Lasoor wrote:
Lets compare this to
Kassadin just because he's a champion I have experience with. Take a look at his
Null Sphere. He points at enemy and clicks dealing up to 185 damage + 70% of his AP, cancels any channeling the enemy was doing (*cough
Malzahar), AND gains a shield that absorbs up to 160 magic damage + 30% of his AP. So at 500 AP he does 535 damage and gains a shield that absorbs 310 magic damage.... All he does is points and clicks and does more damage than
Karthus, cancels enemy channeling, and gains a 310 magic damage shield....








Lasoor wrote:
Lasoor wrote:
if the fking thing didn't cancel if you died and instead just kept channeling. Oh and not to mention champions that can cancel his ultimate (*cough
Kassadin).

IDK man, I've had a couple of



Quoted:
You should compare DPS (damage per second), not base damage though. In the time Kassadin did one Null Sphere, Karthus can spam 9x Lay Waste. Even without the 2x multiplier and taking in account the shield as damage it deals more damage per second, which is fine since it's a skillshot vs a point and click skill.
I stressed the point that even landing

Quoted:
Tank Karthus is a thing (the guide is probably slightly outdated but it's probably not far from optimal). Buffing the AP scaling would cause some weird optimizations like offtank builds being OP on him.
Tank

Quoted:
That's because the idea is using your ult either after you die or getting some smart positioning to avoid channel cancelation.
IDK man, I've had a couple of Karthus enemies lately and he seems fine. Awful early game for great late game, some hard counters in lane and some hopelessly lost games when against a good Karthus aren't signs of a weak champion. I guess he's a bit too wide on his extreme cases (hard counters too hard, early/late power difference too big), but since his kit is already pretty low on mechanics I don't see an obvious way to solve it.
IDK man, I've had a couple of Karthus enemies lately and he seems fine. Awful early game for great late game, some hard counters in lane and some hopelessly lost games when against a good Karthus aren't signs of a weak champion. I guess he's a bit too wide on his extreme cases (hard counters too hard, early/late power difference too big), but since his kit is already pretty low on mechanics I don't see an obvious way to solve it.
I mean it's pretty known that





This video sums up

Lasoor wrote:
I stressed the point that even landing
Lay Waste is insanely difficult. You may be able to spam it 9x, but you may only hit once or twice and in that time you are also having your movement paused which results in your death.

Lasoor wrote:
Tank
Karthus is basically useless though. It makes literally no sense to take a squishy AP focused mage and build it as a tank. You might as well play a real tank.


Lasoor wrote:
I mean it's pretty known that
Karthus is bad right now. I don't see how you can think he's a fine champion when champions that are far better than him fall off in higher elo.
Karthus in higher elo is so bad because people in higher elo are good enough to not get hit by one of the easiest skill shots to dodge. Even bronzies can dodge him... The best
Karthus plays I've seen relied on his team and resulted in him mostly just kill stealing.






Lasoor wrote:
When I play him I normally do pretty well, but that's just because I am good at the game. To make up for missing just about everything I farm up to 300 CS as fast as possible so I can punish the enemy team for team fighting with my ultimate. I grab items like
Rylai's Crystal Scepter to do effects on them all at once. I often times do tons of damage by late game if I ever manage to hit my
Lay Waste, yet I also die like 15 times just because how immobile the champion is. And the amount of damage is nothing compared to the enemy burst mage.






Lasoor wrote:
This video sums up Karthus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C66vjew-APQ

Quoted:
That's just an exaggeration. It depends on your skill, your enemy reaction and your own strategy around when to spam the spell (it's easier to hit it after landing your wall or waiting for a complicated teamfight). You can't just say everyone will only hit it once or twice out of nine times because you've been unable to land it so many times.
It's not an exaggeration nor am I saying it applies to everyone. But the fact that


