@Any Rioter Concerning Karthus

Do you think he's in a good state as he is? Are there any changes planned for him in the works? Would love to hear if there are.

Besides those two questions, a little bit of rambling and some thoughts.

With the significant increase of mobility and survival capabilities that have accumulated over time, Karthus is slowly losing much of his impact. With the addition of Stopwatch (and not to mention Nullifying Orb), the threat he had on the game was heavily reduced.

Fleet Footwork is one of my biggest peeves when playing Karthus. With the number of champions that already have dashes and high mobility, fleet footwork just makes trying to land his abilities on priority targets nightmarish. Not that there's much that could be changed to fix that, though a little more oomph when you do land it would be nice.

Wall of Pain. Out of all of his kit, easily the worst part, due to its nature of being a wall. As an offensive option, it's hard to utilize well since it doesn't do damage, and you're still gated by either getting dangerously close, or trying to land an ability that's still hard to land against many champs even when they're slowed by Wall of Pain.

As a defensive option, it's also hard to utilize, because many of the champions who you'd want to use it to defend against can completely ignore it. Even though the 15% magic resistance reduction is definitely powerful, it's an ability that generally feels lackluster, and many times clunky.

Perhaps a grounding effect on enemies that pass through the Wall of Pain, instead of a magic resistance reduction? I think it would go a long way in resolving his issues with all the mobility.

And for his ultimate.. The growing number of defensive options are creeping the power out of it. Locket and Stopwatch are the biggest grievances for me when playing as Karthus. Nullifying orb and Maw are also frustrating to face, but not nearly as much. The changes in testing for Locket, also creep especially hard on Karthus's ultimate. For the purposes of interaction, Karthus's ultimate is treated as an AoE, and thus gets reduced by 50% in addition to the big chunk of shielding and magic resistance on Locket.

And let's not forget that Braum's shield can block it, which is definitely one of the frustrating interactions. All in all, the increasing amount of healing, shielding, and damage reduction available is heavily cutting into the reliability of an ability that is already heavily limited by cooldown for being extremely powerful and generally reliable.

Has potentially giving Karthus's ultimate a mini-rework come into discussion? Like for example, an idea I think would be really cool for it, a sort-of execution effect. Basically: On cast Requiem checks each champion to see if the damage it will deal exceeds their effective HP at the start of the cast, and if it does, it will execute those champions regardless of their effective HP when it detonates.

Somewhat like how Urgot's ultimate interacts. Once the chains are launched, regardless of how much HP/Shielding you have when you reach Urgot, you die. Would be completely fine if Requiem had its scaling lowered a bit as a result of such a change.

Last but definitely not least, an indicator if his ultimate will deal fatal damage, like Cho'gath's. This would be a wonderful QoL buff to have, regardless of whether or not his kit any changes of any kind.