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The Book of Aphelios

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Kalista Build Guide by

Vapora Dark In-Depth ADC Kalista Guide Season 10

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Kalista Build Guide By Updated on

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Guide Discussion (87) More Kalista Guides

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(7) |

what do you think about kalista top?

(624) |

Seems to be quite strong with rush.

(1) |

Very new to Mobas & lol - Trying Kalista during this free rotation for the first time.

EXCELLENT resource not only for her but all ADC's MF's my fav.

Really tough because I am learning EVERYTHING from scratch. The better the explanation the more thoroughly I understand their functionality to begin practicing with them rather than fudging around w/my own ideas for an hour.

Thank you for the in depth insight into Kalista as well as the very helpful adc tips

(1) |

Hi fun guide but its very outdated, as the guide itself doesnt cover the runes, keep up the good work though

(624) |

Glad you like the guide despite the runes issue. I'm working on getting a new Runes format for all my guides to make them easier to update, currently updating runes is too much coding work which I'm inexperienced with.

(5) |

THX FOR THE GUIDE! I just need a good one. XD , bw , GG ^_^.

Great guide! Well organized and easy to understand, plus great links to videos that are extremely helpful not only for this champion, but for play in general.
Thanks!

About runes. In the guide u advice to use precision + sorcery, but in top of the guide there is precision + domination now. Which one is better?))

(624) |

Domination is better.

Looking forward to trying this out! ^_^

What do you think about running lethal tempo on Kalista?

(624) |

It's not good, is much better.

(1) |

could you please make an ekko guide? I am not confident in my Ekko mechanics.

(624) |

I have no plans to make an guide currently sorry. Might happen in the future but I have no ETA for it.

(3) |

Detailed guide.Thank you tons.

(1) |

Thank you for this! She is very difficult to master, nonetheless.

(104) |

I don't like that you don't go in depth at all with runes, and all of your laning technique, and a lot of the farming in the late game technique just seems like basic ADC information. If I wanted that I would just google it; I go to Mobafire guides to get in depth information about the champion from someone who is in love with the champion, someone that has a deep passion for the champion. This feels like a cheap imitation.

(57) |

But isn't that the point of an in-depth guide? To cover any question a player who reads a guide would have (whom are usually newer players).
In my opinion, the point of an in-depth guide is to play this champ from 0 knoweldge to holding your own and making critical thinking without reference and in order to do that basics must be told.

You need item explanations, you need a general description on how to lane, how to teamfight and how to push/freeze.
And ADC is the most problematic role for that because it's all really similar. You either bully lane, scale the lane or push the lane (Draven, Kog, Cait respectivley). That's all 3 lane archtypes done.
Now what happens if you talk about Twitch instead of Kog? No matter how you possibly word it, the correct way to describe the "general idea of his lane" is going to be similar to Kog'Maw.
The pushing, the teamfighting, the laning. This information is 100% interchangable between most of the ADC roster.

My Draven/Jhin guides are probably the 2 most unique ADCs we have right now, Jhin because of the 4 bullets and AS limit. Draven for his 100% unique and gameplay changing mechanic.
Check those guides and I bet you even though they're unique, you'll find similar sections to any well written ADC guide. Runes, Summoner Spells, Crit Items... All the same.

The information being copy pasted is the only way to sort it out. If you write something perfectly, or just about, the first time, you wouldn't re-write it. So you'll change a few words and the ADC the guide pertains too.
It's like the meme in sneaky's twitch chat. "When do I push and when do I freeze?" It became a meme because newer players kept asking it and sneaky got sick of repeating himself.
An in-depth guide needs to cover this kind of information so the answer will nearly always be the same. Because Vapora has nearly 20 guides, more than half are ADC, why does he get flak for using general information?

