Karthus Build Guide by SWAGRID

17/07/14 on my very first attemp with your build lol!

You should allow score pictures to pimp your guide. Increadible work and the best Karthus guide here. The life leech is crazy

Next I will try out the jungling XD

It definitely is an alternative build to standard core builds.

I think without clarity it suffers from lack of mana sustain and with clarity you lose flash or revive if you swing that way.

THe key to this is the mana pots and clarity without Archaengels MP5 you kidna need it. I ran dry on sustained fights if i went with Teleport/Flash using these builds. you trully need Archaengels Staff here.

in fact Archaengels providing 96 base AP at level 18 with potential to go to 127 AP if the 1000 bonus mana is reached is acing on the AP cake.
losing the sustain and mana bonus, hence losing the AP bonus leads to less time DPSing, less time Spell Vamping and overall less spell vamp due to reduced damage per hit since we dont quite have as big of an AP as we should.

Trade Ryjals slow potentials and tankiness for the Archaengels Staff and this build would trully shine.

In fact very little needs to change:
Start Boots 1, 3 HP
1st town vist-> buy Tear outright teleport to lane
2nd visit buy catalyst
3rd vist finish Roa or Boots or both.
then revolver->will of anchients abnd continue with your builds.

my 2c anyway.

good guide. i often play karthus especially now that it is free and i use this build

increadible build. nothing else comes close

+1

Loving this guide. Came across this when he was free. Bought him now. Best guide here for Karthus

Interesting, I will try this sometime.

Hey there!

Tried it out!

Great fun, never thought of a number of the things you mentioned and I thought it was fabulous!

Swagrid, just a few things,

1) Could you post a video of a ranked game you have played with this guide so I can see your style
2) Do you find late game you struggle a bit for surviveability? In some games, say your facing an akali who can burst you down instantly the spell vamp doesn't really help as you can't get off very many skills until you are dead, where a zhonyas would have saved you.
3) Whats your Elo? (I understand if you don't want to say)

Otherwise, nice guide! Made an account purely to say this! So I am going to try and figure out how to vote for it!

Eventhough i didn't try out this build yet, i think there are some things that are not taken into account properly.

- Requiem, for a finishing skill such as karthus's ult, isn't it more desireable to deal more damage, rather than having a smaller cooldown. On the other hand its very likely that the 40% CRD will get you to a certain threshold with your ult, having it avaible in every teamfight rather than 70% of the teamfights.

- Passive, While your build synergizes well with the short cooldowns of karthus, it does not synergize well with his passive. The passive of karthus works best when you deal a lot of damage in a short amount of time. The CDR would atleast not help with defile, since you cant switch it on and off. You could probably get 4 lay wastes and ultimate instead of 3 lay wastes, but the extra damage on Requiem and Defile would easily make up for that. on top of that, good luck spellvamping when your dead :P

- Focus / CC chains. Personally i find Zonias Hourglass the best item on karthus. and I wonder if without it you would be very prone to CC change and quick focus. Of course there is no denying that in some cases Zonias is better and in others Spellvamp based items are better. But i would like to know how you support the lack of hard anti-cc with spellvamp.

Also i would like to add that this seems like a build where you need a lot of skill to reach its full potential, since my, and probably everyones biggest concern is being focused down before your spellvamp comes into play. Once you have mastered the art of positioning you will able to position yourself such that you will maximally take about 50% of your health as damage which should be getting vamped up in a matter of seconds.

thats all, i will try your build out.

this build works, for the first time i actually had a build completed before the game ended, and i scored 17/6/17 without runes as i am not lvl 30 on that account. Very easy to understand, keep it up +1