Let's talk about Karthus.

As a recent Karthus main, I feel like he's slowly losing power both as a mage mid and the game overall. I know that he's such a bursty champion right now and he's not really in this meta, but the terminology of ** low mobility mages** has gotten to the point that I feel like Karthus is one of the only champions that falls into this category right now. For example, let's look at some champions that are considered low mobility mages:

If you don't see the trend here, all of these champions have one thing in particular: a small, **hard **crowd control to allow them a chance to escape. Karthus does not have any hard CC and therefore is probably the easiest mage to camp. I have been camped by Vi and Lee Sins (and basically any high mobility ganker like and so on [assuming that you burnt flash from getting camped]).

Another point to bring up is his only source of crowd control spell-wise: Wall of Pain. This ability has been Karthus's bread and butter ability, alongside with his Q, Lay Waste. The slow, however, has been altered (buff/nerf/bug fixes) numerous times. Look back at when Karthus used to have an 80% slow on his wall. The nerf on June 26th of the year 2009 states, "Slow reduced to 40 / 50 / 60 / 70 / 80% from 80 at all ranks" Going back to the argument I made earlier about how Karthus is extremely easy to gank, not only does this hurt his early game, his slow is only viable late game.

Don't get me wrong; his wall is very useful. Since his wall now has a 50% reduction after 1 second of being slowed and decays over 4 seconds, the wall's use at level 1 seems useless. 50% of 40 is 20, and 20 divided by the 4 seconds is 5% decay every second after the initial 1 second of the 40%. Since Q has a 1 second cooldown and a .5 cast delay, this means that** Karthus can land roughly about 2-3 Qs while the slow is up. ** That seems good on paper, and the 15% magic resist reduction is a really good debuff for such a bursty champion.

But sadly, high mobility is overflowing the meta. This assassin update has given Edge of Night () to assassins and Redemption () to supports, the only heal item in the game. (excluding potions). Even for late game, Karthus sometimes has struggles getting his damage on people. Not to mention the Rylai's nerf that basically made Karthus seem like a good champion is getting a flat slow rate. Karthus is starting to get countered by items that give people shields or health.

A solution that I propose is that people inside the wall has the grounding effect (i.e W) I feel like this would make Karthus have a slightly better laning phase and a smoother counterplay against assassins overall.