Most importantly however, look it at it from a readers PoV. I don't know user traffic or site traffic in general, but I have a distinct feeling that most people don't read multiple guides within memory of the last.
Meaning, I just don't see someone reading Twitch + Ashe + Lucian + Tristana + Kalista then going "man all these guides are similar".
They would just read the twitch one and go "wow, that had a lot of information that not only helped me learn twitch but the role he's mostly played in! thanks for the extra effort!"

Vapora writing a lot of guides is a different "problem" (I use quote marks because I don't see it as such) than to ADC guides being similar and he just so happens to have mostly ADC guides.
No matter how you look at it, or who is writing the guides, a solid half of most guides in the same role will be similar as half the game is knowing more about the general game than your opponent.

(624) |

I don't really care about what you think since I know you'd love an opportunity to downvote me no matter what, but I'll respond just to clear this up for everyone that agrees with you.

https://i.imgur.com/4vx0QfN.png

https://i.imgur.com/MTRxqva.png

https://i.imgur.com/mnj1yOB.png

https://i.imgur.com/Yl3sr9m.png

https://i.imgur.com/yhdhtXZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/86rFlXT.png

Your criticism applies just as much here as it does to my guide (the author's a friend of yours too so you probably knew that already). But no one has ever gone to this author and said "hey man, this guide contains so much general information, it's really dirty that you're just using a bunch of general information to fill out your guide". In fact, this is the highest rated guide on the site right now!

But you know what's the only real difference between my guides and this guide? The biggest difference is I have 13 ADC guides and this author has 1 ADC guide, so on their part the information looks so much less repetitive and personalized even though it's just the exact same information that I'm presenting (I mean I helped write it, it's literally the same information, just sometimes reworded; minus the team-fight section, they straight up ripped that section off of mine once we weren't talking any more, but I guess it's okay for your friends to re-use my information, I just can't re-use my own information). They even go the extra mile and talk about dragons, scuttler crabs and barons, information that has nothing to do with the champion itself, it's just general information. But that's not a bad thing.

People just see how I'm spamming out ADC guides and see all the guides have the same general information after the items chapter and think "man that's so dirty, he's just writing the same guide over and over, that's so unfair". You know why Riot releases so few ADCs? Because it's so hard to make a unique ADC. They all do the same ******** thing. There's minor differences in their spells (the reason my spell chapters don't seem copy and pasted), but they all provide DPS, all play team-fights the same way, all have the exact same gameplay patterns, with only execution being different. It's not like with mid laners where some can frontline (), some assassinate carries, some disrupt with CC, some burn tanks; literally every single ADC fills the exact same purpose.

So of course my guides look repetitive, if I were to start spamming support guides you'd notice me copy and pasting with 0 rewording the exact same warding chapter in every single guide, just like I do the farming out of lane chapter.

"Yeah but that's so dirty dude, no other author engages in this kind of behaviour, copy and pasting content on guides is so bad".

https://i.imgur.com/FpMKyKF.png

https://i.imgur.com/o3EpbfZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/JvJUGAZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/5oFKT7v.png

"That's just one small chapter though."

https://i.imgur.com/0t3NPv7.png

https://i.imgur.com/cXNa3em.png

https://i.imgur.com/6LyELvL.png

https://i.imgur.com/IeRNOkK.png

Yes that's actually 4 different guides, though I may as well have screenshotted the same guide 4 times.

The only reason I'm the only author to get this kind of flak for this kind of behaviour is I have 20 guides. That's unprecedented for any reputable author to write that amount of guides, and naturally it draws a lot of attention and especially scrutiny when people see all the ADC guides and think "wtf, these all look so similar". Yeah no ****, ADCs all do the same ****ing thing. You think if the author of the MF guide were to write 10 more ADC guides they wouldn't re-use all the same general ADC information, just like they literally copy and pasted their warding chapter and I literally copy and paste my farming out of lane chapter? The information is all fine. It was fine when it was added to the guide 2 years ago, it was fine when I originally wrote it for my guide 2 years ago, and it's still fine when I add it into every other one of my ADC guides afterwards.

