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Katarina overpowered - ...but not for me...

Xanaxine··5 votes·1,045 views

Hey All,

I am pretty new to LoL. I am now lvl 16, and I have mained Katarina for now. I have read many many things on how to play her well on a lot of different websites.

I often read that she is "best" and can get pentakill so (too?) easily... I watched a lot of videos of pros and less pros murdering everyone with her...

Well, I can't... and I just don't understand why... Don't get me wrong, I don't really fail completely... I can always manage to end a game with more kills than deaths. But I can't seem to deal as much dmg as what I see in videos.

I see Kats on youtube literally diving into team fights where all enemies are full life, and getting away undamaged with a quadrakill or even pentakill... If I dive in a team fight, I get slaughtered in 2 secs without killing anyone!

The q-e-w combo doesn't do that much dmg... at best, 20% of an opponent's life of the same level as me, and her Ult gets interrupted immediately, or most of the times, I just die during the channeling.

I follow the builds recommended, and I usually manage to get a decent level (above my opponents) and good gold and items when I mid her, but I just don't feel that she's as effective as the whole internet claims her to be.

Any other Kat players feel the same?

Some input form Kat players who disagree with me would be appreciated! cheers all!

Xan

10 Comments

HyperSMB4 votes

I don't play Kat but I have played against enough to know how she works.

Pentas are never..."easy". No characters outside of some REALLY broken setups (which are often nerfed shortly after) can even attempt to set up their own penta.

People say getting a penta with her is easy because of her reset mechanic. But truth be told, against any reasonable team, it takes fast fingers, a very quick mind and a fair amount of luck to pull one off with her.

Hahahahyena1 votes

people say its easy to get pentas because the players that do get 'easy' pentas make it look easy

Vekkna4 votes

Katarina is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult champs to play in the entire game. Here's why:

  1. Your timing has to be on point. If you go in and don't get a kill, you die.
  2. Your actual button mashing has to be quick and precise, especially with E range and ward-hopping
  3. You have to know the kits of the enemy champions very well to know all the ways they can cockblock you. Quinn cancels your ult with her Vault...seriously
  4. You have to know your power relative to other champs based on kit, items, and level.

Unlike other assassins, she doesn't have tools like escapes, stealth, or crazy single-target assassination damage. She's actually extremely bad at assassinating a single target near full hp, any target ahead of her, any tank or bruiser, or anyone with an MR item. She's just not a good duelist.

Her primary role is to force the enemy team to play around her, and exploiting that to your advantage is a huge part of her skill cap. I have around 120k mastery on her and I'm still awful at it.

What I mean is that she creates this psychological game where the enemy knows they have to save cc for her ult. But if they sit on cc too long in a team fight, they risk losing the fight. So do they use the ccs and risk a runaway Katarina bloodbath, or do they wait and risk a disadvantage in the fight with Kat on cleanup duty? Great Katarina players can watch what's happening, count the ccs, and know what will happen when they jump into the fight. They'll let their team engage and go for an ace when enemies are around 50% or lower. But they also know the moment where waiting longer will lose the fight outright. I suck at that, too.

If you're just starting out with her, you need to be in the mindset that you're a weak champ that becomes very strong with teammates leading the charge. Basic tips:

  1. Poke with Q every time you can also last-hit a minion
  2. Wait for an enemy to use the skill they rank first before poking with EW to proc a mark
  3. Keep an eye on bot lane's HP bars and roam for kills after 6 and after shopping
  4. Don't roam to lanes with full hp enemies unless you know your allies can hard engage for you
  5. Unsuccessful or too-frequent roaming can put you behind in levels, which makes you pretty useless; when in doubt, stay in lane and farm for an xp advantage
  6. Bad Kats tunnel-vision enemy kills; turrets are always the top priority
hh the thinker3 votes

you don't have all the runes and masteries. that's a masive reason it's harder for you. more runes and masteries means more damage.

Der Lindwurm3 votes

People say Katarina can press R to get a pentakill. That alone should tell you something. They might want to actually learn what her abilities really do before saying things like that. If they did, maybe they'd even be able to deal with her a bit more effectively! There are literally dozens of champions that can shut her R down pretty much instantly and many others who can easily dash out of it once they realize that's all they have to do. Kat needs to skirmish with Q, W, and E and save R for when enemies are so low on health that they won't be able to get out of it or shut it down in time. Or for that perfect chance when the whole enemy team is busy dealing with the rest of your team and won't be able to stop you from getting a long channel. But that's pretty rare.

What does enable Kat to pick up a pentakill a bit easier than most is her passive - as soon as you get a kill or assist you can immediately E onto another enemy. If E and then W kills that one, you can instantly do the same to another and then another as long as they're all low enough on health. When that happens, it says more about what an awesome job your team did than how OP Kat is. It does take a little mousework too.

