Commentary of the Katarina change for patch 9.1

Hello, I'm an avid Katarina player and have tremendously enjoyed her rework from release. However, I feel that most of the Katarina mains share an opinion that differs from mine. In fact, from the past months on the Katarina discord, all I would hear were ploys on getting Riot games to rework her. To me, I thought this would be a huge mistake because the new Katarina, despite being harder to play, has a much more enjoyable lane phase than before. This brings me to the purpose of this message. and that is that the changes for patch 9.1 are not the correct changes that should be made for Katarina.

Let's start with what the change is (this is from the leaked 9.1 patch notes copied and pasted) E - Shunpo CAST TIME 0.075 seconds before teleporting and 0.075 seconds after teleporting ⇒ 0.15 seconds after teleporting (Katarina now teleports immediately upon pressing E) BUFFERING Katarina can now buffer Hextech Gunblade's active to fire after Shunpo's cast time completes

At a first glance, this change may not be bad. In fact, how CAN this be bad? This allows Katarina players more time to dodge stinky skillshots such as Q, E, and my favorite to dodge, R. There's no way this change can hurt Katarina mains, right??? But it does, and here is how.

Katarina's bouncing blades and preparation (Q and W, respectively.) spawn extremely sharp daggers that fly up in the air for a certain amount of time before falling. Once they touch the ground, Katarina can pick them up to deal an area of effect damage that also reduces her Shunpo cooldown by a good percentage. So what does this have to do with the new changes coming up? Remember that .075 second delay before jumping? Well, as it turns out if you throw your dagger up in the air and time it just right with it falling you can actually cast your Shunpo before it touches the ground, catch the dagger reducing the cooldown of Shunpo, then jumping to the targetted area. This mechanic is what I call the "dagger trick" and have referred to it multiple times while talking in the discord.

But what's so good about this dagger trick? Is it only a trick. or does it have any practical use whatsoever? As it turns out, it has many uses. Proper use of this trick allows you to quickly jump twice to your opponent which means that you can follow their without actually needing to use your own in the process. It also allows you to juke multiple times within the minion wave, and go in for a quick trade. If this is so good, then why would you ever want to get rid of such a beautiful change? More importantly, why do very few Katarina mains even consider using this trick in the first place? The answer is simple. This dagger trick is really, really, precise. While proper use of this trick does indeed look crazy and your opponent wonders how you teleported twice, the trick has a .075 second window to perform correctly. This trick is among the hardest tricks in the game to do on a consistent basis. This trick has 4.5 frames (60 frames in a second, so each frame is 0.166 repeating seconds) of leniency. The only more difficult trick I've ever performed was for with her R Q R combo. (WARNING: do not try this trick unless you want to get frustrated. In 45 minutes of sheer practicing, I only managed to get it about 5 times. It is the hardest trick in the game, and any main that has mastered the trick said themselves that the trick is not worth it to learn for how inconsistent it feels) And if you miss the trick? You not only don't get another Shunpo to use, but you also have wasted one of your pointy daggers for no reason. It feels really bad to miss.

Dagger trick aside, what if I said that this wasn't the issue at all? What if I said that there was an even bigger issue that has went completely ignored this whole time, and it's not a problem for dodging stinky R's with 's Shunpo, but for dodging stinky R's with ANYONE in the game. You want to know this issue that has been causing some of us to not be able to be quick enough to dodge certain skill shots and have been holding us back this whole time? Well, the answer is ping. How can this be the reason? Well, normally in league of legends you constantly put inputs in, and after the time of your ping the action goes through. This is more felt if you get a big spike (from 50 ping to 200 ping) randomly for a short bit during your game. A fair amount of skill shots in this game have a certain amount of time before going through, or a cast time. This cast time allows for the enemy to have time to react to it and give them an oppertunity to move out of the way so they don't get hit by it. However, some skill shots are not telegraphed like the R. Dodging this requires you to react as soon as he is moving at a super fast speed to you in order to dodge it successfully, or you can it. Now for the math behind the big rocks ultimate. Assuming he does it at maximum range (1000) if he moves at a speed of 1835 + bonus movement speed (we'll assume he has tier 2 boots such as ninja tabi's or mercury's trads) giving him at least 1880 movement speed on big, bad, ultimate. This gives you about 0.5319 seconds to dodge it... but we have a problem. This time doesn't account for ping, so really you have to subtract whatever your ping is (I'll use 70 since that's what https://www.quora.com/Why-do-NA-players-play-so-smoothly-with-high-pings used) so this brings it down to .4619 seconds. still pretty good. But we're still forgetting the Shunpo startup, so that's another .075 seconds bringing it down to a final .3869 seconds. The average human reaction time is roughly .25 seconds, so on average, we can dodge a 1000 range ult, hooray! But we have a problem, what if the big rock had a sneaky plan to then ult.

has a 400 range, so subtract 400 from 1000 to get a 600 range ult. Again we'll use 1880 movement on the ult to get .319 seconds which is still higher than .25, but now we have to factor ping. If we factor .070 seconds as average ping we now have .249 seconds to react to the ultimate. This is exactly the average reaction time (if we use two significant figures) which gives us time to out of it... but what if we used our Shunpo? Currently, we still have to factor in the .075 seconds in, which gives us .1741 seconds to react to the ult, and this is a problem. Katarina players cannot Shunpo since we simply do not have enough time with the amount of time given. Thank goodness for the change in 9.1... But then we lost the dagger trick. We don't want to lose such a high-risk high reward trick... and as it turns out, we don't have to. We are focused on whether or not we can do it with ping that we don't consider whether we could with lower ping. In Korea, they mostly have sub 10 ping (I'll put their ping as 9 for the calculation) which means that they get back .061 seconds bringing the time to .2351 seconds. This sounds much more possible to do, but we can't all have low ping such as the KR region. So the problem with the Shunpo isn't just the delay, but also the ping that we have too. This means that if we have lower ping, then our problem for Shunpo isn't as big of an issue.

But there is a problem here, Riot has already lowered the ping tremendously over the past couple of years, and I'm optimistic that they will find ways to lower it even more in the future, but we can't just have that change in by 9.1 saving our precious Shunpo delay, and this sucks. I'll miss doing the dagger trick. It was something, while not always used, always made me feel accomplished when I secured a kill using it. It's one of the most rewarding tricks I've ever done successfully in the game, and it's really sad to make it leave for the sake of being more agile... But what if it doesn't have to leave? What if we can do both, lower the delay, and keep the dagger trick? As it turns out, it is possible, what if we set the delay to roughly a .0166 second delay. (Does that number look familiar?) This delay would make the previous flash ult dodge time to react from .1741 to a new, beautiful .2325. Hooray, it is now possible to dodge the ult with Shunpo while still using the dagger trick (although the dagger trick now has a one frame window, but still possible to do nevertheless.)

TL;DR (if you don't want to read all the content that I made, here is the conclusion) The whole point of the post is to make one last plead to not remove all of the delay, but lower it to .0166 seconds to still be able to use the dagger trick. Any Katarina main that uses the trick would greatly appreciate it while the rest of the Katarina players will be happy that their Shunpo feels a lot faster in comparison. I would be more than happy to hear other suggestions down below from the rest of the community, and I hope that one of my favorite tricks in the game remains for a long time. Goodbye!