kat has an over 50% win rate against all other mid champions, which is a problem.

That means no matter who you pick, if it's not Kat, you're more likely than not to lose the game.

How that can be considered balanced is beyond me.

source: http://www.lolking.net/charts?region=all&type=mid-matchup&range=monthly&map=sr&queue=1x1&league=ranked

Everyone's counter-point to her being OP is to just CC her. The problem is, most CC spells have some sorts of cast time or pre-requisite (yasuo) for mids as well as in general. You can't cast if she kills you mid-cast. Cast times for CC range between 0.25 and 2 seconds. So assuming you begin casting your ultra-low cast time CC perfectly at the same exact instant she comes in with her ult, she's still going to get 1 fairly large damage hit on a champion.

To get an idea of where her power lies in her kit, let's go through her abilities, one by one.

  • Passive: On kill or assist, cooldowns are reduced by 15 seconds. So, it resets her Q,W, and E instantly on a kill or assist. It also cuts the cooldown on her ult by 25%/28.5%/33.3%. Ultimate gets a triple kill? ult's back up.

  • Q- Blades Bounce to 4 enemies. Dealing flat damage and scaling (+45% AP). On top of that, applies a mark that deals more flat damage and scaling (+15% AP) when detonated. So 60% total AP plus some flat damage.

  • W- Spins Blades dealing flat damage and scaling (+60% bonus AD, +25% AP). Also gives her movement speed buff (15%-35%) for 1 second if she hits a champion.

  • E- Blinks behind target. Deals flat damage and scaling (+40% AP) to target. Then has incoming damage reduced by 15% for 1.5 seconds.

  • R- Daggers for days. High value of flat damage and scaling (+250% AP and +3.75 per bonus AD) on up to 10 times on 3 closest champions. Up to 2.5 seconds cast (4 attacks per second). Interruptible by CC. Applies Grevious Wounds for 3 seconds.

So, how can we give Kat a rework without completely nerfing her ratios to all holy hell. I'd make some small modifications that don't reduce her damage, but how she applies it and the buffs she gets while doing it.

  • Passive- Dem resets. Now on trigger on kills. Nothing for assists. You still gets your resets, but you've got to be doing the killing. Other ideas: -Assists give 7.5 second cooldown -Cooldown reduction scales with level
  • Q- Blade throw- Now a line based skillshot that will move through up to 4 opponents. Same damage and applies marks. Other ideas: -Reduce damage on consecutive targets hit -Reduce # of blade bounces
  • W- No changes.
  • E- Damage reduction only applies to champion/target that was blinked behind. All other damage is applied normally. Will add more risk/reward to blinking under tower to finish off an enemy or blinking into a full health team to cast ult.
  • R- Now up to a 4 second channel time rather than 2.5 second reducing the attacks from 4/s to 2.5/s. This gives a chance for CC spells to cast before her ult kills you. Also, CD doesn't begin until channeling is finished, so the passive won't let ultimate (which has a very short CD to begin with) self reset. Other ideas: -Only increase channel time -Only remove ult's self-resetting ability.

I know I'm going to receive a lot of backlash (mostly from Katarina players), but I think this is a fairly reasonable power reduction that still allows her to be viable, but steps away from the current Katarina play where all of her abilities deal massive damage and are basically insta-refresh after ulting.

I'm open to discussion of the ideas and would like feedback/other ideas.

11 Comments

Sightless6610/25/2014, 7:20:15 PM4 votes

Discussing the ultimate nerfs The problem with this idea is that you're both reducing the power of the ultimate, and then you're also removing the ability to reset. You don't need to do both. If you're opening up that much of a window for her to be crowd controlled, then you're also significantly lowering the number of situations where she can instaburst you with it to get a nearly instant ult reset. You're also just reducing the damage it does in general. Pick one nerf or the other, because both is just overkill.

I don't see the point of Q being a line skillshot. It doesn't fit the kit at all. I get that you're trying to reduce the number of targets she can mark, but just reducing the bounce number or lowering the mark damage for later champions hit or even just lowering the mark damage in general would all be much more elegant solutions. There isn't anything about a skillshot that makes it a good solution for this case.

The kill thing was changed because in the past, aoe reset champions (think AP Yi) frustrated their own teams by having gameplay based around stealing kills. It's just considered particularly fun for anyone in the game. It would reduce her power, but it's not a balance change that's ever likely to be utilized.

The E change is fine. It could be thrown onto other changes if necessary without major problems. As far as straight power reduction without affecting core gameplay goes, this is your best suggestion.

