A Letter to Riot - Katarina

Dear Riot,

Let me preface this letter (incoming wall of text) by saying that I am not an expert on your game, nor do I claim to be. I rank mid gold every season so I'm not a professional player. I am however a player who since this game went into beta and Katarina was made available have loved the champion and have played her through highs and lows all the same. I have roughly 1000+ games as her and would like to have another 1000+ in the future.

With that said, let me address my concerns. A few weeks ago a tweet went out with "tentative" balance changes for Katarina. Since then there was a massive feedback freakout by the community including prominent Katarina players (TiensiNoAkuma included). Since then another tweet came out saying they were scrapping that approach to her. As a lover of Katarina I am thoroughly thankful for this.

But the events of the past couple weeks have brought to center stage the problem that is balancing Katarina. She is one of (if not the most) snowballing champions in the game. As such she lends very strongly to "pub stomping" at low ranking games (due to player skill (or lack of), reaction times, game knowledge, etc.) however, as you get higher rankings she becomes exponentially harder to play at a competitive level. I can think of less than 5 players that are Master/Challenger rank that consistently play Katarina and do well with her. Having watched them any time I see them in a featured game to spectate or stream, there is a number of things that you can do at a lower level of play that you would never do at a higher level of play due to the same reasons listed earlier.

So how do you balance her without changing the feel of this amazingly entertaining champion? Her core power comes from her passive. The ability to reset cooldowns is not unique to her, but having it reset ALL of her basic abilites AND affect her ultimate is. This gives her great risk/reward chances, punishing you if you go in too early but giving you amazing rewards if you go in at the right time. Right now her power is very ultimate centric. If your ultimate is up you can do some serious damage. If it's not, you feel near worthless. With the removal of the DFG this feeling is exacerbated. In a more recent change, the cooldown on her rank 1 ultimate was significantly increased to reduce her early game ability to roam and making you choose much more carefully when to use your ultimate. Are you going to roam? Better not use it to harass your lane opponent out of lane before you go.

One of the thoughts that came through my mind when I was trying to understand why the tentative changes (and that approach to balancing her) was being considered was this: Why is she so powerful at low levels and not at higher levels? I feel a lot of it is still centered around her ultimate. At lower levels of play people do not have the reaction time or mechanical skill to really react to or the game knowledge to predict when Katarina is going to ultimate. As such she becomes a one-button-win champion where you literally spin-to-win and snowball out of control. At higher levels this is less prominent and individual player farm (and thus gold income) is also much higher so getting "fed out of your mind" is much less prominent.

My idea for a possible solution to this would be to make her base abilities more reliable as far as where your damage comes from and make her less ultimate reliant. By moving some of the base damage from her ultimate (mostly rank 2 and 3, rank one feels great) to her other abilities (possibly just her Q and W) while keeping (or slightly lowering) the scaling on her ultimate would give her more consistent damage and a more consistent threat from her rather than a "Is her ultimate up? No? Ignore? Yes? Focus all attention on her!" approach. While this can cause some cool team play, it's very one dimensional and not very interesting. By having her have a more consistent threat even if her ultimate is on cooldown she becomes more than an "ult-bot" that you just assume if she comes in that her ult is up and you need to be ready to interrupt it at all costs. With the power shift from her ultimate to her basic abilities though, she will again become a lane bully that scales amazingly into late game (though at high risk in late game fights). One of the balances that could be done to help with this is by changing her passive to only reduce the cooldown of her ultimate by (10sec, X%, not at all?) so that it falls more in line with other assassins as far as how long the cooldown on her ultimate is. You'll be rewarded for using a smart ultimate and not just spamming it and having it be "literally always up."

I've noticed a trend in more recent seasons to a shift away from having a dynamic of strong early game champions that fall off to making every champion weak in early game and scale well into late game. And while this does help prevent games snowballing out of control into one team's favor, it also makes for a rather slow and monotonous early game. By changing her in a manor like I described above it would shift her back to an early game lane bully that excels in mid game and scales decently into late game but is really only effective near the end of the game if she makes smart plays, but with threat that comes from more than a single ability. Obviously I'm not providing numbers or doing math to give you exact numbers of how to balance her, but this would keep her plalystyle and feel that so many people love the same but would allow for a more even curve of her dominance of lower level games to her significant decline at higher levels. (I feel a few assassins could benefit from this style of change, giving them a stronger early game but a stronger fall off late game).

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and I hope that this gives some inspiration to someone to keep her play style as it is but just adjust where some of her power comes from.

Sincerely, A Katarina Player and League of Legends fan

TL;DR: Shift power from her ultimate to her basic abilities, make her passive have less (or no) effect on her ultimate. Gives her a flatter power curve and should allow her to have some presence at higher level play while making her less of a one-button "no skill" champion at low level play.