The Curious Case of Karma's Tether
Hi there, it's another thread from me. This time we are looking at Karma's tether; the weird parts about it, the missconceptions, the old tether version and design elements of the current one. Skip to any part that you find interesting (or the whole thread, if you don't care, lol).
MISSCONCEPTIONS
Let's start with the weirder things.
TETHER DEALS DAMAGE IN 0.66 INTERVALS No, it doesn't. The tether lasts for 2.0s. It deals its damage 3 times; upon forming and upon rooting - at the same time RW grants the heals - and once in between. With 0.66 intervals it would deal its damage 4 times; 0.00, 0.66, 1.33, 2.00. I think the missconception arose when people calculated the casting time of 0.5s into the duration and tried to make sense of it hitting 3 times. And then typed it into the wikia. And now everyone just believes it without checking <sigh>.
KARMAS CAN INSTANTLY HEAL FOR 20% This is not quite true. W does have a casttime of around 0.5s. In addition to requiring double the buttons pressed than normal abilities. It will also consume the mantra and NOT heal you, if the target leaves the area or dies within the casting animation (or you do, lol). IF the tether formed, however, the second heal will also go off, if the target dies. Just so you know.
KARMA HAS THE BEST ROOT IN THE GAME Erm, that depends on how you define "best". It is the slowest root in the game, taking ~2.5 seconds to apply, making it hit a lot later than even the sister ability from LeBlanc, who takes 1.5s + traveltime. It's also not even the longest root for the majority of the game. At lvl1, Karma can root for 1s (1.5s with Mantra). Lux and Morgana offer 2s. But even when leveling, Karma takes quite some time to outdo all others. Until lvl16, to be precise. This is the point she can put 4points in her Mantra for a potential +1.25s bonus root duration, finally beating Morgana by 0.25seconds, provided she didn't level W last.... which most Karmas do. But at that point standing next to an enemy as a squishy mage for 2.5s seems sometimes harder to pull off than hitting a skillshot. Bottom line is; while Karma's root sure is nothing to shrug off easily, it's imbedded in so many conditions, that it just fails at delivering what 3.25 seconds of root seem to promise.
OLD TETHER
The full values can still be found on the wiki under "Previous Abilities". The old spotlight is still on youtube.
COST: 65 - 115 // COOLDOWN: 15 - 10 MAGIC DAMAGE: 80 - 305 (+ 70% AP) MOVEMENT SPEED MODIFIER: 10 - 20% / 20-40% DURATION: 5s (anchor) / 3s(touch)
TOXIC SLOW The old tether was a weird ability. It was one of the most verstile and creative abilities that existed in the League back then. It could be used to speed up, slow, clear waves, trade... It was both offensive and defensive. And the values were quite.... broken? A point-and-click ability that could slow someone for 40% for 5 (!) whole seconds. With max CDR this would be on a 5.5s cooldown, so you could easily slow someone for 10seconds with no counterplay.... well, "getting out of range" would be the counterplay, but this is what the tether prevented in the first place. There is no way this ability would make it by today's design standards.
UNMATCHED CREATIVITY But it also did some funny things; it could be cast on wards or Jarvan's flag , allowing for some surprising damage (the damage only applied upon touching it, not if it was cast on you). So this was one of the fairest damage abilities, that had a lot of creativity to it and allowed for some suprising outplays, which counteracted the fact, that none of her other abilities had any mechanical skill attached to them. The teamplay potential was only matched by recent abilities, like Kalistas' ultimate, in that it became incredibly strong, if your ally and you would.... get each other ;). And last fun point; tethering a minion to get back to lane felt like casually walking your dog. At least to me.
WHAT ABOUT TWITCH? There was another easily forgotten interaction, that is very different to today; Karma's tether broke if the target went invisible. I assume this was done to prevent giving away the location of an ally Twitch, for example, or having a weird animation, if the the ENEMY twitch tried to stealth.
DESIGN PROBLEMS
STEALTH AND ALLY FUNCTIONS Let's stay with the "invisibility" idea for a while. Some people requested that New Karma's W should have an ally function too, because the current one is boring. I'd love to see this, but people usually don't consider the invisibility tether problem. You either break the tether, let the tether become invisible (to the enemies) or let it... reveal the tethered ally? All solutions seem kind of awkward and non-intuitive.
But let's talk about what the ability currently does!
