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Kalista Build Guide by

[10.18] Spear of Vengeance|Diamond Guide With All Matchups

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Kalista Build Guide By Updated on

Guide Discussion More Kalista Guides

Runes:

Domination

Hail of Blades

Taste of Blood

Zombie Ward

Ravenous Hunter

Precision

Overheal

Legend: Alacrity

Bonus:

+10% Attack Speed
+9 Adaptive (5.4 AD or 9 AP)
+6 Armor

Spells:

1 2 3 4

Standard

Flash

Heal

Items

Starting Items

First Back (ANY)

CORE

LATE GAME FULL BUILD EXAMPLE

vs ap heavy

vs high hp tanks

vs high burst

other alternative items

Ability Order

Kalista Passive Ability

Threats & Synergies

Threats

Synergies

Extreme Major Even Minor Tiny

Show All

None Low Ok Strong Ideal

Extreme Threats

Ideal Synergies

Synergies

Ideal Strong Ok Low None

Champion Build Guide

How Good Is Kalista ?

Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Strong Early Game
• High Burst Damage
• Great Kiting
• Strong All-In
• Strong Duellist

Kalista is probably one of the best early game marksman out there, and at one point was picked as a top laner due to her strong oppressive early game. Not only this, she is often picked in professional play as an early/aggressive lane to dominate the bot side of the map. Especially since she has no difficult match-ups, meaning you can actually blind pick her. You will win 1v1s against all marksmen, making it very easy to win lane and snowball out of control, allowing you secure dragon and tower plating early on. Her Passive allows her to hop after each autoattack, allowing her to kite and chase down enemies like no other marksman can, which also makes her a bit more mechanically demanding. The only problem will be that of your support pick, you most likely need a support with CC to enable Kalista, something like Thresh or Taric is excellent with her, otherwise you may have a hard time killing your lane opponent, and going even as Kalista is not exactly ideal due to her poor scaling in comparison to other marksman.

Cons:

• Poor Scaling
• Weak Vs Slows
• Hard To Comeback
• Mechanically Demanding
• High Skill Ceiling

Kalista can be extremely fun to play but not without any drawback. She is very mechanically demanding due to her Passive. Allowing her to hop every time she autoattacks, and once you have your attack speed items completed, it will require you to constantly weave in movement clicks whilst inputting attack on the correct target continuously to make the most out of her kite and during teamfights and skirmishes this can be extremely overwhelming for a player who is not familiar with kiting. She is very susceptible to slows, if you get hit by a slow spell like Trundle's pillar or Ashe's volley in the middle of a skirmish or teamfight, you next autoattack + move will be extremely slow, even though your attack speed is not being reduced but because of your movement speed being reduced it will affect how fast your hop, in turn making your attack speed slower unless you are literally standing still which usually means death sentence. If you become really behind it is extremely difficult for Kalista to come back, mainly due to her poor scaling and her lack of synergy with crit items which is the main stat for scaling. There are also many champion specific mechanics that is rather hard to pull off

Why and when should you pick Kalista ?

Why Kalista ?

Very fun and challenging champion, I highly recommend her if you are looking for something more different than other marksmen, she has a very unique playstyle that can be very rewarding if you are able to pull her off especially with various of different mechanics that you are able to perform on her.

When to pick Kalista ?

Kalista is great when paired up with a support that has strong CC, something like Thresh and Taric has the best synergy with Kalista. It is usually okay to pick Kalista into something like Sivir, Twitch, Miss Fortune even when you have a losing support match-up, because of how hard you win in an isolated 1v1, if you play it well and is able outplay the enemy support by dodging, Flashing their CC, something like Nautilus's Hook, or Leona's E etc you can actually try to look for a 1v2 in lane even without the need of your support. However, you want to avoid picking Kalista when the enemy has a strong engage and all-in duo lane like Draven and Blitzcrank when you have a Sona. Which will be extremely unfavourable, you will most likely lose the lane and on top of it you do not scale against Draven, making it very difficult for you to do anything later on.

