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How to make people hate Katarina just a little bit more...

Šinister·4/21/2015, 10:51:33 PM·1 votes·2,019 views

TLDR at the end- still urge you to read on.

Hello, rioters! This is my first post, and I'm doing so from my phone, so I won't be posting and visual guides or aesthetics. I also won't be going into as much detail as I would like to (maybe, we will see as I type).

Lets cut to the chase.

I main Kat. (Lets take a moment to all point and laugh at the Kat main.) (Lets take another moment to flame the Kat main)

Okay, now that all the hard feelings are out, let me start off by saying I am only 165 games into my Kat career. I decided I was going to main her about a month ago. I consider myself a pretty good Kat. I have played her with Ap, Hybrid and AD builds, though primarily AP of course. I have played a good handful of jungle, bot lane carry, and top lane Kat. Lets not talk about support Kat. I have toyed around with many builds and runes. I rune 21/5/4 or 21/9/0 depending on my runes and matchup.

Today I want to discuss running full Magic Penetration runes, what they do, what they mean for Kat, and why I really like them.

First of all, with full MPen Quints, Glyphs, and Marks. You have 20 magic penetration from the start of the game. I run scaling HP seals, feel free to run Scaling AP if you're really brave, or scaling armor in AD match ups.

What does 20 magic penetration mean for kat? Well, for starters, if you get haunting guise or Sorcerers boots on your first back, your likely only shy 4-13 magic pen from true damage. If you have both items, it's extremely likely you're doing bonus damage from your abilities, as you have more magic penetration than they have MR.

So far this sounds like Kat with sub-par defensive runes and magic pen instead of AP. Well, that would be correct! I find that running 20 magic pen will give you only slightly less damage at level 1 as opposed to running AP. We all know kat isn't an early game champion, so why bother catering to it? No amount of starting AP from runes will make her early game broken, however, we can introduce scaling runes to capitalize on her mid game prowess.

Anyways, this is only a little bit of backstory on the champion for those who do not play kat often, or even for those who could use some insights. Remember, the claims I make are coming from a silver IV player that is still fresh in his Katarina experience.

So with these runes, I build parts of haunting guise (I almost always go boots and 4 pots to start, as this makes buying boots II easier for later). The stats from the parts of guise are good for early laning, and most kat players would agree. Since we have only 7 AP to start from masteries, buying that amp tome is very necessary, as opposed to rushing sorcerers boots. So once we have both items, we have a total of 50 magic penetration. That's a LOT considering were probably only 10-15 minutes in the game. If you have an AD top laner, and your lane opponent isn't rushing abyssal scepter (looking at you, Diana), then you most likely deal true damage AND bonus damage to every enemy in the game. On a quick side note, if you are facing a Diana who is rushing abyssal scepter, I find going void staff after your flat penetration items really do the trick. A lot of people would detest buying void staff so early with so little ap, but the goal of this build isn't to have enough damage to KS until you're fed. The goal is to make Kat cut through MR like a hot knife through butter... in other words, we want to melt TANKS with kat. Of course, realistically, Katarina will never be able to 100-0 a tank at full build. But we can make her useful as poke damage.

In most scenarios, I won't be building Void Staff until I see people building MR across the board. If my laner builds MR, I am more incline to roam and build better items instead of building to fight them in lane... but I want to make it a point that if you want to stay in lane and hold them down (and given they are building MR), void staff is in fact, a better buy than Rabadons.

But hey, that's a little off topic. We have our 2 flat pen items, and now we want AP. There is no go-to item at this point. I almost always opt for a 120 ap item, although I will build abyssal if they are ap heavy (and we get 20 more magic pen from it!). I build zhonyas when I'm the target of the enemys' affection(caitlyn, vi, assassins, hard cc, etc) I buy Rabadons if I'm confident in fighting without the crutch that is zhonyas, and I build Ludens echo when they have a poke comp. The goal with ludens is to be able to poke back and make a flashy shunpo play right into the belly of the beast. Rabadons goes without saying. As with anyone who is ridiculously snowballing, I might get mejais, though it is completely unnecessary.

So we have: 70-50 magic penetration and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-150 AP, respectively to our magic pen. We don't care about that stupid Maokai up top with spirit visage(okay maybe a little bit). We don't care that sona is giving Graves more MR with Aegis. We cut right through the mid game MR. Nobody gets to reduce our damage by more than ~33%. These claims are made on an estimated average.

Lets fast forward a bit. We are full build. When I'm full build I have 4 core items. Void staff, Abyssal scepter, Sorcerers boots, and... Liandrys Torment. What?! Okay, let's make one thing very clear:

People hate Katarina. When they see her in a game and doing well, they start getting tanky. it becomes a problem to actually do anything useful as Kat when facing a tank and 2 bruises and a mage that's building to survive Kat's deadly blades. Liandrys Torment allows my first Q to melt away a 6th of a pure tank's HP. We're talking 6k HP with 200+ MR. With this build, we are ignoring 140 MR on said tank, and we are doing chunk damage with either Ludens or Rabadons (or both), plus the % HP burn on liandrys. Of course, we all know liandrys becomes less effective the lower the targets current hp, but do not forget who you are! Kat was made to execute people low on health! If we can just throw a few daggers and have some poke from the team, then we will be shredding tanks and setting up pentakills in no time!

