So I just laned against the new Katarina

ummmm...not impressed. Not surprised. But not impressed at all.

Riot has this reputation of "fixing" or "balancing" things but making them broken as hell in the process.

I was which I know is not the best pick, but Katarina was picked into me and I didn't get a ban either so there was really nothing I could do about that.

At level one I was like "Her blades can only bounce three times now. No longer can she farm entire waves by pressing Q, or poke as much. It feels so nice". I punished her during this phase as much as a level 1 Twisted Fate can. Hitting her with pick a card any chance I could get to hopefully deny her cs, and it was working pretty well. I wasn't doing much damage, but I was out farming her pretty good.

And then the blinks started happening. At first I simply passed if off as a mild nuisance. Then it became a great nuisance. Then it became the most annoying shit on the planet Earth. One slight misclick and she pounced, blinking on to me, dropping a dagger, melee-ing me, blink to next dagger, and an ignite for style points, and she 100-0'ed me.

"Ok" I said to myself. "This definitely isn't good. I have to play defensive now, and stay the f*%k away from her daggers where ever they fall". Using this tatic I once again began to out-farm her and by a pretty significant amount. She was still able to occasionally poke at me though and after pushing a wave I had to back. Time to buy some MR.

And then she roamed bot and scored a double kill. "Holy crap!! The only other enemy in bot lane at the time was which means Kat did all the damage and this was two kills in 3 seconds. How much damage does she have?" I opened the tab menu to see her item list. There, sitting a box affixed with the single number 1, was a , followed by a pair of .

The rest of the game was awash. Despite trying to counter build Katarina simply did way too much damage for me to contest her for long. She was hella cocky too, blinking under turret just to get to me, I would always gold card, and try for the Q, and auto for a thunderlords proc, plus about two or three turret shots...never killed her. She would blink right back out with about half health left.

Don't get me wrong, I can tell just by looking at it that Katarina takes much more skill to play now than she did before, but she still has the problem in that her power spike is not at level 6 like most champs, but at level 3. At this level she can Q for a dagger, W for a dagger, and E all over the place for a ton of damage. Sure I play TF, whose main combo can also be accessed at level 2 or 3, but TF has nowhere near the damage output.