Talk:Katarina/@comment-26061591-20161001141832/@comment-2179912-20161009103617

As the fellow commenters said, she is going to receive an allegedly exciting rework very soon, so all our current data on her will change.

However, as of right now, her damage is quite... strange.

Her ultimate has one of the highest AP-scaling ultimates in the entire game. Death Lotus alone is so powerful that it does almost as much damage as a "normal" mage's entire rotation (most common rotations output around {as|300% AP}, and they usually take longer than Death Lotus too).

However. The rest of her kit does surprisingly low damage - so in order to nuke someone without Death Lotus, you need to be very ahead and stack MPen too.

Her 3 basic skills combined have {as|115% AP} scaling which is extremely sub-par. For comparison, Ekko's passive and Q have {as|80% AP} scaling each. Anivia's empowered E has {as|100% AP} scaling alone. Viktor's evolved Death Ray has {as|120% AP} scaling in total.

However, her dynamic changes in team fights since even if you focus a single target, you do a lot of collateral damage. If you manage to QEW a target, get a reset and QEW a second target, the double QW proc on all nearby enemies (even though you didn't do that intentionally) will have also done significant damage, perhaps allowing you for a third or fourth reset.

Every time, the hardest reset to get is the first one. Once you get it, the enemies near your initial target will have also taken damage, allowing you to just snowball fights. That's why you see experienced Katarinas wait so long before they enter a fight, they barely get a kill, they blow Flash, Death Lotus and Ignite for the struggling double kill - and suddenly they get a penta in half a second.

This is one of the two reasons that explain why her QWE abilities are so weak. The other one is simple: they are all unavoidable.

Imagine having a champion with a basic combo you can't dodge since it's all targeted, that can reset if she manages to get a kill or assist with it, AND that can easily oneshot a squishy like the other assassins. She'd just casually kill everyone on her own.

Granted, she can still oneshot squishies since she gets miles ahead so easily, but they simply cannot lower her scalings any more. So when she's ahead she still can easily QEW an adc and oneshot it instantly, and then oneshot the support next to it who will already have been hit by QW once so it'll die even faster... and so on. She counterbalances her awful scalings with her extreme ability to destroy fights.

The issue is, of course, that if she DOESN'T manage to get ahead, she's shit.

She will have to poke with her 120 damage Q in fights until someone drops low enough to finish them off, and even if that happens, she won't have the damage to move on to the next target, so she'll be forced to last hit the kill and blink back to safety immediately.

And this is exactly what Riot calls a "binary kit" or a "feast or famine" kit. She either overcomes her awful scalings by being ahead, and she just kills your entire backline before you can even blink your eyes, OR she doesn't, and she just tries to KS her team to get ahead.

Let's hope the rework makes her less binary. She's a fun champion, but she comes down to "press QWE. Did they die? If yes, repeat." with the occasional "is their CC down? Press R"