Quoted:
You're probably underestimating Aqua Dragon's build though. The guy did the math and played the build with success in platinum elo. It might not be the best one, but my point is that buffing his AoE could actually make it the optimal build, which would suck, since it avoids the skill check from Lay Waste.
I mean you can get away with anything in higher elo if you're good enough. Good build or not, it doesn't refute my point that you'll get more out of playing an actual tank when building tanky instead of a squishy mage who has 1 ****py CC ability and the ability to continue to use abilities after death(meaning being alive is less important).
Quoted:
He has a 51% win rate in platinum elo and higher. Compare him to Master Yi, for example, who actually falls off in high elo. You're looking at it backwards, people in higher elo actually know how to predict where to land their Lay Wastes better and how to make it easier to land too, so your appreciation only works for you. Lastly, I'd rather let a decent Karthus have the kill than me, it's one of the hardest scaling champions in league. And "relying on your team" is what you're supposed to do, not some handicap one player has. By relying on your team's CC or even the distraction caused by their skills you can easily land your Lay Wastes and deal several times more damage than any other mage.
Um no, he has a 51% win rate total among all elos and a play rate of 1.24% which means it is mostly people really good with



The last time


Quoted:
You're average. Every single decent Karthus player farms a lot and Rylai's Crystal Scepter is one of Karthus' most frequently built items. I've seen my Diamond elo brother play him going literally into their enemy team to get killed and deal a lot of damage without fear of CC. Karthus has some weird optimization around his passive... And also a pretty well defined mastery curve in which newer players have under 50% win rate and go well over it after some games, further showing that with experience you can overcome some of those problems.
Again, you're going off of statistics that only apply to a very tiny minority of the League of Legends community. Almost no one actually plays


A






The Europeans play him a bit more. The top guy in EU West server according to op.gg played 227 games, is Diamond 2, and has a 59% win rate on






For the most part it seems it takes being Master tier or higher to truly be good at

I also looked up other people's reasons for why he sucks and apparently it is because Riot over time nerfed all of his kit, nerfed AP items he uses, and buffed ADCs and assassins which he is weak against. Not to mention all the 'new' champions added that make him less of a viable pick if they're chosen such as





Then people also say

Many mages that people pick currently have great defense against assassins and adcs. And most people in mid are picking assassins now.

Quoted:
Darkk Mane sucks at league so hard man.
That video was a joke.
You might argue that my sample pool is small, but where are you taking your data from then? If you're stating that "
Karthus is harder to do well with than
Azir" out of your own experience I think my sources are more reliable.
It's the same everybody said about AD
Malzahar jungle (also aqua's build), but granted, maybe it's Aqua being too good. The point is that the build is borderline usable. It deals significant damage with
Defile since it has great base damage and is more reliable than
Lay Waste, and gets a bunch of tankiness because that's what you have to get if you're doing damage in an AoE around you. If you add good scaling to it, it would turn into a must max if buffed and the build would become clunkier and very toxic. I guess you could lower base damage and increase AP scaling, but that would further enhance
Karthus' early/late power difference.
1.24% play rate is well over one thousand games JUST THIS PATCH. It's not a small sample, it's not
Aurelion Sol jungle that was used less than 100 times and dropped to less than 45% win rate as soon as it hit around 500 games.
And I'm guessing the point about competitive was just an extreme example of a small sample because you see 1.27% as a little percentage even though there are 47 different mid laners to split those 100%.
So many of the
Karthus main op.gg pages you checked look bad, but my sample of over a thousand games from this patch was small? And Archangel being most common doesn't change the fact that Rylai's is the second most common. Not sure what was your point there.
Nope, those aren't the people with more games played as Karthus by a longshot (those are only from NA too). You're just making excuses at this point. I've presented you with a serious stats page and you disregarded it "because it's a small sample" and now you keep pointing out at your personal opinion and personal experiences and using what you see as top players as examples (i.e. presenting even smaller samples).
Are you gonna say it's "because it's a small sample" on this too? Or is it only when you don't like the conclusion? Master and Challenger players are literally edge cases, and op.gg only has around 50 games on him from challenger/master players over the last month (in NA, other regions could be higher or lower, but the point is that THAT is a small sample). You can also check how many of the champions with lower win rate than
Karthus aren't weak if you want to see why it's not a great argument.
This is both subjective (you can say any champion is bad by pointing out how many things that annoy it there are out there, and
LeBlanc is a prime example of constant nerfing doing nothing to her) and meta-dependant. He's clearly out of meta and he has been for a couple of years afaik. That doesn't mean he's bad, it just means he has a smaller playerbase than average. People playing him and liking his playstyle can play very well with him (as noted by the bunch of stats I posted here). You might just not like him.
Then again, as I pointed in my original answer, I can see he has some more complex problems that Riot might address someday like his early/late game power curve and versatility versus counterpicks.
I know. I didn't make an argument around it, I just pointed out that it annoys me how bad he is. I kinda like his videos and subbed to him on youtube for a while, but most of the plays he makes cringe me too hard.