Runes

Hail of Blades

Basic attacking an enemy champion triggers Hail of Blades on-attack, with 2 stacks remaining. While Hail of Blades is active, you gain 110% bonus attack speed and your attack speed cap is increased temporarily. Hail of Blades lasts 3 seconds but has its duration refreshed by attacking enemy champions until all stacks are consumed. This is a very hyper-aggressive rune page which will amplify Kalista's already aggressive nature and early game, allowing you to trade much more efficiently in the early game and if the enemy disrespects you may even look for an all-in for first blood.

Taste of Blood

Damaging an enemy champion heals you for 18 − 35 (based on level) (+ 20% bonus AD) (+ 10% AP). I think this is good because you can make use of this in lane a lot, especially when you can go aggressive, you will be able to tag your opponent and get free healing from this rune, pretty much nullify any minion damage you take when trading which can in turn help you have a big health advantage over your lane opponent.

Zombie Ward

Scoring a takedown on an enemy ward summons a friendly Zombie Ward in its place (10 second assist timer). Gain 1.2 bonus Attack Damage or 2 Ability Power (Adaptive) for every Zombie Ward spawned, up to 10, for a maximum of 12 bonus Attack Damage or 20 Ability Power (Adaptive). After spawning 10 Zombie Wards, gain an additional 6 bonus Attack Damage or 10 Ability Power (Adaptive). I personally think this is the better rune option out of the other 2 because as Kalista you will be playing very aggressive and having the ability to leave wards behind after killing enemy wards can be useful, preventing potential ganks when there is no need to use any trinket or control wards personally.

Ravenous Hunter

Heal for 1.5% (+ 2.5% per Bounty Hunter stack) of the damage dealt by your abilities, on-hit effects and items, up to 14% at 5 stacks. Benefits from Heal Power. Earn a Bounty Hunter stack for champion takedowns, up to one per unique enemy champion.Healing reduced to one third on area damage.

Overheal

Converts 20% − 100% (based on level) of the healing in excess of your maximum health into a shield for an amount of up to 10 (+ 10% of maximum health).
After 6 seconds, the shield decays by 2.5% of its maximum value each second. Receiving healing, dealing or taking damage will refresh the shield duration to 6 seconds. In our build, we often build lifesteal and in particular Bloodthirster, which has a passive of giving your shields when you are lifestealing at full health, this has a great synergy with Overheal as the shield amount will be even higher, allowing you to take trades and look for potential all-ins during mid to late game. It will also prevent you from being blown up by any high burst champions.

Legend: Alacrity

Gain 3% (+ 1.5% per Legend stack)bonus attack speed, up to 18% with 10 stacks.
Attack speed stacks much quicker than the lifesteal rune, and you will build lifesteal from the very first item and then more lifesteal item later on so there really is not a need to go for the lifesteal rune, this will allow you to get the stacks faster and help you snowball quicker.

Abilities

Kalista's Passive

Kalista's basic attack has unique properties:
Deals 90% AD physical damage.
Misses if she loses sight of her target before they hit.
Is unstoppable.
Can switch targets mid attack windup.
Makes her dash in the target direction after issuing a movement command during a windup or right after casting Pierce.
The distance scales with her Boots tier. The windup while dashing is only reduced by 0.66% per 1% bonus attack speed.

Kalista's Q

COST: 50 / 55 / 60 / 65 / 70 COOLDOWN: 8

Kalista hurls a fast and narrow spear in the target direction, dealing physical damage to the first enemy hit. If Pierce kills its target, the spear continues onward, transferring all of the dead victim's Rend stacks to the next enemy it hits. This can repeat indefinitely until the spear reaches its maximum distance.

Side Note:

This is an excellent execute ability that allows you to transfer your Rend stacks, letting you trade against your opponents giving them no chance to retaliate. This also procs your Passive, letting you hop, which means at certain times even without targets, you are able to hop over walls to either escape from a difficult spot or make an outplay. When you use this ability and Rend straight away right before it hits the target it will deal more damage than if you wait for the spear to hit the target then rend, thus a form of execute.