I understand why I get this criticism, but I also know it's wrong. My guides would not be better if I removed all the general information, they would be worse. All the general information in my ADC guides is information you need to know for playing ADC. Removing it would be like not talking about warding/roaming on support, not clearing or ganking on a jungler, not using TP on a top laner, not roaming on a mid laner.

Could my guides be more in-depth? Could I talk more about runes, about masteries, about spells maybe? Yes, yep, that's all valid. I'm not claiming to be writing the most in-depth guides around, I'm not claiming they're flawless, unable to be topped by anything anyone else could write, none of these guides are anything I would expect to win the yearly MOBAFire guide contest, I'm not trying to make them all contenders for Guide of the Century. They're just meant to be solid, correct guides, on a site infamous for garbage builds. That was fine when I wrote my first few guides, and it's fine now too.

Now to finish this off, just a few more examples of authors re-using either my information or their own information in their guides, on top of the already-linked screenshots of the MF guide author re-using the same information my own guides use:

https://i.imgur.com/01r9eMs.png

https://i.imgur.com/fm6rSec.png

https://i.imgur.com/z04Qnsv.png

https://i.imgur.com/JUuWH5D.png

https://i.imgur.com/xzzJE2f.png

https://i.imgur.com/8xgx3HF.png

https://i.imgur.com/PjeeJQT.png

https://i.imgur.com/rnvlTqh.png

https://i.imgur.com/ScnRlsw.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZmBJzEU.png

https://i.imgur.com/EDSRDD2.png

https://i.imgur.com/HwdS4Py.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZTtoxtb.png

https://i.imgur.com/oSyEn99.png

https://i.imgur.com/6KR1qLp.png

https://i.imgur.com/NdprLfN.png

https://i.imgur.com/dGY0Onw.png

https://i.imgur.com/CTaNcC7.png

https://i.imgur.com/VEpCT7G.png

https://i.imgur.com/uKCKvTC.png

https://i.imgur.com/6Jh30Ff.png

https://i.imgur.com/uka6brx.png

https://i.imgur.com/BgVnTcU.png

https://i.imgur.com/FWlDJde.png

https://i.imgur.com/GYtua27.png

https://i.imgur.com/3Byu2JO.png

https://i.imgur.com/hDNIyRg.png

https://i.imgur.com/WVhTjml.png

https://i.imgur.com/rrh4e96.png

https://i.imgur.com/VUXIW7M.png

https://i.imgur.com/oIIqNgZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/jZKETGR.png

https://i.imgur.com/WFLpPAe.png

https://i.imgur.com/l0WSZ4E.png

https://i.imgur.com/6UopfAh.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZIlfUj7.png

https://i.imgur.com/cWOnlGJ.png

https://i.imgur.com/dTXLSCM.png

https://i.imgur.com/VflZgxV.png

There's actually more than that but I can't be bothered to go on, you get the picture. All great guides use general information and if the author writes multiple guides for the same role, they're logically going to re-use the same information over and over.

But of course, 2 of the 3 authors mentioned in this post are your friends and you wouldn't criticise and downvote your own friends for this kind of behaviour; you probably hadn't even given it a second thought. But when someone you bizarrely despise for no apparent reason does it? Perfect opportunity to call them out in public for it!

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to clear myself up on this.

(2057) |

You could have put the images in an imgur album for convenience xD

I think the main difference between Jovana's and Joev's guides and yours is that they have 3 (whelp, respectively 5 support guides and 6 jungle) guides for the same role, not 13. They don't have a literal monopoly of an entire roster of champions (just...).

As I suggested ages ago, why not write a general ADC guide with all that extra information in it and link it in all your guides? I certainly feel like it'd be easier to update for you, as well as being a general, good-to-read resource that any ADC can access. You wouldn't get flamed for having copy/pasted content, as it is no longer copy/pasted.

I'd personally prefer a chapter specific to the gameplay of the champion, as opposed to mechanics of the ADC, ESPECIALLY IF you have those mechanics available to read as a stand-alone guide.