GOOD THINGS Karma was reworked in a time where there was a huge shift in design towards counterplay. Abilities shouldn't only be engaging for the user, but also for the person used upon. At least some way of mitigating damage or effects made exchanges more dynamic and fair. Additionally, abilities were now meant to be not only thematically fitting, but should also interact with each other, either passively or actively (think Yasuo Q+E or Soraka Q+W, etc).
Karma's new W did both of these things; it introduced decent CC into the kit that could be worked around. Since Karma's slow was moved to Q, her W wouldn't prevent the counterplay to itself. Additionally the new W interacted with your shield in that you could ensure hitting W by using your E's movementspeed.... at the cost of losing your defensive cooldown. And finally, RQ offered a way of capitalizing on the new root, which wouldn't have had any syndergy on Old Karma.
BAD THINGS New W did a few weird things though. The bad kind of weird. It is a spell that rewards you for being up close, which makes very little sense on a squishy poke mage, which the rest of her kit tries to tell you. It not only confuses Karma on to what to buy, but also the enemy on where to stand. If you stand far away, you get easily poked, if you get close, you get easily rooted. Where are Karma's weakspots?
Adding to this confusion are the stats on RW. It's a pure missing%hp heal, scaling VERY well with defenses. However, with a delay of a little over 0.5s and the usually very squishy buildpath of Karma, this heal becomes missguidingly unreliable. Without any %health damage or true damage or sustained damage, Karma can't really afford to build tanky either, Especially since her base stats make her fall pretty quickly when CC'ed....
https://blog.sysomos.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/weight-loss-coffee.jpg
W makes for a really weird balance; it is really unreliable against champions with dashes or blinks, while being rather oppressive against immobile champions; having a built in speedup makes escaping from this ability feel really awkward. The counterplay part also falls a bit flat; escaping from a Karma tether doesn't feel great or rewarding, while hitting it doesn't feel good either. It's always this "should've happened anyways" feeling, since it requires very little skill from both parties and is mostly dependent on the setup.
In terms of design, this ability is also really.... boring. Especially compared to its predecessor. While the old W had a dozen of ways to be applied creatively and was mostly only limited by your imagination, this one just.... a one-way-street; E enables W which enables RQ. Ironically instead of representing the binding of souls, like it used to, it represents binding two abilities to a very simple combo, while being rather low impact by itself.
A short note on the changes of 5.10: In this patch Karma's tether lost its 60-300 +60%AP bonus damage for the increased root duration 0.5-1.25; this shifted the power of this spell from "for 2s" to "before and after 2s". This is one of the reasons, why the casting time on W suddenly feels so bad, because it's too unresponsive. It's not fast enough to make for a good bait-only spell, and the root takes for waaaay too long and is too unreliable. Or put enother way; You only feel the impact after cast time (0.5s), tether (2s) and root (1-2s). The bonus effect only becomes apparent after 3.5-4.5 seconds. Also leveling this ability at lvl 6 is very unimpressive. You used to get double the bonus damage at lvl6, and now you go from 0.5s bonus root to 0.75. Ugh. And lastly, this introduced the old problem; what the hell does Karma use the extra root for? If your mantra'd Q is the only thing in the kit that can use a root, why spend your mantra on the root?
And a last note on the visual appartment; Karma's RW is problematic, because it doesn't visually provide enough clues. This was one of the reasons, why you could sneak in the enormous RW damage, because the tether doesn't look different enough and the damage was a DoT. The problem still stands today, though. The visuals of this should really be looked at. People should visually realize that they are about to get hit by a 3.25s root
FINAL NOTES
As you can see, there are quite a lot of problems in this spell. I know we can not expect any major changes on Karma in the upcoming mage update, but maybe some small changes are thinkable:
- Reduce or remove the casttime of W
- If the casttime stays, at least restore some CD on W and R if the ability is cancelled during the animation.
- Reduce the missing%hp heal and add a flat amount.
- Give it an ally function, at least in the RW version.
- Make Karma's RW visually more distinct from W.
Other things on my wishlist, that I deem unrealistic tho:
- Remove the weird bonus root or give Karma a reason in her kit to want to hit it.
- Do something interesting with Karma's passive
- Add something unique to her kit, like %slow resistance to her E.
- Add a haste animation, when above a certain speed.
Anyways, thanks for reading. Add any thoughts that you like :)!
here I found a reason to want to hit a bonus root.
gets buffed that would be true. It's kind of weak right now.
