My Thoughts on Katarina's Rework
Hello. I'm FLASH SHUNPO. I wanted to give my opinion on the upcoming Katarina rework. I'm very timid about it. I've been playing since early season 2, and I think I'm pretty good at league of legends. The best out of my real life friends, although that's not saying much. I'm able to achieve the ranks I have with insane win rates in a very small amount of games relative to the average player. I haven't gone further because I don't like playing this game enough to consistently have fun being that competitive with it. I assume, although I don't know, that Katarina is responsible for my relative success. I feel like I'm very talented at the elements of the game Katarina is great at. I'm able to outplay junglers as they gank me using ward shunpo excellently, as I'm very disciplined with not using shunpo in lane. I can get most cs even against aggressive lane opponents by using the very edge of my w, avoiding even autoattacks. I fear this new Katarina won't be Katarina, but a very different champion that requires entirely different skills to play. I hope to provide my opinion on the changes they're proposing probably without offering any better alternatives because I'm not a game designer.
I thought Kat was in a pretty good spot. I can see wanting to change her lane phase but it provided a unique gameplay experience where you were this very fragile thing that was easy to intimidate and push back but in return you nicked them every once in a while until their health bar was low enough that you could kill them in 0.02 seconds. It created an environment where the enemy had to remain vigilant every moment in pushing the lane and keeping you from csing when the situation was otherwise very boring. Enemies often get distracted or lulled into a Katarina-induced trance-like state and let you cs despite knowing they can push you off the wave and that you were at the moment not a threat to them. Because of this I used almost all scaling runes and embraced my weaker early game state. Every second that went by increased my odds of winning.
Onto the idea of "tank kat" being the only way to play her at the moment. For a lot of games, I agree with that. First picking Katarina often results in enemy team compositions littered with cc and tanks. It's in these situations that you have to go tank Kat. Seldomly, if you're doing really well, or you're against an "easy to kill" enemy team (no kindred...), you could easily go burst kat and see a lot of success. I don't know where I stand on this. I love both playstyles. I loved how every dagger increased my chances of winning the teamfight when I played my "poketank kat" with liandries, rylai's, and luden's. I also enjoy evaporating people during an opportune moment using my patented flash->shunpo.
I don't know how they can suggest there's no counterplay against Kat. More and more champions are being released that have perfect counters to instantaneous death, Kindred being the most offensive example. I haven't had much opportunity to playtest this complaint, but I'd assume Kled's invulnerability upon losing mount is above and beyond what's necessary to counter Katarina.
Through the years it feels like it's been a rollercoaster that only goes down when it comes to Katarina. She's sustained many, many nerfs over the years. 3 second passive duration nerf, consecutive bouncing blade damage reductions, hell, even her 1st rework was a nerf in many a way. A lot of people would disagree with the bit about the 1st rework, but as much as Riot says AoE is something inherent to Katarina, it wasn't always that way. Real Katarina players aren't really going for the AoE all that much. More often, we're trying to take a squishy target out to instantly change how a fight looks and then apply our damage to whoever is closest after that. In that case, single target damage is what matters. A lot of Katarina's nerfs have been subtly geared toward reducing that single target damage, because that's what's really broken here. Single target damage is what is difficult to counterplay against, not the AoE. That's why everyone who doesn't know how to play Kat will tell you "Kat is useless if someone CCs her while she's ulting". Ult is way more important now than it used to be, and it's STILL not the most important part of her kit. Old Kat had 2 sources of damage besides her ult and they were both massive single target nukes. She's come a long way, into the nerf pit.
Unconditionally, w and e have to remain 100% instant cast. That's the 1 thing I'll put forward as a game design suggestion. Katarina would lose her fluidity and feel like a cinderblock if you took that away from her. Take my ward shunpo, that's fine, I'll likely find a way to do work without it. If you took away the instants I wouldn't even WANT to find a way to work with it because the champ wouldn't be fun anymore.
Ok now I'll address the supposed changes directly.
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Changes to her passive - I suspect this may be where they add the additional shunpo resets. I hope she retains her current passive, and it sounds like she will from what riot is suggesting.
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Changes to bouncing blade - I kind of laughed when I saw that they indeed were reworking this ability. I think we can expect it to get significantly higher damage in light of the many other nerfs she's supposedly facing. Assuming she continues to use no resource, maybe this ability will only hit 3 targets and have a shorter cooldown since they want kat to be viable in lane. As long as it has the same range I'm fine with whatever they do to my primary nuke.