As an aside, it doesn't matter if you helped Jovana write her guide(s) when you were together, she has a right to keep that stuff up - bringing it up is a little irrelevant - as long as she credits you for the help (which I assume she does).

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(624) |

wrote:

she has a right to keep that stuff up - bringing it up is a little irrelevant - as long as she credits you for the help (which I assume she does).

She doesn't credit me but that's because I told her to remove me from all her guides. And I'm not criticising her using my information, I'm pointing out that you can't criticise me re-using my information in all my guides when it's re-used in her guides too but no one has a problem with her guide, only my guides. If anything my point is that you can't criticise me without criticising her too; and since I'm certainly not criticising my own re-use of my information, I'm not criticising her for it either.

wrote:

As I suggested ages ago, why not write a general ADC guide with all that extra information in it and link it in all your guides? I certainly feel like it'd be easier to update for you, as well as being a general, good-to-read resource that any ADC can access. You wouldn't get flamed for having copy/pasted content, as it is no longer copy/pasted.

Fact of the matter is, it would reach less people that way. Not to mention it wouldn't work; when I "copy paste" the later half of my guides, the bulk of the information is the same but I still have to heavily alter small bits to cover the ADC in question.

Like sieging - Caitlyn is the queen of siege, this is how you siege on her. Sivir is very bad at sieging, she doesn't have many tools to siege well with and her small range makes it dangerous. Laning - Lucian is very strong in lane, push your lane over and over and deny CS under tower, force trades frequently especially when you have minion advantage. Kog'maw, you'll frequently find yourself getting pushed in and losing trades, avoid trading as much as possible to remain high HP and focus on last-hitting to scale to late-game, it's natural that you'll fall behind, just don't die or force yourself to have to back early or you'll make it worse.

I literally copy and paste the entire gameplay chapter to use it as a reference as to what to write next, which is why it all looks so similar, but there are countless parts that need editing to fit the champion in question, and just having 1 general ADC guide would exasperate the problem you have with my guides of being too general, there would be less room for specializing each guide towards each champion.

Honestly the only way my guides would stop looking like copy pasted slightly edited versions of themselves is if I do stop copy and pasting relevant bits and just constantly re-write every guide from scratch over and over with each guide, basically using the same information but just rewording it every single time; which is just a massive waste of time when the only purpose is to appease fellow MOBAFire members, readers don't benefit from it and I don't benefit from it.

And this is a moot point by now anyway since I won't be writing any more ADC guides until there are new ADCs to write guides on, and as mentioned that doesn't happen very often since Riot doesn't like making ADCs since it's so hard to make a unique ADC.

wrote:

I'd personally prefer a chapter specific to the gameplay of the champion, as opposed to mechanics of the ADC, ESPECIALLY IF you have those mechanics available to read as a stand-alone guide.

I did this for my guide but as I mentioned last time, I can't do this for most/any other ADCs, their spells are just too simple/don't have enough unique interactions to talk about.

The best thing I could do for some of them is a combo chapter like Yamikaze does with his guides, but this doesn't apply to most ADCs anyway. for example; what combo? You have spells that you use whenever you want, you don't really chain them together. Same for . does have combos and I do mention them even though I don't have a combo chapter, they're just mentioned in the spells chapter itself; arguably I could have it better organized, but the information is there. But for other ADCs there's just really not much to talk about except "This spell does this. The end".

Similarly to Riot having an issue creating unique ADCs because the role is defined by their auto-attacks above all else, there's really not much to talk about in ADCs spells because their spells are pretty uninteresting in order to be better balanced around their auto-attacks. If you had an ADC that had all of 's spells and combos, but scaled off of AD and built like an ADC, it would be broken since you have a that's doing things while also melting tanks with 800 DPS late-game. That's why ADCs in general just simply don't have much to talk about in that department, their spells are usually very basic to make up for their main strength being their auto-attacks. Even who doubles as an assassin as well as an ADC assassinates with auto-attacks, there is no combo to talk about.

wrote:

I think the main difference between Jovana's and Joev's guides and yours is that they have 3 guides for the same role, not 13. They don't have a literal monopoly of an entire roster of champions.

