Boards›Gameplay

Katarina Rework (Warning Long Post)

Yoshiaki·12/30/2014, 7:40:30 AM·6 votes·780 views

This post is dedicated to the rework and balance of Katarina's kit. Katarina is my favorite champion and I've spent many games learning how to play her optimally in a variety of situations. These are my ideas to improve her kit without making her OP.

First of all, I would like to define what makes Katarina, well, Katarina. She is a high risk - high reward, mobile-assassin champion with AOE damage, who is reliant on teammates and heavily countered by CC. The problems I see with her right now is that she can easily snowball during the mid-game because of how easily she can burst down mulitiple enemies at once.

This being said, I would like to preserve the high risk high reward Kat. I think the core of Katarina's gameplay lies in her ability to reset and combo instead of bursting an enemy down and buttonmash to clean everyone else up.

First things first, take off the AD ratios on her W and R. They are not useful at all and only hurt newer players learning her because it makes them think they should buy Hextech Gunblade.

Katarina's Q seems to be in a relatively good spot, the only change I would make is to decrease the base ratio and increase the ratio mark activation ratio. This could also be changed into a skillshot to make Kat less of a button smasher.

Now lets look at her W- Sinister Steel. This is a fairly boring spell because its only use is to activate the Q mark on multiple targets at once. The movespeed is somewhat useless on her because it is used to either escape or to stick to a target, neither of which is used very often because Shunpo is her tool to reposition. There are two ways I thought of that would make her W better, one where the ratio and base damages are increased, but the movespeed is taken off, and one where the ratio is increased and every 3 targets hit you get a buff for your next autoattack to deal the same damage again to a single target. This makes Kat players not only focus on their combos but also focus on getting stacks and interlacing autoattacks during her combo.

My next revision is to change her E- Shunpo. I think this tool should be used for utility and positioning more than it should be used for damage. The damage reduction is something that is very overlooked, and its used more to be on top of someone than it is to reposition defensively. I would reduce Shunpo's cooldown to 10/8.5/7.5.5/4 so that she is able to reposition more often both in early game and Late game. I would also take off all damage from Shunpo and move it to other areas of her kit, including it triggering the mark from her Q. The damage reduction aspect should also be increased, scaling from 10/15/20/25/30, but only applicable when she Shunpo's to an allied target. Kat would then be able to reposition quickly, and this would open up more options for Kat to use Shunpo defensively rather than offensively.

The last revision is to change her ultimate to give her an incentive to stay in longer by increasing her damage the longer her ultimate is channeled. The scaling ramps up each .25 second she is channeling. The damage will also decrease with the distance the target is away from Kat, so that Kat must get up close to be dealing her maximum damage. This increases counterplay because in order for Kat to burst someone down, she has to be within melee range with her target, a perfect spot for the enemy to CC her. Kat is able to deal massive AOE damage if she is able to stay within range of her enemies and if she is able to time her ultimate correctly to avoid any incoming CC.

2 Comments

N3mO0612/30/2014, 12:15:39 PM2 votes

But.....creating a skillshot with some sort of resouces is difficult!?!?! When you go in and You have the possibility to do an error for a skillshot, this is high risk! The animation of e is away too fast that you can cast w before landing and there isn't the possibility of error or missclick, but just the possibility for the enamy to CC you AS EVERY ASSASSIN CHAMP, but katarina is faster and the time of reaction against her kit, especially after r's buff which does more damage in the first second, are lower than other assassin( thing exclamation mark on rengar ulti or death mark on zed). Then kata has the damage of an assassin, but aoe with no mana, resets and ap scaling like mage..... This things must change, and you have some interesting option, but resets should be removed from all kit, just on e should be maintained

Yoshiaki12/30/2014, 7:22:20 PM2 votes

I think if you remove resets from katarina then you remove Kats core gameplay. If you are playing as Kat or playing against one, you always know that she's very dangerous if she can get one kill off. The part that I'm more concerned about is how easily she can get this one kill off and then immediately ace the entire team by herself. I agree the skills hot for Q seems a little silly but there is almost no risk involved in using it, and no counter against it. Once you get hit by it you can't stand near your teammates because they will be hit too, and you can't stand alone or else Kat will burst you down and you don't have any CC to stop her. My main point is to tone down the assassin part of her kit and make people move towards the AOE part of her.