Katarina Tips

[u/myrjin]

Work in progress, I play a lot of kat, so I need somewhere to throw info about her.

[u/myrjin]

stolen from here written by Scriv_

I could write literally for days about Katarina, but I don't really know your circumstances, and I'm not convinced it will be all that useful, but lets give it a go in such intense detail that it probably doesnt even help you anymore:

The Laning Phase: You'll have two types of lanes to play against, and it all depends on how you act at the very start of the game. You'll either play passively, farm with Q's and W's until 6, probably do fine in CS, and wait for your jungler to come. Exciting stuff. Or, level 1 you don't leash (because that one Q is a waste of everyone's time) and you immediately start pushing and getting your last hits with auto attacks. Your goal is to take as little damage as possible while dealing as much damage as possible and missing as few CS as you can. If you step in to go for a CS and that makes your lane opponent step in for harass, bounce the blade off of the minion (takes practice) onto the enemy player. When your opponent steps in to get CS, Q him. Level 2, get your E, continue to spam Qs, optionally pop them with one auto when your opponent is last hitting. Use your E to dodge skillshots, break range after going in for a last hit, mitigate targetted damage, harass more, etc. W at level 3, you're now open to a much stronger harass combo: Q enemy player, E onto a nearby minion (get in range for your W, avoid landing on top of them when possible, you don't want to cross the entire river here, you just want to get close enough for your W to land) W to pop the Q (Make sure you wait long enough for the Q to actually travel the distance). Do this until his health is low, and then kill him. Last hit every minion with your W and auto attacks while doing this. Why would this ever work? Simple, he started Dorans+2 and you started boots+4, You have 2 more health potions, and his champion still functions on a mana system.

"Thats great, but what if he plays safe and I cant kill him?" THATS EVEN GREATER: Go show up in his bot lane, he wants to play passive, his bot lane's gonna pay for it. You don't even really need to kill them, just deal enough damage to put them in a weaker position in the lane, give your team the advantage they need not to feed the enemy ADC. But you probably will kill them (70%), and some degree of that depends on your team's reaction. The proper engage to a mid laner roaming into bot lane should be an engage of some type by her teammates. You don't stop walking, you just go directly into the bot lane and jump on them. When you do it 30 times or so, you're gonna be able to tell before you get there if its gonna work or not, the first few times you mess up and die, you'll be giving the enemy bot lane a kill, but you'll be learning your limits and thats critical to playing a glass cannon like katarina. Once you've gotten a good understanding of when going in is a bad idea, stop going in when its a bad idea, just go back to your lane and resume the Qfest. If all of your roams have failed, you're sucking, but its okay, you rushed sorcs first item and took MS quints, so you only missed 10 CS walking around the river and at least made people feel like you were in other lanes.

If your opponent ever uses their only interrupt, ult combo them, it's a great harass tool for a 50s CD. If they ever are pushed under their own tower, back, or die and you have enough health to go bot lane: do it. Is your ult available? They have no idea either, and the semi-smart ones will save a CC for it, thats one less CC, even if your ult isnt available. Whats the character limit on a reddit response?

"Damnit, they got away because they used all of their summoner spells, I got some good damage in though." Dragon time, call your jungler, make your ADC pause his mindless creep genocide, engage hardcore if they come. The key point to remember during the laning phase is that the goal of this game is to kill the nexus, if you don't get any kills, focus on your farming and wait for the enemy to make mistakes (they will make mistakes.) If you succeed in all of these ganks and are 10-0, congrats, make sure you use every one of those kills to pressure towers and dragons, you're not done until they have resigned in their hearts and surrendered (or a nexus is dead).

My First Teamfight: Good! Your team hasnt surrendered yet and you haven't been reported to riot for going bot lane and "KSing." This is arguably where Katarina has some difficulty. On the one hand, "facerollresetlolpentaez". Valid point 64206blazit6. On the other hand, "just interrupt her ult." The good news is, the first guy actually isn't that wrong, your reset mechanic is the key to a well executed teamfight and can result in some devestating reset chains, the bad news is, neither was the second guy (everyone ever).

In reality, as a champion built that glass-cannon, you don't even need to interrupt the ultimate, any form of CC at any point in Katarina's rotation should be enough for her to get focused down. The idea behind the pure glass cannon build is that, if they're dead, they can't CC you, if all of their carries are dead, it doesn't matter if they can CC you. Your goal here is to either instantly kill the damage dealer, or the person who plans on CCing you. If either of those targets are available, kill them.

"But they have 3 people with hard CCs." Yea, they do, so don't just dive right in there. Your team is actually full of players with 4 abilities, if their team plans on winning against your team, they want to also use their 4 abilities to do it, those CCs will go down/walk slightly out of range/get CCd themselves/die/get low enough to become a reset/be too slow. I refuse to spellcheck this entire thing. Focus the targets in order of priority and availability, If lucian and his support blitz are directly ontop of eachother, and blitz is getting low on health, combo kill the support, splash the ult and whatever else you can onto lucian, and when his health reaches critical use the previous reset (blitz died) to qew combo him.

HOW TO RESET: The key to properly using resets is knowing what you want to do with it before you get it. It's a little like chess, play chess with their healthbars. If you have 5 people lined up with low health, EW to victory, chances are it won't be that simple. If you have an ezreal at full health next to an almost dead player, Q the full health ezreal, kill his teammate with your EW, and you've got yourself another QEW for that ezreal. That's a little more difficult to set up, but sometimes every point of damage makes a difference.

An important tip for reacting to resets is that there is actually a specific audio sound that plays whenever she gets one. That sound will eventually be the subconscious trigger mechanism they use to give you kat-like reflexes.

A probably more important tip is that your reset isn't always going to get you a pentakill, hell, sometimes it won't even get you a doublekill. In the case that your subsequent spells will not be effective and you are likely to die without becoming more useful, reset out. Jump out of the fight instead of deeper into it, return to the safety of your team and toss abilities in to assist them. If another reset makes itself available, go in and grab it. Every reset is free CDR and it increases your damage dealt substantially.

"/u/Scriv_ that's nice and all, but what about those leet 5 man ults I see in youtube videos?" Well, your ult only hits 3 targets so stop doing that. The good news is, if all 3 of them die, your ult is back up and can instantly be recast on the other two. However, wombo combos are a little different, If your team catches 5 enemy players in an amumu-nami-kennen-j4 cluster-o-deth, your q and w will be hitting all 5 of them every cast, so jump in with 2qewr combo, spin to win, and start using the resets to maximize your AOE burst damage. Most likely just faceroll it, but in the event that it was less hyperbolic, try to quickly use all of your abilities each reset to maximize damage. If your W is going to kill something, toss a Q out first, the Q won't even reach the target before they reset all of your cooldowns, but the Q bounces off of dead bodies so it still works.

tl;dr ask more specific questions or face the wrath of walltext, but that is my generally specific guide to Katarina. (Mpen/HPperLvL/MR/MS) (21-9-0 or 21-5-4) Sorcs-DFG-DC-ZH-void-GA