Lasoor wrote:
I mean you can get away with anything in higher elo if you're good enough. Good build or not, it doesn't refute my point that you'll get more out of playing an actual tank when building tanky instead of a squishy mage who has 1 ****py CC ability and the ability to continue to use abilities after death(meaning being alive is less important).




Lasoor wrote:
Um no, he has a 51% win rate total among all elos and a play rate of 1.24% which means it is mostly people really good with
Karthus who play him, which isn't a large pool of people. He has a 100% win rate picking Sweeping Lens which was only done 1 recorded time according to Champion.gg. Not really smart to trust win statistics on a champion that almost no one plays in ranked. It is certainly possible to do well with
Karthus, but that doesn't mean he's good. There are high elo
Aatrox mains after all.
The last time
Karthus was played competitively he had a kda of 3/6/8, compare that to the last time
Aatrox was played competitively with a kda of 4/8/18.



The last time



And I'm guessing the point about competitive was just an extreme example of a small sample because you see 1.27% as a little percentage even though there are 47 different mid laners to split those 100%.
Lasoor wrote:
Again, you're going off of statistics that only apply to a very tiny minority of the League of Legends community. Almost no one actually plays
Karthus because most people who try to get good at him stop playing him.The people left playing him are the few success stories. I've looked at many of the
Karthus main op.gg pages and many of them didn't look so good. And Archeangel's Staff is more commonly chosen than Rylai's Crystal Scepter.



Lasoor wrote:
A
Karthus "master" according to op.gg is a Challenger tier player who has a 67% win rate on
Karthus and played it 93 games. The second place on their masters list played only 40 games, is Diamond 1, and has a 50% win rate on
Karthus. The next one played 36 games, and is Diamond 1 with 53% win rate on
Karthus. Then a master tier player who has 52% win rate on
Karthus with 28 games. I'm pretty sure these are the people who have played
Karthus the most on the NA server and they all together have played less games than it would normally take to truly master a champion. Their win rates reflect on that.






Lasoor wrote:
And even the Master tier and up players aren't doing that great with him.

Lasoor wrote:
I also looked up other people's reasons for why he sucks and apparently it is because Riot over time nerfed all of his kit, nerfed AP items he uses, and buffed ADCs and assassins which he is weak against. Not to mention all the 'new' champions added that make him less of a viable pick if they're chosen such as
Tahm Kench,
Bard,
Kindred, and
Ekko. Not to mention
Soraka ult.
Then people also say
Karthus ult is way too weak in relation to the high cooldown on it. And of course the easy to dodge abilities. His most useful ability is often times his wall just so he can slow enemies down and hit them. But it isn't always easy to make use of it because the set up for it is kind of wacky. When you're trying to place a giant wall it can be difficult to angle it right and often times you have to try to throw it right on someone. Then of course anyone with a gap closer will just jump on you and kill you anyway.
Many mages that people pick currently have great defense against assassins and adcs. And most people in mid are picking assassins now.
Karthus seems more better at handling tanks than anything else which is kind of sad.





Then people also say

Many mages that people pick currently have great defense against assassins and adcs. And most people in mid are picking assassins now.


Then again, as I pointed in my original answer, I can see he has some more complex problems that Riot might address someday like his early/late game power curve and versatility versus counterpicks.
Lasoor wrote:
That video was a joke.