Kalista's W

COOLDOWN: 30 RECHARGE: 90 / 80 / 70 / 60 / 50

SOUL-MARKED: While Kalista and her Oathsworn are linked, their basic attacks and Pierce apply a Soul-Mark to their targets.
If both Soul-Marks are applied within 4 seconds, the target takes bonus magic damage (capped against non-champions), and cannot be Soul-Marked for 10 seconds. Soul-Mark deals 75 minimum damage to minions and executes them if they're below 125 health. Kalista applies the damage on-attack while the Oathsworn's damage occurs on-hit.

BONUS MAGIC DAMAGE:
14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18% of target's maximum health

PASSIVE: Kalista periodically stocks a Sentinel charge, up to a maximum of 2.

ACTIVE: Kalista summons a Sentinel to patrol along the area in the target direction

Side Note:

This actually gives you extremely high amount of damage when both you and your support hits the same target and proc the passive, dealing bonus magic damage. It usually takes the enemy by surprise and will help towards building an advantage in the botlane. You can also use the Sentinel to scout out certain areas, whilst it is very unreliable, you can target it to the dragon pit and this way you will know if they are doing drake or not.

Kalista's E

COST: 30 COOLDOWN: 14 / 12.5 / 11 / 9.5 / 8

Kalista's basic attacks on-hit and Pierce each lodge a spear in the target for 4 seconds, stacking up to 254 times.

Kalista rips all lodged spears from nearby enemies, dealing physical damage and slowing them for 2 seconds. The damage is increased with additional spears, but with reduced efficiency. Rend deals 50% reduced damage against epic Monster icon monsters.

PHYSICAL DAMAGE:
20 / 30 / 40 / 50 / 60 (+ 60% AD)

SLOW:
10 / 18 / 26 / 34 / 42%

Rend resets its cooldown and refunds mana if it kills at least one target.

MANA REFUND:
10 / 15 / 20 / 25 / 30

Side Note:

This will be an ability that you really have to get a feel for, as there is no exact way to determine how much damage your spear stacks will do once you activate Rend. This is your go to execute ability when you are able to stack many spears into an enemy, combining your Pierce for that high execute damage.

Kalista's Ultimate

COST: 100 COOLDOWN: 150 / 120 / 90

Kalista invokes her link, retrieving her Oathsworn and cleansing them from allcrowd control while rendering theminvulnerable, untargetable, silenced, and unable to move for 4 seconds.

Kalista's Oathsworn can dashunstoppably to a target location, and automatically does so at the end of the duration, ending Fate's Call's effects and stopping at the first enemy champion hit, knocking up all surrounding enemies and landing themselves at their basic attack range relative to the target hit.

Side Note:

An excellent engage tool and also a way to save your support from any dire situation as you are able to pull him into you. Either going back in to engage once again or simply getting out.

In-Depth Mechanics

In-depth Mechanics

Spear Stack Transfer

If you do not know already, you can actually have multiple stacks on a single minion and then use your Q to execute the minion to transfer the stack to the next enemy in the target direction. This is especially relevant when you are able to stack multiple spear stacks onto a cannon minion in the early game and if by chance you can use Q to transfer it over to your lane opponent you can immediately Rend to deal massive damage, gaining a big health advantage over your lane opponent. You can even stack more spears onto jungle camps, which is usually rare but it may happen one day that you are able to stack hundreds of spears onto a single jungle camp and if an enemy happens to walk up you can try this stack transfer technique to potentially one shot them with Rend.

Rend Reset & Trade Pattern

You can reset Rend cooldown and refund part of its mana if you are able to kill the target that you activate Rend on. So, knowing this knowledge we can apply this to the way we trade, first we stack a spear or two onto an enemy minion then we walk up and try to attack the enemy lane opponent, if we do it successfully we are able to stack spears onto both the enemy champion and minion, and when we rend it will do decent damage to the enemy champion and at the same time it will kill the minion, immediately resetting the cooldown of Rend. And whilst killing a minion will refund part of its mana it will not refund all of it, so you can actually execute multiple minions using Rend to refund the full mana used or even gain mana from it.

