User blog comment:Doeniel/Karthus, the Deathsinger Rework Ideas & Discussion/@comment-26459891-20151206074722/@comment-26459891-20151206155812

Do not get me wrong, I by no means wish to insult you or anything, but all your changes a part from the W one seem to simply aim at making Karthus's learning curve less steep, and sound like coming from someone who do not have a great experience.

Karthus's passive has no in-built way to help him keeping his targets near him, that's true. But that's because dying in a "good place" is up to the Karthus player. If I were a Rioter, I'd say that's "what separates good Karthuses from great Karthuses". That, or his team does a good job at keeping the enemy team inside Karthus's zone. Either way, this makes his passive have high and low moments, and it feels particularly rewarding when you pull it off right: you do an obscene amount of damage, but that's because you managed to get yourself in a good position, or your team set up a good fight. Your changes would make it more reliable, but very less exciting. And you also had to halve E's damage to do that. It's not great in 1v1 because you're not supposed to die 1v1, and even in that scenario if you're good at hitting Qs it will probably let you get away with a kill.

The ultimate becoming a big nuke to the whole team is part of Karthus's great scaling. If you've let the game last so long, you've screwed up. Making it useful only as an execute would limit its possible uses and make it scale worse into late, which is counterintuitive.

Also, you speak like there's a lot of ways to counter Karthus's ultimate, and that is not false. Bard's ult, Soraka, ADC's heal, spellshields, Banshee's, Zhonya's... But look at it this way. You're not playing this game alone. When your ulti is up, you're posing a threat to everyone's defensive spell, at the same time. Of course it sucks that Syndra bought a Zhonya's and Sivir can spellshield your ulti, but that means that if they decide to hold it on to avoid your ulti, they're leaving themselves vulnerable to literally everything else that could harm them. They might also be forced to use them for any other reason, and at that point they'll know your ulti will be ready to drop onto them any moment.

Furthermore, don't forget that, as I said in my other post, most of your teamfighting revolves around your E. In an actual teamfight, you'll go in, E, Zhonya, die etc. By the time it's time for you to ult, the fight will have been going on for so long that everyone's defensive spell will probably have been used already. So most of the frustration you speak about comes from when you try to finish off a fleeing enemy, but that's trivial -- I don't think specializing Karthus's ult in doing that would be a good idea.

By the way, I'd like to point out that, despite the fact that you seem very interested in keeping intact Karthus's 1v1 potential, you quite gutted him in that regard. Q doesn't double its damage on single targets anymore, E damage halved, W gives MRes shred ONLY when you step into it (very often I just drop it and Q people I hit with it). Perhaps making it still reduce MRes, and making the shred stronger when you step into your wall? (Like the slow, in other words)

Overall, the biggest flaw of this proposal of yours is the reduced E damage, which is super core on Karthus and which you reduced to add trivial effects such as healing and MRes which do not benefit him all that much. All he wants is damage, damage and more damage.