So I played Karthus for the first time in 2 years yesterday

KnightOfEloHell·6/22/2017, 2:22:34 PM·2 votes·289 views

Since Ranked was down, and I'm a Morde one trick, I thought I'd try to expand my champion pool.

I got first blood against duo top, exaust, lay waste, and ignite, but than fed all game, because I SUCK with skill shots.

But you know, Karthus has really nice DPS. Do yall think that a tank Karthus that builds a large mana pool would be good? I feel like a tank Karthus would be better than glass cannon Karthus.

Tank to survive, and a large mana pool for sustained damage. And get shit loads of pen for damage

6 Comments

Marshbouy6/22/2017, 2:26:18 PM1 votes

Well, how I understand karthus game is basically "build glass cannon, run into the middle of their team, die, then still deal shitloads of damage because of your passive then ult"

so building tank would just be wasted stats if your goal was to run in 1v5 and die anyway to deal as much damage as you could.

Captain Aishi6/22/2017, 6:17:16 PM1 votes

karthus has really high base damage values so if you just get sorc shoes/liandries and survivability, you can get very good results (even in getting AP items like banshees/zhonyas/rylais you get decent defensive stats while dealing huge amounts of damage)

but if you decide to just get the spellpen and defensive items you can be a pretty big headache for the enemy team to work around in fights if you have other sources of damage on your team that's for sure

EvilMerodach6/22/2017, 6:21:03 PM1 votes

Problem with tank Karthus is your q and r suffer a lot from it. And your passive becomes pretty much straight useless. And you're only kind of a mild disrupter with your wall. Yeah, sure, you'll survive a long time, and have mana to sit there with your e on in the middle of a fight. But you can largely be circled around and ignored (by a smart team) cause his ms is bad, and no dashes or speed boosts of any kind.

The q is the bread and butter of it. If you're good with q's, you can stay REAL safe (unless they have a Zed or something along those lines), so the fact that you are glass cannon means very little, unless you make a mistake and overextend. Plus in late game you can pretty much just yolo baron pit and die and still win a game off it, so he maintains a huge threat all game.

Your E passive returns mana for cs'ing. So if you're decent at last hitting, and at least get a item 3010 or item 3070 early, you shouldn't have much mana problems, unless you just continually forget to toggle e off.

That all said, I think Karthus is in a pretty bad spot in the current meta, along with the last 15 or so meta's. He's not bad, but there's almost always better choices for anything you want to do. Syndra Xerath Cassiopeia Lux Veigar Velkoz all kinda just do different things his 'job' can do, but they fit better in almost all team comps, where he's kinda an outsider/"niche" for...something that doesn't really exist anymore.

He's a dps team killer that can't stick to targets, and is pretty bad at contesting objectives. Even the super late game baron thing, it isn't even that he'll be all that likely to contest the baron, he'll either ace the enemy, or not. While acing them super late game will win the game, games usually don't get to that point, and a smart enemy will just end the game some other way than try for baron.

And objectives have been WAYYY more important than open dps fights for a long time.

But if the enemy looks like they're going for a hardcore teamfight comp, fuck it, play Karthus and wreck them. But still gonna vote glass cannon being overall more useful than tank. Unless your team just really needs a tank...in which case...why pick Karthus to begin with?