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Changes to sinister steel - CSing with this used to be really important to Katarina's kit, but if she can hold her own in lane now we may see it fall on the backburner for csing and be relegated to a shunpo resetting tool. The only other thing kat does is auto and that's boring so I figure this will be what's necessary to hit a champion with to reset shunpo. Keep it instant please.
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Changes to shunpo - RIP ward shunpo 2016 RIP In all seriousness, I guess I'll have to show some restraint when I don't know where the enemy jungler is now. To be even more honest than that though, my intent is to find a way to constantly 1v2 the laner and jungler with Katarina's new found laning prowess if she's still playable. To get rid of ward shunpo is a really serious thing, because it was basically the only thing keeping Katarina safe in a game with champions significantly more overpowered than her in what I call "the neutral game" (I play melee). This means they'll have to significantly buff Katarina in many categories to keep her up to par, and this is why I expect such a radical buff on the q in particular. They think they're justifying it with the explanation that shunpo will have additional resets, but ward shunpo was far more potent than any exclusively offensive buff. It could be used for offense or defense on a whim. It could go over walls with nothing on the other side. It could bring you into a forward bush without the enemy ever seeing you go from the 1st bush to the second. It WAS overpowered. I'm sad to see it go, but it probably should have. Honestly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Most of the time if I see anything remotely threatening I just ward shunpo back and because I don't have to do it very often it's there 90% of the time even if the jungler is really camping me. On a side note, this WILL mean Katarina is camped 100% of games by junglers if she remains as volatile as she is. PLEEEEEEASSEEE KEEP THIS INSTANT IT'S THE ONLY THING KEEPING ME PLAYING YOUR GAME.
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Changes to Death Lotus - They've done whatever with this ability in the past and none of it has really made a difference. Hope it doesn't lose it's stealth detection. Mortal wounds is pretty cool but really only super situationally so I won't be that sad to see it go. It would certainly make me more scared of Dr.Mundo. Again though, if you're gonna remove mortal wounds AND ward shunpo, I'm expecting some pretty serious buffs to her NUMBERS. I wanna see q actually hurting people in the early game or something.
Other little tidbits:
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Don't change her autoattack animation c'maaaan
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Riot Ezreal, if you happen to be listening for some reason, at PAX east in Boston I came up to you and asked for a mid lanyard. You suckered me into a conversation about how I thought the game was in order to attain it. We briefly discussed spell vamp on Katarina. I hold to my opinion that it was the coolest rendition of Kat when gunblade was (very) viable on her. If you could somehow find a way to squeeeeeeze in gunblade viability again I would be forever grateful and it would make up for the 3 years where you've done nothing to comply with my demands.
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Hourglass is extremely overrated since the changes to it. The active is nice but Kat's meaningful cooldowns are often longer than it so unless you're tank kat it's simply a chance to allow someone to die to get your resets, but the 3 second duration on your passive means even that's less effective. 10% CDR is near useless on Katarina unless you're playing that weird 45% CDR Kat that's objectively not as good as other forms of Kat. Armor is only meaningful if you have the base health to support it aka tank katarina. The only thing it's useful for on live is dealing with Zed who should be able to put you in the dirt before you ever had enough gold to buy the item (I ban Zed every game I can).
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Abyssal. I always resisted abyssal much like I once resisted Rylais. Of course it's good, the MR is often huge against certain enemy team compositions. However, I don't think this should ever be purchased as a 1st item. Doing so is like admitting defeat, it's like saying "I'm not effective enough with my champion to buy the more effective item with her and must spend gold on defense because I'm scared of you". I know many of you hold a different opinion and consider this just playing safe, but playing exclusively Kat does things to your brain that make you want to make the most out of every point of damage.
Anyway, for the seldom few who make it here, thank you for reading. I know, you probably hate my opinions, I'm not very well liked when I type on the internet but I had to support my favorite champion in her time of need. If you think Kat is toxic and needs to be either nerfed out of the game or turned into something else entirely, power to you. She probably does, as I've been able to achieve more success than many players probably better than me using an entirely different skill set that otherwise isn't present in league of legends. It's almost like I've been playing a whole different game. If you support me, I encourage you to post your own sob story about how much Katarina means to you and why you don't want ward shunpo to be removed. I might not play until the rework, I'm just so bad at saying goodbye.
I'll miss you, Katarina that wasn't as good as pre-rework1 Katarina.
TLDR: I'm a little scared about the changes to Kat, but I'm hopeful Riot can find a way to make it work that isn't nerfing the damage on her q for the 20th time.
