Some Katarina ideas @ricklessabadon

So, I don't really know what your goal was with the last tentative changes that didn't go through (nerf/buff/balance out her combos/...?), but I absolutely hate Katarina with a passion for a couple reasons, and I've got 3 ideas which would balance out my personal frustrations a bit, so I'll share them and maybe they might prove useful to you somehow :) Since I have more room here than on twitter, I went ahead and (ab)used the space to explain my reasoning and detailed my ideas a bit. Apologies if it's too long for your liking, I just wanted to be thorough :)

-Some assassins or reset-reliant champs dash around a lot in a fight to chain kills. The main word is DASH, so you can see the direction they're going (cfr. Kha'Zix leaping) or there's an indication where they can blink back to (Yi's first Q target, Zed's shadows, Leblanc's W sigils). Whenever I play a CC heavy champ I pay very good attention to track their movement and try to disrupt them to save my teammates. Against Kata however, she has a pretty long range instant blink, that has 0 cast time and an instant reset on kill/assist. I've had teamfights where I was losing my mind trying to stick to her and disrupt her, missing all my CC or having trouble targeting her because she can blink like 4 times in 1.5 second. What I think might be a good idea to allow some counterplay to this, is that her passive resets her abilities to like a 0.5 second cooldown, rather than flat 0. This gives very brief windows of opportunity to catch her, but its not too punishing so she still maintains a lot of mobility. This might maker her too easy to catch though, but maybe you can increase late game shunpo's damage reduction/duration a bit to counter this. -She sometimes has a deceptive amount of burst, so a really good Kat could be able to nuke a squishy and get out safe, or basically initiate certain fights on her own (note I said certain, not saying she could do it every time). I remember this also being an issue when Bruiser Kha'Zix was the meta right before his nerfs. Combining the fact she has resets as well, she can output some pretty obscene damage sometimes. So instead, why not make her passive something like Yasuo E. Nerf all her damage to about 75% from live, and when she gets a reset with her passive, she gets a temporary 25% damage increase, up to 2 stacks for a total of 112,5% damage compared to live. This emphasizes the need for resets and makes her more potent when she gets them. Since the cap is only 2 she gets a good amount of value quick quickly, instead of having to Penta before she'll actually do some damage. This will make her 1v1 and laning a lot weaker though, so maybe buff her low lvl base damages quite a bit (and make her AP/AD scaling scale per ability lvl to balance things out a bit or something), and her ult can have increased single target damage when nobody else is around? (maybe somewhere between ~133-150% to 1 person?) -Finally, following my previous point. With Kat having such deceptive burst sometimes, wouldn't it be better if her ult had some 'ramping up' time? It does sooo much total damage late game, that I see a lot of Katarinas just ult for a split second after which they just start shunpo'ing all over the place. I'd suggest the ult having slightly reduced damage on cast, and the first 1 or 1.5 seconds of the channel the damage ramps up, so the rest of the channel she'll do the actual max dps. Maybe even increase the range during the ramping up so she'll still be able to hit people trying to run away when she first casts it. This takes away its usefulness as a burst ability but maintains the AoE DoT, forcing her to ult a bit longer to gain the most effect from it, instead of doing a decent amount of damage in a splitsecond and just abandoning it when the resets hit.

I'm not a Kat player, I don't even play Ranked (yet?), but I just had these instantaneous ideas at some point and figured they were worth mentioning. I tried being objective, not nerfing the shite out of her but keeping Kat players still somewhat pleased and not super pissed at my suggestions. They're not perfect, but then again nothing is. I'll leave the *actual * balancing to the pros like you ;) Please let me know your thoughts, would be much appreciated :)

Kind regards, skipPeRTh3Reaper