The problems I have with Katarina's rework
Now I've been seeing vastly differing opinions regarding Katarina's rework, some people are saying it's brilliant and absolutely flawless, others are saying it's utterly terrible. Unfortunately I am in the latter camp, which saddens me because I really really want to like her new kit, truly I do but there's just some serious intrinsic problems to it. So allow me to qualify my position and share my thoughts (some of this is taken from a thread response, so if it seems familiar it's likely you read it).
The biggest issue I have with it is all the waiting around you have to do, it utterly pile-drives her pacing.
For a champion who is supposed to zip around a fight and remain highly mobile to avoid getting locked down & killed, waiting around for daggers to land is agonisingly slow. Yes it's only 1.25 seconds, but when the faecal matter is propelled towards the rotating blade assembly, that 1.25 seconds kills any sense of pace or speed to playing Kat. Which, given those daggers and picking them up is your main source of damage outside of your (easily interruptible) ultimate, that's a big deal.
Yes her kit is healthier by design, but it also feels simultaneously shat on. Playing against Katarina is surely going to be a far less aggravating time, but playing as Katarina is considerably less fun even when I do manage the perfect chain-killing combo.
This isn't even considering that the daggers are unreliable. They land behind your target yes, but they land behind your target relative to where the two of you were when you threw the dagger. And fights tend to move around a lot, so your chances of even a decent dagger placement are further hindered. Many times in the last few days I have been screwed over by how unreliable dagger placement is. Sometimes it will land on the opposite side of a freaking wall, so what good is that? Sometimes it lands so far away from my target that the spin doesn't hit them. But most of the time by my target simply moves...then what am I supposed to do? I can't jump on them because I'll miss a huge portion of my damage by not picking up the dagger that's like, way over there. I can't use preparations to drop another one because that again takes an agonising 1 and a quarter seconds to land, by which point they're already out of range or worse yet, have killed me!
The whole concept of picking up daggers to deal a sizeable chunk of your non-ult damage is predicated on your victims not moving, and nobody stands still in a fight! Now I know somebody will rebut that with "Why not go with someone who has CC?", well by the time I'm around teammates with CC I'm also highly likely to be accompanied by people who can get off damage faster than me (especially if it's an ADCarry). And given how much damage ADCs can do it's not uncommon that, in that 1.25 seconds I have to wait for my fucking dagger to land my ADC has already fired off three shots each of which have quartered my intended target's HP, leaving them with only a single quarter of their HP left so by that point I might as well not bother because my ADC is about to pick up the kill. Which leads me to wonder why you'd bother picking Katarina in the first place when you can just play a control mage who can get out the same (if not more) damage, quicker, and who have their own CC....
The waiting completely destroys how Katarina is supposed to operate. Historically you'd fire off your abilities, kill someone, get resets and continue immediately. Now however you fire off your abilities, (hope to) kill someone, get resets but instead of immediately continuing you have to wait....and wait, for your dagger to land before you can carry on. Meanwhile the fight is moving about so your dagger might not even land somewhere decent so you'll miss a lot of your damage. It just totally kills the pace of playing the red headed assassin by actively handicapping your ability to utilise your passive for what it was made to do! Be a core part of your kit to get resets to chain kill like a motherfucker! But you can't do that now due to having to.................wait.
Of course this is just my opinion. If she works for you then....fantastic. I'm glad someone is happy with playing a champion slowly, that's supposed to be fast paced. If someone wants to give me a rebuttal then go for it, I'd like to be convinced otherwise but I doubt time and repeated sessions will warm me up to the changes. Which is a true shame because when I heard Katarina was getting reworked I was looking so forward to it. If you are going to rebut me, please stay civil <3 I'd like a discussion not a war.