This, if anything, is an issue with me and my popularity, not with the individual guides themselves (ergo downvoting my guides and criticising them relative to their competition for it isn't just). And while my popularity causing my guides to by default get higher scores than others obviously does suck from an outside, MOBAFire have not only given that the okay, they've literally said it's fine to go linking my guide to every single one of my fans 1 by 1 and saying individually to each one: "if you want to create an account and upvote that would help a lot".

I could have the #1 guide already if I were willing to do that, but since I'm not unlike a certain other individual on this site, it's not #1. My guides constantly reaching #1 almost every time is as fair as it's going to get. You can't prevent it any more than you can prevent Reddit users upvoting content from popular content creators while ignoring content from people they don't know. That's just how these systems work.

(1495) |

wrote:

I just wanted to clarify something here. When I was talking to you about this Vapora, I meant that you can accomplish the same goal (getting more guide traffic and votes by sharing your guide) without explicitly asking for votes. Asking people to just upvote your content is against the rules, the same way asking for Rep is. Suggesting that upvoting is a nice way to support you if they liked the guide is okay.

Basically same result, but don't ask people just to open your guide and vote on it without reading (or make an account to do so). Same reason people can say "If you liked the guide and want to support me, I'd appreciate an upvote or a +Rep," but "Hey XYZ, go +Rep me and upvote all my guides" isn't allowed. Your friends and fans will want to support you anyway; you shouldn't have to ask people for votes.

(2057) |

Which "certain other individual" are you referring to? Also, why say "you can't prevent it", like I'm trying to do that? xD

(624) |

I'm not trying to call anyone out here, this is unrelated to them. That's also why I didn't mention Psiguard or MissMaw by name and just referenced their guides as it was relevant to my argument.

I say it because if your problem is with my monopoly and not the content of my guides, then that's nothing to do with the guides themselves, and all to do with my popularity, which I can't help even if I wanted to.

(2057) |

Nah, like I said on your Ashe guide, my issue was with the copy/paste across all your ADC guides. And now that I've seen other guides do the same thing, I feel a little cheated there too. My feelings are pretty clear - if you have a certain role you're good at and you're copy/pasting a bunch of info regarding that role, I think you should make a general guide for that role and link individual guides to it. And as discussed above, you have your own reasons as to why you don't do that. Nothing really has amounted from this discussion, so I'll leave it be for now.

I do wonder if you'll start a trend of this sort of thing though. If enough people see it happening, perhaps they'll copy you.

(624) |

Quoted:

I do wonder if you'll start a trend of this sort of thing though. If enough people see it happening, perhaps they'll copy you.

I really don't think it's anything new. I'm sure lots of people did it before me, just never to the extent that it got so much attention. And there have been lots of people before me who can easily get the #1 rated guide for any champion they want regardless of whether their guide was amazing or just decent (DuffTime back in the day comes to mind), the only deterrent being motivation; why go through all that effort to do something that in the end doesn't really actually benefit you?

My case is different since I was trying and ended up succeeding in using guides to help me make a living through streaming, and no matter how many guides I write I'll always have the incentive to write more because of how much it helps with streaming. But no one else is in that situation and it's not something that's easy to recreate either, since it takes a lot of effort (months and months of streaming for basically no pay) put into streaming regardless of how many guides you create before you can actually make a living from it, so most people can't be bothered. Not to mention you also need a PC and internet good enough to stream with.

If you're not streaming you don't really benefit that much from writing guides beyond feeling proud about them, or enjoying the attention it gets you. I used to use guides to advertise for League coaching and even that didn't really result in anything worth noting, even having as many guides as I did.

