Katarina's ultimate is out of her thematic

King Empress·8/26/2018, 10:33:31 AM·1 votes·1,587 views

Don't get me wrong. Katarina's ultimate ability can have a very big impact in a game and can be very useful, however to her theme of being a highly mobile, always blinking around assassin, her ultimate is out of the theme. Katarina has always been a very high risk/ high reward champion. Even from behind, if she plays her cards right she can turn a losing game into a winning game almost immediately. Her resets have always been a huge part of her kit and and her most recent rework (assassin rework), Katarina's resets were taken to an all new and very unique level. That being said her ultimate remained the same. Katarina's ultimate "Death Lotus" is a stationary ult in which over the course of 2.5 seconds Katarina flings a flurry of projectile blades at the 3 nearest enemy champions within range of her. Needless to say this ability does insane amounts of damage and can be very useful. Lately however there are more champions than ever in League of legends that have cc that make her ultimate almost unusable and not in the way that you think. It's almost a guarantee nowadays that Katarina will be stunned, popped up, knocked back etc during her ultimate and she has to find the right time to use it, but even them she locks herself in place for a full 2.5 seconds and even more considering she's set herself up for vulnerability. This I've noticed is the one major part of her kit that is not aligned with her theme. As I've played Katarina these last 3 years I've comfortably transitioned from her previous stated to her reworked state and have continued to main her regardless and for the most part I am satisfied with everything but her ultimate. On the previous Katarina kit, having less access to immediate resets does make sense to have a constant damaging stationary ult to hope for a chipped death to get a shunpo to leave or persist on fights. To my understanding however, having he new resetting kit but still keeping a stationary kit is holding her down to an expectation to be still rather than moving where she needs to be. Death lotus is not only counter intuitive to her kit, but it is completely out of her theme of constant and swift movement. Personally I am attending an art college and I always wanted to work at RIOT games because I think they work very hard on their creations. As I studied more on my characer conception and thematics I just couldn't help realizin that my favorite character in league of legends herself was missing out on a potentially more healthy update to her kit. Assumingly her old ultimate was kept in there for familiarity and fear of making too drastic of a change to her kit. I believe now more than ever in a game state where there are dozens of champions that can be chosen per game to render Katarina's ult useless, is the perfect time to consider an ultimate change that can suit her current high mobility kit while still feeling like Katarina. I personally would love to talk to Rioters about this on a personal level because this is something I have been working on and taking into consideration in and very long time. I would really like to take this to a testing point to see how it performs and if it's something that shows signs of more negativity that positivity then It just won't make it to live servers. I have a few ideas to modernize Katarin a while putting into consideration having to play against her.

5 Comments

Devil Demoko8/27/2018, 1:00:32 AM2 votes

I agree, I've been complaining about kat because she honestly feels so bad rn, every assassin outdoes her and her ult feels horrible. You can't be in the middle of a fight in this meta, it's just impossible. I just wish they'd give her some more survivability. even if it's 30% Reduced damage when ulting or she can't be cced in ult.

ned the kled8/26/2018, 6:08:05 PM1 votes

wall of text

give me a tl;dr or just fix this

Terozu8/26/2018, 11:51:59 PM1 votes

I disagree to be honest. Look at it this way, she is, in rapid succession throwing knives at people without missing at a rate of up to 12 knives a second. She is accurately throwing 12 knives a second on moving targets. That very much fits the thematic of someone called "The Sinister Blade".

As for how it fits into her kit, it gives her a weakness, she is able to constantly jump around, giving her a stationary ult helps circumvent her extreme mobility and furthermore highlights her thematic of being a chaos causer. In order to properly use the champion you have to abuse chaos to properly use her ult.

My only complaint is that the rate of the knives should increase when theres only one target, even if the number stays the same.