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Sinister steel

Hey everyone! I'm sh00zyz, a platnium mid laner on the Oceanic servers. I've been playing Katarina for a very long time. I've mained her ever since her rework came out which was back in 2012! So I have tons of experience with her. With the amount of time I've been playing her, I've learned a lot so I would like to tell you guys how I play Katarina! I hope you guys enjoy and learn a lot!

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Pros +Snowballs well +Hard to gank with Shunpo +Fairly easy to play +CAN last very long in fights +Insane amount of damage +No mana +Best Passive in the game Katarina is quite a unique champion because of her play style. Getting an early lead on Katarina can allow her to easily snowball which will also help her excel in team-fights. Thanks to Shunpo, she can be a tricky champion to gank. Katarina is a quite simple champion to play after you've had a few games with her. Playing a lot of games with Katarina really helps to know how much damage you can do. Katarina CAN last long in team-fights if you play her correctly and you will generally win a team-fight after you assassinate your target thanks to the help of your Passive. Katarina can deal heaps of damage, especially in the mid game where not many people have strong tank items that will reduce your damage input by that much and to top it off, she uses NO mana.

Cons +No form of ANY crowd control +Team reliant +Bad laning phase/Many counters +Hard to master +Vulnerable to crowd control +Can be useless in fights +May fall off late game Katarina can also be a very risky pick (espically in ranked; she will likely be counter-picked.) She has no form of ANY crowd control, so that makes her very team reliant. Katarina also has quite a poor laning phase, thus giving her many counters (notice the amount of difficult champions she has.) She can also be very hard to master, in terms of timing and knowing when to go in (especially if they have a lot of crowd control) because, the thing that makes her useless is if you jump in, cast your ult for less then a second, and die. You will unlikely get any resets to Shunpo out probably resulting in death and a loss of the team-fight. If the game extends into the late game, Katarina could be quite useless, especially if they have tanky and hard Crowd Control champions such as Alistar or Blitzcrank.

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Here I have my basic mastery set-up on Katarina. Feel free to change a few points where you like here and there. This set-up is quite good; most Katarina players should set-up a page like this.

CUNNING We'll start with the cunning page first since it has 18 points in it. Wanderer is a great starting mastery as it gives +3% movement speed out of combat which is great for roaming as it suits her play-style as an Assassin. The other option you could take is Savagery which I wouldn't recommend as Katarina has only one single target spell and you don't really need that bonus 5 damage to minions unless you are really bad at last hitting. I take Secret Stash because I feel like the other options don't benefit Katarina that much. Katarina doesn't really need buffs and even though the mastery is called Assassin , Katarina isn't a type of champion that can kill people by herself. She is team reliant as I stated in Cons. Merciless is a pretty good mastery on Katarina. Dealing increased damage to champions who are fairly low on health definitely helps her. Don't take the other option; no explanation needed. Take Dangerous Game because the other one is useless on Katarina and, this will probably save your life in a lot of situations. Precision is probably the better option. Having magic penetration on Katarina is always quite good and this mastery also scales. Intelligence Gives you 5% CDR and increases your CDR cap. You don't need CDR because of the resets and the cap is useless because you don't build any CDR. Thunderlord's Decree is a must take mastery in this meta. It's super strong and gives you really good damage in lane. The only other keystone you can take is Deathfire Touch but I highly recommended not doing this as it doesn't provide that much usefulness compared to Deathfire Touch .

FEROCITY Sorcery is pretty good on Katarina. There is no use in taking Fury as it provides Katarina no benefit. Sorcery increases ability damage by %2 so that's a neat thing to have. You have an option here between Double Edged Sword and Feast. I think Double Edged Sword is a bit more beneficial for Katarina because having more damage is obviously better and since you're melee, you deal an additional %3 damage and only take %1.5 increased damage while range is additional %2 for both dealing and taking. You can take Vampirism here, but I think Natural Talent is a bit better since Death Lotus has a massive AP ratio and even scales off AD. The life steal in Vampirism is quite little and you have life steal on it as well which you don't need. Take Bounty Hunter , you don't have much option because you don't have any CC, so I wouldn't recommend it even if your team had CC. Bounty Hunter is quite neat; %1 increased damage for each unique champion kill and that works well with Katarina.

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Greater Mark of Magic Penetration
These marks are really good on Katarina. They will give you insane damage in the early to mid game. Since it stacks with Abyssal Mask and Sorcerer's Shoes, it adds up to just under 50 magic pen in total.

Greater Seal of Scaling Armor
I personally like to take these because when you're up against AD champions that do some decent damage to you early game (such as Talon or Zed), it really helps against them. You can take Greater Seal of Scaling Health or Greater Seal of Armor if you like; I would personally recommend these and it's all up to taste.

Greater Glyph of Scaling Magic Resist
These are quite good. Provide good defense and I personally wouldn't swap them because it's always good to have some defense on Katarina. The other options you can take for glyphs are: Greater Glyph of Magic Resist (flat), Greater Glyph of Scaling Ability Power and Greater Glyph of Magic Penetration. Choose what you like but I would probably stay with the scaling and flat (take flat if you're against a hard AP match up.)

Greater Quintessence of Ability Power
Gives you around 15 flat AP to start the game with. These are nice because you don't start with any AP items on Katarina. The only other option you really have is Greater Quintessence of Movement Speed, but I don't like these that much.

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Flash is a must take spell on Katarina. Even though you have your shunpo, there is no other summoner spell that really satisfies it and Flash is also a great engage tool to.

Ignite is really good on Katarina. It gives you lots of kill potential and will help you get those resets in fights.

Teleport is the only other option you have instead of taking ignite. It gives you good map presence and helps you in fights quite a lot. In a sense, this could be dealing more 'damage' than ignite because you can show up to a team fight if you're not there. But that's very situational and I always take ignite on Katarina.

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Voracity (Passive) This is definitely one of the best passives in the game. If someone dies within 3 seconds of you damaging them, all of your abilities are reduced by 15 seconds (all of your basic abilities are instantly refreshed.) This ability is what makes Katarina and this allows you to dive so easily and generally when you get one reset in a team fight, you've pretty much won the team fight because you can just clean up everyone else!