Snowball Katarina?

[quote=alyzar]I've been playing a lot of Snowball Katarina (Mejai -> Occult -> Leviathan) in normals and it's been working out pretty well if you play her carefully. Does anyone else do this? I feel like Gunblade Kat is kinda silly since the Gunblade nerf, and the hybrid route isn't really that good becuase of how expensive AD can be. She is awesome in the mid game as a finisher and if you plan your attacks so they definitely kill someone, you can either hop out of the fight or hop onto someone else if there's another kill around. That way, you can build up stacks pretty easily and eventually turn your ult into something seriously painful. Does anyone else play her this way? I did a write up on her if you're interested in learning more :D http://alyzar.com/?p=135[/quote]

[quote=wRAthoFVuLK]lol... you never ever want to depend on stacking items and stacking gunblades loses utility *check my guide cough cough*[/quote]

[quote=alyzar]Have you actually played it, or are you basing your opinions off of biased assumptions?[/quote]

[quote=alyzar]I've been playing Katarina for a while and it works better for me than any other Katarina build.[/quote]

[quote=Icuonuez][quote=alyzar] Have you actually played it, or are you basing your opinions off of biased assumptions? [/quote] I used to main Kat, and still play her sometimes. Snowballing is a bad idea on any champion. Snowballing all 3 items is even worse. Mejai's/SotO/Leviathan all make you the target in a teamfight, which means you die more. Bye-bye stacks. Sure, if you get all 20 on everything, it makes you hard to 1v1, but LoL is about teamwork. Besides, Leviathan and Sword of the Occult are wasted item slots on Kat. You could grab Void Staff and Rylai's instead. Wrath knows what he's talking about, and you should listen.[/quote]

[quote=alyzar]Read my post. Try it out, and THEN give your opinion, if you would be so kind.[/quote]

[quote=The_Nameless_Bard]I've tried it...and played with numerous people using it... It makes people focus you.[/quote]

[quote=alyzar]Why would you put yourself into a situation where you get focused in the first place? Whenever I play with my premade (in normals), I play Kat when we have a team that has a lot of disrupters (Jarvan, Amumu, Ashe, Janna, Poppy, etc) I run around the outskirts of a fight, and once someone gets low, I place a ward where I'm standing, shunpo onto them and ult to finish them off. After that, I either jump onto the next low health person or shunpo back to the ward and be completely safe. If you are in a situation as Katarina where you get focused or get stunned, you're playing her wrong. When I'm playing my best, I don't get stunned, and I sure as hell don't get focused. I can see myself getting focused if I initiate in at the very start of the fight, but if you play the mid game properly and (as I've talked about in the post) build up enough stacks by helping clean up skirmishes (and never engaging directly unless I know I will win) and because of the cheapness of these items, I can get Guardian Angel and QSS extremely quickly. It IS high risk, but if you are capable of playing Katarina properly, and targetting the right people, abusing wards and abusing her passive, it's leaps and bounds ahead of AP in terms of damage AND durability. If people DO focus you (assuming you stick around long enough to be focused), you have 100+ MR and Armor, the active of QSS, the ability to shunpo away, bonus movement speed, the bonus from killer instinct, AND the bonus from Leviathan. That makes me tankier and faster than most characters on the field (most of the time). I get 20/20/20 in at least 8/10 of my games. I'm not saying that to boast, because a lot of those games I played like crap. I'm saying it to point out how easy it is to build up stacks on Katarina.[/quote]

[quote=PsiGuard][quote=alyzar] If you are in a situation as Katarina where you get focused or get stunned, you're playing her wrong. When I'm playing my best, I don't get stunned, and I sure as hell don't get focused. [/quote] No, the enemy team is playing wrong. Katarina is countered by hard CC (stuns, silences, displacements and suppression). [[Exhaust]] also cuts down her usefulness a lot. If your team is full of disrupters, theirs can be too. If the enemy team sees you picking Kat, they WILL make sure to have some tools to deal with you, whether it be an [[Exhaust]] or two, or several silences and stuns. Even with QSS, you aren't invincible, and you aren't invulnerable to CC. In a perfect world (for your team), your build could be viable. The fact is, you can't count on all your teammates to be doing extremely well, using CC perfectly while the enemy team is completely incompetent and has tunnel-vision. Any smart opponent knows to save CC for Kat's ultimate. I do it every game when I play champions like [[Alistar]], [[Soraka]], [[Ashe]], [[Malphite]] and [[Lee Sin]] to name a handful; just think how many stuns, silences, displacements and suppresses there are in the game. There are plenty of champions who are built for counter-initiation and disruption of champions just like Kat. According to your logic, a [[Fiddlesticks]] with some AP and spellvamp would be able to enter a team fight (after the initiation) and be completely invulnerable because he's channeling drain. Is this realistic? No. Of course you're going to get CC'd. It's what any competent team would do.[/quote]

[quote=JakofAllSpaydes]What psi said. It's not realistic. Don't do it :/[/quote]