Quoted:
You might argue that my sample pool is small, but where are you taking your data from then? If you're stating that " Karthus is harder to do well with than Azir" out of your own experience I think my sources are more reliable.
I'm taking my data from specific experiences that top


Quoted:
1.24% play rate is well over one thousand games JUST THIS PATCH. It's not a small sample,
Um no, that play rate wasn't just this patch. It was this season and possibly even earlier seasons all mixed together.
Quoted:
So many of the Karthus main op.gg pages you checked look bad, but my sample of over a thousand games from this patch was small? And Archangel being most common doesn't change the fact that Rylai's is the second most common. Not sure what was your point there.
Those



Quoted:
Nope, those aren't the people with more games played as Karthus by a longshot (those are only from NA too). You're just making excuses at this point. I've presented you with a serious stats page and you disregarded it "because it's a small sample" and now you keep pointing out at your personal opinion and personal experiences and using what you see as top players as examples (i.e. presenting even smaller samples).
The way they set it up is they show you the high elo



Quoted:
Are you gonna say it's "because it's a small sample" on this too? Or is it only when you don't like the conclusion? Master and Challenger players are literally edge cases, and op.gg only has around 50 games on him from challenger/master players over the last month (in NA, other regions could be higher or lower, but the point is that THAT is a small sample). You can also check how many of the champions with lower win rate than Karthus aren't weak if you want to see why it's not a great argument.
The amount of games it says they played is far more than 50. It records the number of all the games they played on



Quoted:
This is both subjective (you can say any champion is bad by pointing out how many things that annoy it there are out there, and LeBlanc is a prime example of constant nerfing doing nothing to her) and meta-dependant. He's clearly out of meta and he has been for a couple of years afaik. That doesn't mean he's bad, it just means he has a smaller playerbase than average. People playing him and liking his playstyle can play very well with him (as noted by the bunch of stats I posted here). You might just not like him.
It's not subjective, it is a compilation of the actual reasons he has fallen off. He at one point was a more viable pick and now is a pick that requires tons of effort in mastering him to do much with him. Which again brings me back to the evidence I laid out of the high elo players who put time into mastering him and still did badly with him in Ranked. This section is simply the explanation of why he didn't work in ranked. It's like trying to play

Except even


I have put tons of actual data into my argument yet you make the claim it is based on opinions while your argument has literally nothing backing it up except a very low ranked play rate which includes every elo that you think is just this patch, when it's not. And yes 1.24% is a very low play rate. Compare it to




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Lets look at his abilities.
"Creates a delayed blast at Karthus' cursor position.
Almost impossible to hit that delayed blast, especially at higher elos... Plenty of skilled players have tried
"deals 40 / 60 / 80 / 100 / 120 (+30% of ability power) magic damage to each nearby enemy. This deals double damage if it hits only a single unit."
Okay so it normally will only hit one person because the radius is so small. So lets say it does 220 magic damage plus double 30% of your AP, or is it just 60% of your AP? That part isn't clear, i'd assume it's just double whatever 30% of your AP is. Anyway, if you have 500 AP that's 300 damage if you double 30% of 500. So a total of 520 damage if you hit just 1 enemy with your ability. Now, each time you use it the small area of effect is delayed by 0.5 seconds. So the damage is alright for a low mana ability that you can spam, but when you try to actually use the damn thing you will miss almost every shot. Not to mention it has cast time.
Lets compare this to
So it's obvious what I'm gonna say here, increase the damage on
This ability is basically his only chance against any gap closing type champions who rush him or any champions that know how to avoid a tiny radius in 0.5 seconds. So basically this is all he has in many fights until he dies. (When he dies he can focus more on landing his Q because he's no longer multitasking, even then it's hard).
"Drains 30 / 42 / 54 / 66 / 78 Mana to deal 30 / 50 / 70 / 90 / 110 (+20% of ability power) damage to nearby enemies each second."
This ability ends up being his only real way of hurting anyone competent enough to right click and it only scales off of 20% of his AP.... At this point I feel like going ADC
This ability is the only reason anyone plays
So there you have it, that's my
Even if I'm wrong, I do feel like we can all agree that
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