As others have mentioned, Luden's Echo is top priority, though I've been starting Dark Seal lately since it gives some ability power while leaving you with enough gold to buy a refillable potion (and if things go well it's worth upgrading to Mejai's too). I usually also try to build Zhonya's, Abyssal Sceptre, and either sorceror's shoes or boots of swiftness. If the game starts dragging on past 35 minutes, Rabadon's can give you the AP boost to settle things once and for all if you have those other items. Void Staff and Rylai's aren't bad either. Guardian Angel is good for those longer games too.

Vesarixx2 votes

Katarina isn't really OP, people are just salty about playing against her, they do the same thing with Riven, and a ton of other champions on top of that.

Baby Ghoul2 votes

Katarina isn't overpowered, even at lower ELO now. This is actually the first thread I've seen about her in a while.

She used to be very menacing, but now not so much. There used to be an old meme that Katarina players roll their faces on their keyboard and a pentakill happens. Check the date of the videos you're watching and guides you're looking at.

She hasn't been at the head of the meta for quite some time now, but you can still get far playing her. You need to practice though, at level 16 I don't think you should be looking for guides or videos. You're going to learn so much by playing her on your own without outside influences guiding you along and making you second guess yourself.

Another thing is that any type of squishy high burst champion is going to be targeted, so you're going to continue to run into that road block throughout league if you continue playing mages. You can mitigate it somewhat, but it's just a consequence of putting out so much damage. People want to shut you down before you put out that damage.

Dochasach1 votes

Here's Some Help:

Laning Phase:

  • Poke with Q (Go in to proc Q with E if you can)
  • Don't go in on them and ult until they have 50% health or lower
  • Flash and Ignite are good summoner spells on her
  • Combo Is Q E W R

Team Fights:

  • Let your team do damage to the enemies
  • Wait until the enemies are at 75% health to do the Q E W R combo

Items:

  • Get Ludens First item 3285
  • Rabadons Deathcap item 3089
  • Liandrys Torment item 3151 OR Zhonya's item 3157
  • You decide what you build now
Shrek Luigi1 votes

I haven't really invested any time in her since before she was reworked a while back--I took a long break from video games in general--but I'm familiar with both the champion and the position you're in and I might have some advice that could help. On any given champion--in order to do really well--you need to be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses they have, what portion of the game do the peak in strength (late-game? early-game? somewhere in between?), and what their intended role is.

Katarina is an assassin. She does a ton of burst damage and is tuned toward executing squishy champions. Since she scales so well with Ability Power, she generally opts out of high defence in favor of magic penetration and items that steroid her burst damage (item 3151item 3285item 3001item 3020, though the ideal build will vary every game). As a laner, she doesn't have a whole lot to work with, and uses her Q as a crutch against most of the folks she's matched up with--Champions who could otherwise safely harass her with their strong pokes, like XerathVelkozVarusLux. However--once she gets a few of those aforementioned items up, she could rip through any one of those dudes thanks to her powerful skill rotation, and could survive bursts of their own with strategically-bought HP+AP items and proper maneuvering--made greatly-easier thanks to her high mobility. On the flip side, she is fairly weak without her ultimate (which hinders her early game), and is quite risky to go in guns-blazing (proverbially speaking, if you like guns then play a marksman) in the lategame when those intense teamfights start to happen (which impacts her late game negatively).

Looking at that, it is important to piece together--in order to be successful with her--that she is a midgame champion. Katarina, like many other assassin's who don't have the stats early on to cut through enemy champions, are tuned toward the midgame. They carefully control the lane by last-hitting with their auto attacks to keep the waves to their side, or shove it with their skills when they start dying to your tower too often. They get as much gold as they can for the midgame--sometimes getting lucky enough to lock in a few kills thanks to a well placed jungle gank--and use that gold to get those cool AP items as quickly as possible. They make decisions like "Hey, should I use my gap-closing skill to jump on Teemo or should I use it to escape that Hecarim gank?". Once they become built, the answer to that question tends to, more often, be Kill Teemo once your burst damage creeps up and your skill rotation becomes stronger in proportion to what you want to kill. Finally: since you would melt from several sources of damage otherwise, one needs to wait patiently for a good opportunity to unleash their burst damage when the enemy team starts to group--especially on Katarina, whose interuptable Ult is thwarted by even the simplest of Stuns.

League of Legends is like playing a s***load of rock-paper-scissors rounds at the same time. You gotta think about how earlygame-champs beat the tar out of midgame champs in lane, but can't do a damn thing against that champion who scales so well into the later stages of a match. You also gotta thnk about how smart it is to stack a bunch of health to deal with all that burst damage when there's this chick who does %HP damage every few quick ranged-AA's and is wearing item 3153; and maybe getting your earlygame-oriented buddy could give you a hand and screw her lanephase up to delay her getting built up.

So my advice is to learn about these different rock-paper-scissors scenarios on the champ you want to do well with, what snowballing is, keep in mind what you should be doing/when should you be buying what/when to level which skills, and especially what items do what so that you can make the most appropriate buying-choices and not set yourself back. Using the most popular build on Mobafire isn't always the smartest move, even if they are helpful, and it's just as important to hit up the League of Legends champion spotlight--or even experienced streamers--to get familiar with the game's/a champion's mechanics.

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