League of Legends: Katarina

I brought my laptop with me to New Brunswick and even brought my power cord along this time so I've been able to play some League of Legends after everyone else goes to sleep. I normally play on a fancy gamer keyboard which I didn't bring with me so I've been stuck using my laptop keyboard. I figured with that handicap I'd be better off just learning a new hero in normal games instead of tanking my rating when I hit the wrong key by mistake.

The hero I chose to learn is Katarina, a hero that has always blown me up on the rare occasion she gets played. I didn't really know what she was doing to be awesome and figured a good way to learn would be to read a bit and then just give her a spin. She plays very differently than the other heroes I typically play and preliminary results seem to indicate I like the way she plays. Now, these games were normal games so it could be that I was playing against particularly bad players, or that Kat is good against the way normal mode players tend to play. (No wards, rarely a support character, sometimes not even a jungler...) I've gone 6-0 in the last couple days with her. Kill scores have been a combined 56 kills/21 deaths/69 assists. Pretty sweet!

So, what does she do? Well, she's a melee character which doesn't want to auto-attack very much. She has a few brutally powerful spells that scale well with ability power so the basic idea for her is to make her abilities awesome and her melee attacks terrible. She also doesn't have any secondary resource. No mana, no rage, no energy... Her abilities just have cooldowns so they can be spammed at will. What are those abilities?

Q: This ability is a ranged attack that hits multiple targets. It chains to an extra target per rank of the skill (so 6 targets total when maxxed out) and does 10% less damage after each bounce. The damage on this isn't great at any level but it has a fairly short cooldown. (9 seconds at rank 1, 7 seconds at rank 5.) It's also a ranged ability that does a reasonable amount of damage so you can use it to kill creeps for gold in the early going of the game.

E: This ability is a blink-strike attack. Basically you target something within a pretty big range (the range window actually doesn't fit on my laptop screen!) and teleport to it instantly. If the target is an enemy you do a ton of damage as well. It also has a fairly short cooldown (10 seconds at rank 1, 6 seconds at rank 5) and can be used early game to kill creeps for cash. Or you can use it jump on the enemy hero for some damage, hit them with your Q, and then run away and wait for the cooldowns to come up. Repeat until they have to go heal!

W: This ability is interesting. It starts off as a passive which adds a small amount of damage to every attack Kat makes. Auto-attack or ability. Then you can also activate it to modify your next Q or E cast. If you buff your Q then it does full damage to all targets and applies a mortal strike debuff for 5 seconds. If you buff your E then you take from 15-35% less damage for 3 seconds. This is pretty great when you're blinking onto them to harass them! If they try to counter-harass back you take less damage. And they're probably burning their limited resource when they do!

R: Her ultimate is absurdly insane. When you use it you become rooted and start throwing daggers wildly. You'll throw up to 30 daggers over 3 seconds which only hit the 3 nearest enemy heroes. Each dagger does a ton of damage. It can be interrupted with pretty much every CC known to man but if they don't have something ready right away you murder people. It also has a relatively short cooldown (60/55/50 seconds).


Now, it looks like from just those abilities that she'll be really great at the start of a team fight but if she gets CCed or if the fight goes wrong she won't be very good. She's in melee range without good attacks and will probably get murdered, right? Well... Turns out sometimes yes and sometimes no. And the reason why is her passive...

Every time Kat gets a kill or an assist she gains 25 gold and the cooldown on all her abilities is lowered by 15 seconds.

This is absolutely absurd. I've run into fights where some enemies are low. Hit one of them with my two normal damage abilities and kill them. They both instantly refresh. Turn and use them both on the next guy. Kill them. Refresh the abilities. Smash! I've had situations where I jumped in and ulted, killing two people. That knocks 30 seconds off of the 50 second cooldown on my ult! Chase for a bit and you're good to go again!


So, how do you deal with Kat? Well, I've had the most trouble when people are good enough to switch to me. If I go in first and get hit with practically anything I'm dead. But if the fight gets started and then I sneak in and they don't switch to me they get obliterated. Also in smaller skirmishes it's all over. She has so much front-end damage that you can pretty much turn any 2v2 into a 2v1 in a real hurry. I had a game where I started in top lane, got level 6, and then switched to a 2v2 lane bottom. I was up against two enemies with no ability to interrupt my ult and they were still level 3/4. The game pretty much ended right there. Those two could no longer get money or experience since if they ever wandered out of their own turret they were in danger of dying. I actually rarely killed them since they'd start running as soon as I jumped in but each time I'd knock them so low they had to go heal and they didn't do enough to me to make me leave. Not having mana meant I never ran out of steam!

But if you're a hero with any interrupt ability at all and you're smart about saving it for Kat's ult she's actually pretty weak. Interrupt the brutal ult and then focus her down while she has no abilities left. (No ult tends to mean no immediate deaths which means no crazy ability spamming to get away.) In big team fights you just need to turn and kill her as soon as you see her.

So I think she is particularly well suited to beating bad players. Is she worth running in ranked games? Well, I think I'm going to give it a shot when I get home to my good keyboard and see how it ends up. (She's free this week so I may have to buy her to do this. But she's a lot of fun and I'm liking the assassin style so I think I should buy her anyway.)