With all that said, I don't think Kataraina is too strong. She takes advantage of certain team compositions very well. Teams that have something like Ryze top, Zed mid, Kha'zix jungle can easily have almost no disruptive CC except for a support, and those teams are pretty common nowadays. It's natural that she'll be taking advantage of that. I'd rather see her counters like jungle tanks and melee bruiser tops come back into focus a bit and then she how she does.

Final thing. For your poll, you might want to have options like "I think Kat is balanced and I like your changes as nerfs if she was op", "I think Kat is balanced and I don't like your changes as nerfs if she was op", "I think Kat is too strong and I don't like your nerfs", "I think Kat is too strong and I like your nerfs". That would give you information both about if people think she is balanced and what they think of your changes. Right now your poll doesn't have an option for me telling you if I like the ideas if I don't think she's too strong.

disregardable10/25/2014, 7:07:40 PM3 votes

I actually think Kat is fine as is. I disagree with you that the CC takes too long for it to be effective.

Lord Dusteon10/25/2014, 7:35:31 PM2 votes

"So, how can we give Kat a rework without completely nerfing her to all holy hell. I'd make some small modifications that don't reduce her damage, but how she applies it and the buffs she gets while doing it."

Well, you made it so she can't get resets except by taking every single kill, nerfed her Q a huge deal (hint, most enemy champions don't spend a fight standing in a straight line. Neither do minions), nerfed her survivability on E (which is funny, since she's a glass cannon, which makes 15% damage reduction and zhonyas her main methods of living), then both made it so her ult getting resets requires her to stop casting it before someone dies, decreased it's burst damage significantly, and increased the channel time needed to get full damage.

So no, I think your rework would just nerf her to hell, since it would make her need even more time without anyone doing anything to the stationary squishy target, makes her have to STOP DEALING DAMAGE WITH HER MAIN DAMAGE ABILITY to get any resets, and requires her to take every kill to be useful in a fight.

Biggg O10/25/2014, 7:25:03 PM2 votes

Reduce ult damage or remove assist resets. Or both. Katarina is currently broken, and I played a lot of katarina back in the day

ULTRAF0RCE10/25/2014, 8:52:49 PM1 votes

Even though as someone who has practised and gotten decent at Katarina so I do have a bias I believe she has to have no skill shots, she is kind of like the simplest assassin you hit the mark that you placed on them you flash to wards or enemies and then do the dance of death. Number tweaking is at most what should be done because her last buff was in patch 4.5 and she wasn't at all popular then so why completely changed what was did not seem broke until the meta shifted.

Hyrum Graff10/25/2014, 8:54:49 PM1 votes

I'm not sure if kat is balanced right now or not. I don't think we can judge that based on win rates, though. The higher elo you get, the lower kat's win rate becomes; in challenger, there are several champs who consistently beat her. Zilean in particular becomes a hard counter. Her high win rate in diamond indicates that she is perhaps too hard to deal with, even though her challenger win rate means she can be dealt with.

Tbh, I think the issue is more that Kat snowballs too hard, than that her power level is off when she doesn't snowball. I think it's primarily due to her damage reduction on E; if she builds items like zhonya's, rylai's, liandry's, and abyssal, she becomes rather tanky and does a lot of damage.

As a whole, I think your changes would result in a gutted champion. Balance is super sensitive. I think the E change, and maybe removing grievous wounds from her ult, would be a good start, and then we should evaluate how strong she is after that goes through. Honestly I think that would be enough to balance her.

RadiantWings10/25/2014, 9:45:25 PM1 votes

-Katarina's innate now reduces her cooldowns by 60% of their base value (half effect for Death Lotus)

There, now she doesn't get instant resets unless she specifically itemizes for it which in turn, gives meaningful itemization choices. For example, for AP carries, Sorc shoes is for bursting squishy targets while Boots of Lucidity is for more long term dps and utility (although Athene's, blue, masteries and mana gating trivialize it for the most part.) Katarina doesn't bother with Boots of Lucidity because bursting her target down resets her cooldowns for her. This change makes it so that she can't simply steamroll your team as easily by simply itemizing to pick off the weakest link.

This however, doesn't fix Kat's problematic design where she capitalizes on that weakest link. There's always going to be a person that doesn't (or possibly can't) itemize well against magic damage. It wouldn't be bad if all she did was assassinate them, but by virtue of all her main attacks being aoe, she just sets up the reset chain too easily by herself. If A) Sinister Steel didn't proc Bouncing Blade mark or B) Sinister Steel dealt less damage per target hit (see where the problem comes from?) it wouldn't be so bad.

I wouldn't do anything past this until Zhonya's finally gets its active duration nerfed. Zhonya's is especially bad on characters like Kat because of low cooldown instant casts + flash ability.