So I doubt it'll start any kind of trend. Even with the minimum effort approach, like straight up skipping anything past the items chapter of a guide, people don't really feel it's worth the effort to write more than 1-3 guides.

(635) |

Kinda wish they had support for youtube content the same way, but alas. I'm not gonna make jack **** on youtube even if I do start making content again, but still.

(624) |

I guess they could add a feature to support a person's YouTube channel rather than their Twitch channel, but just due to the way streams work compared to videos, it wouldn't be anywhere near as beneficial as their additional stream exposure is.

(635) |

It was more musing. If it autoplayed the video and all included ads with no sound you would make money whenever someone looked at the guide, assuming the video wasn't flagged as "not advertiser friendly" and instantly demonetized. I personally stand a high change of making no money because being an LGBT+ person and ever mentioning it, even briefly, accidentally, or in passing, basically gets a video instantly demonetized right now.

Basically, they'd have to allow someone to embed a playlist of their videos, then autoplay and loop them, silently, while people were looking at the guide.

(635) |

I'm pretty sure Vapora wasn't bringing that up to say she shouldn't use that information and it seems like that was really obvious. I don't really have a dog in this specific fight, so don't go thinking I'm taking a side, but I can say I've been affected when other people did the same ****. It's hypocritical to ignore other people doing it and demonize Vapora for doing it.

Vapora has a "monopoly" because his content is good, which has largely made him a recognizable brand on MOBAFire, not because he ***** out endless guides. There have been/are plenty of users with large numbers of guides for a single role around, the difference was/is their content generally being incredibly subpar or them being so unknown that no one ever looked at what they posted.

One could argue you have a monopoly in guide templates and have had such for years. If someone else posts one, it gets largely ignored except by the people who directly know the writer. Should I go complain on that guide because GMD's template is basically only used by me these days? No.

(2057) |

wrote:

Now to finish this off, just a few more examples of authors re-using either my information or their own information in their guides, on top of the already-linked screenshots of the MF guide author re-using the same information my own guides use:

This, to me, seems very obviously a dig at people using "his" information. As long as they credit him (with a link to his profile or the original guide), I think it is okay to use his information (and of course if it was written with that intent - ie, they didn't plagiarize it, they wrote it together/he wrote it for them etc).

The difference is that those guides with my coding (or the coding I've put up created by other authors) don't have my name in the title. It's not xxx by jhoijhoi, it's xxx by userwhousedthetemplate. You can do what you want with your templates (and I'm sure you remember that GMD's template is about 90% inspired from the layout of the website Colin and I created back when), but templates =/= guides.

(635) |

I'm aware that's where it came from, yes, given that I put together pages for that website more than once. I'm also aware templates and guides are not the same thing, that also was really obviously not my point.

My point was that if a guide uses a template at all (rather than just being coded by a specific person), nine times out of ten it's that one. There's nothing wrong with that fact, despite it being a clear monopoly, which is why I shouldn't go complaining about it (that, and me not giving a **** one way or the other).

(2057) |

... I just don't understand how a guide template that is often never attributed to me (and/or the original coders) parallels with a guide with copy/pasted content specifically attributed to the same author?

(635) |

If Nick's template was popular enough to be used by that many people, most use of it wouldn't be attributed to him either. It also doesn't matter if your name is on it, people attribute coding by other people from that guide to you, if they credit anyone at all, because you put the guide together, regardless of whether you personally coded what they used.

You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not comparing my nearly exclusive attributed use of his template to other people using your content without crediting you or anyone else. I'm pointing out that if someone has a monopoly because what they posted is well made, complaining about it seems sort of unreasonable to me.

(624) |

Quoted:

This, to me, seems very obviously a dig at people using "his" information.

Nope, the first screenshot was the only one I ended up using that included my own information, and it was from Vicious Skittle, who asked me if he could use it and I said yes.

The rest of the screenshots were just Psiguard's guides re-using his own information, which obviously wasn't a dig at him since it's the same thing I do.