Anyways, the point of this post is to cause a discussion on MPen Katarina. This build works best against tanky teams, and sometimes I do not keep Liandrys. Since the build is focused on Magic pen, I find Liandrys is more viable that usual.

Some fun facts: With full build including liandrys, we do true damage to anyone with 116 Magic Resist or less.

We end with a not-to-shabby 500-580 AP.

I have yet to play a game with Kat where these runes have failed me. (exception being Kat jungle, I forgot to change my runes and fail smited first red with 16 HP left and lost it to the support. This immediately had a reverse snowball effect on me, but lets not talk about Kat jungle for now.)

I apologize in advance if I missed any typos or words that my phone autocorrected.

TLDR I like full MPEN runes and MPEN builds on kat more than full AP.

Thoughts on this build, arguments for an against it? I will be coming back with some numbers soon. I have class for now. Happy rioting ;)Katarina

10 Comments

Fredart4/21/2015, 11:56:44 PM2 votes

Full mag pen rune page? That sir is how I make people squirm as nida.

Changsty4/21/2015, 10:58:22 PM2 votes

You can't deal bonus damage through mpen alone. You can reduce MR to negative values through reduction, but mpen itself doesn't go past zero. Since reduction is applied before penetration you won't get to deal the bonus damage to anything but minions. Also as Kat your main target are the squishies, so more flat AP is probably better.

Šinister4/21/2015, 11:45:47 PM1 votes

I'm number crunching as we speak.

Leti the Yeti4/22/2015, 1:45:51 AM1 votes

I need more than a moment to laugh at the kat main doe :CCC

Šinister4/22/2015, 2:48:11 AM1 votes

I have done the math and compared my build to a few common builds. I even assumed that Kat was level 18 and had complete scaling ap runes, so as to lean the numbers in favor of any build that was not mine. the only build that came anywhere near the damage output of my build (assuming the target has at least 50 MR) was a build consisting of Void staff, Sorcs, rabadons, zhonyas, ludens echo, and hextech gunblade. i ran calculations on both just Katarina Q, and her full combo, assuming she gets a max range shunpo, walks just a smidgen and procs ludens echo twice (and gets her complete ultimate off). At 50 MR, the he xtech build does 200 more damage than my build(my build does ~4433 damage total). A full AP build ONLY with a fully stacked mejais (in lieu of hextech) does similar damage. Also, if you were wondering why my build damage is estimated, it's because calculating the damage from liandrys is tricky. I used a value of 50 damage for liandrys. At 100 MR, my build does 600 more damage than a hextech build, and 200 more at 150 MR. Also, in regards to assassinating a carry with an assumed 31.5 mr, my build will do 3546 damage-- way more than enough to kill that pesky jinx, graves, or sivir (okay, sivir is a tricky one). A hextech build will do about 4.6k damage to that same carry with 31.5 MR. Also, on my build if we sold ludens echo for zhonyas, we would still do more mid-late game damage than a full AP build, PLUS we would have ~100 armor, ~80 MR, and we can take it a step further by replacing boots for Rylais, for utility and a total of 3K HP. Of course, we would not have boots, and this would bring the damage margins of my build even closer to that of a hextech build. On a final note, guardian angel is a thing that can accomplish the defensive stats of rylais, abyssal, and zhonyas all in one slot... however, the unreliability of the stasis usually wards me off from buying it. Admittedly, it has saved my butt when I could revive and instantly ward hop over a nearby wall, but that wall does not always exist. for those particularly curious, I have numbers on mejais builds, Hybrid builds, ad builds, ap builds, double snowball item builds, bootless ap builds, the aforementioned gunblade build, and of course, my build. If anyone wants to hear any specific numbers, or if you want to proofread my calculations, feel free.

Commit Sudoku4/21/2015, 10:52:53 PM1 votes

tl;dr

LetsLoL4/22/2015, 2:50:19 AM1 votes

you should check out my runepages :^) and yes i do go mpen builds but with rushed luden cuz op

Šinister4/21/2015, 11:12:43 PM1 votes

Hm, I did not know that mechanic regarding MPEN vs Reduction. That's interesting to know. on the subject of targeting squishies, I find having 900 ap is overkill. This build is more than enough to pop the adc and mid lane mage(pls no chogath).

Of course, the main targets are the carries, buy this is not always possible. In a scenario where flanking is dangerous, and both teams are standing off (given the enemy has a massive Frontline) this build excels in making kat useful as more than just an assassin. She retains her ability to assassinate, but also gains the ability to apply meaningful poke to a hefty frontline.

Also, while I'm sad to hear Im not doing bonus damage to most of the targets I thought I was, at least it's still true damage :p