@Riot What are your plans with Karthus?
For those who have seen Riot's latest article on champ popularity, the stats show that Karthus is "Unpopular-as-ever", and that does make me a bit worried, since Riot's response to unpopular champs usually inevitably involves a rework of some sort. That being said, I'd really like to know if there are even any plans (short term or long term) to help Karthus increase his popularity. I would've thought that since Karthus graced the animation of the Pentakill video a couple months back his popularity would increase somewhat, but not really anything happened.
In terms of Gameplay, Karthus has always been the premier Damage Dealer of League (There's a reason he has always been in the #1 spot in damage dealt on sites like champion.gg and the like), but the issue I see is that because most of it is Sustained DPS, it's almost too easy to negate a good chunk of it, or be able to apply damage a lot faster (burst damage) than he can. While Karthus excels in pure damage, he really doesn't do anything else unfortunately, as his only utility is a decaying slow w/ MR shre. He's almost the Vel'Koz of Battlemages since you're more likely to get MPen early since Karthus's AP ratios are so low, (.3 for Q, .2 for E, .6 for R) but instead of being able to deal true damage, you just get to do more sustained damage instead. His main power fantasy comes from his ult, the classic "Press R to win" move, which unfortunately has an almost unbearable amount of counters to it, including 2 new things that EVERYONE can use now, in the form of a rune which is pretty much a Hexdrinker passive, and a new 600G mini-Zhonyas that builds into something for everyone, so yeah it's not currently a great time for Karthus right now.
If there IS to be a rework of some sort, I'd like to put in some of my input of some sort.
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Rework W to be more of an Anti-heal/Shield move (like maybe apply GW and then change GW so it applies to shielding as well) or make it so it disrupts assassins somehow (Most likely Grounded debuff). This being said, if you DO remove the MR shred, please make sure to buff the damage on his other abilities.
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Make the damage tick on E go faster, like what you did with singed. I'd say maybe move the slow from W to E, but I'm not too sure on that.
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Add some Execution damage to R so we can finally feel confidant with ulting a low-health target. I've decided NOT to ask for CD changes simply because that would simply make Karthus more of an Ult-bot and I really don't want him simply to be an ult-bot.
Please riot, I just want to see my main be seen in a different light for once as just some unpopular champ that can be negated by just about everything. Please help me out here?
, and to a lesser extent, 
to just drain tank or sustain you to death. This is allowable because healing, life steal, and regeneration are all able to be done outside of combat, and GW just makes the in combat aspect of it less oppressive.
and 
would have nearly 100% up time against shields, vs the 40-50% they have against healing due to out of combat life-steal/regeneration. In addition to that, they have a limited life span on all but the dedicated shielding champs(
), and even then they only can be applied to one person. And if you apply the shield after the damage has been done? You screwed up, as opposed to healing where you just have to do it before the person dies or regenerates the health them self. Sheilds do need an item to counter them, preferably on mages, BUT NOT GW. IT IS BAD ENOUGH AS IT IS.
would now counter 3 types of supports(sustain, tank, and shielding). At that point, it just needs tenacity and mr for adc's to have a one shop stop for all their opponent countering needs.(and don't get me started on how that will increase 
's worth)