Execute Damage

When you have multiple spear stacks on an enemy, you can rend it immediately but it may not always be able to kill them. In order to maximise your DPS to execute an opponent, first you want to stack as many spears into them as possible, then to execute them, you want to use Q and immediately Rend. So that you are Rending before the Q actually hits them, this provide the highest amount of DPS available, it may seem trivial but once you put it in practise you will realise how much more damage you do by applying this. If your Q is on cooldown, you want to attempt to exact same thing but with an attackattack, before the autoattack actually hits, and immediately Rend, this way you will also deal bonus damage but not as much as you would with Pierce.

Wall Hops

You can actually hop over various of walls and terrains by activating your Passive using autoattacks or Pierce. I highly suggest you to head into practise tool with Kalista, and try to hop over various of walls and terrains as there are many many different types, to test out which ones work and which ones does not. As even with this knowledge, you may struggle to wall hop, even in professional play, players will have a hard time hopping over walls if done incorrectly. You want to make sure your character is as close to the wall as possible, then autoattack or use Pierce and right click on the other side of the wall. Repeat multiple times until you get the general feel of it, and well if you want to be super crazy about it, you can actually hop back and forth a wall to confuse your enemies in a middle of a fight, but this is extremely difficult to do. Finally, do not forget, practise makes perfect!

Laning Phase

Laning With Kalista

Playing as Kalista will require you to have a very aggressive, dominating style mindset, as the whole point of picking Kalista is to win lane, not to scale or farm. So it is important that you are confident to play aggressively. Since Kalista does not have any real hard match-ups, it will heavily depend on the support picks whether the favour of the lane goes to or against you. Even when it is against you, you can look to outplay, for example you are against a Twitch + Thresh lane and you have a Sona support. You first must recognise the key ability here which is the Thresh's Hook and Flay. You can dodge his hook by Flashing, as you approach Twitch and once the Thresh missed his hook, that is him pretty much useless for the most part unless you run into him then he can flay you but it is still not as potent as his hook. Knowing the key cooldown is down, you can punish them if they remain forward, you can all-in the Twitch knowing Thresh has no hook for the next few moments. As we inherently beat Twitch in a 1v1 very easily, this will make it very easy for us to literally 1v2.

Out of Lane

Outside of Laning

Outside of laning phase, you are actually able to play around objectives very well, before the nerf Kalista was an extremely common pick due to her ability to stack spears onto either baron or dragon and dealing more damage than any jungler's smite can do, making it an almost guaranteed to get the objective with Rend. Even after the nerf you are still able to take down dragons and barons when it is around 1000 HP depending on your level, it is best that you try it out first and get a feel for it, otherwise you may mess it up and throw away an objective. Not only this, Kalista has a strong Ultimate that allows her to actually make the call to engage and start a fight using your support, or if you support makes a big blunder, you can use it to call them back in to save their life. Further down in the map awareness guide chapter, it will entail how you would know if it is a good or bad fight.

Map Awareness Guide

In the video above I talk about the following concepts:

- Respecting Fog of War

- Hitting/Starting Objectives without a Reason

- Dealing with Assassins

- Knowing what good fights to take and what bad fights to avoid

It is recommended that, you take one of those tips and attempt to apply it in your next game to reap its benefits. Make sure you only do one at a time if it is too overwhelming, otherwise you will not learn from it. Even playing in a normal game will help, it need not be ranked.

Solo Engage as ADC at Level 2

In the video above I talk about the following concepts:

- Level 2 Power Spike

- How to punish your enemies with this power spike, or respect it and back off of it

- Knowing how many minions it takes to reach level 2 first in a duo lane

- 3 Clips of 3 Different ADCarry; Tristana, Caitlyn and Ezreal show casing what we have mentioned above.

Make sure you test this out in a normal game first before attempting it in ranked. It is okay to make mistakes, go all out and learn from your mistakes. Best to record with some sort of software so you can go back and watch your own replay to analyse what has happened.

Teamfighting

This video is not owned by me but I think it is very well detailed on how to teamfight in general as a carry.

- Direct Initiate

• Create fight or flight response.
• Go in 1v5 if you have to.
• Carries DO NOT go in.

- Follow Up Initiate/Hit Tanks

• Tank pressure backline, or tankline.
• Forces everyone to use cooldowns/abilities
• Carries stay OUT until tank cooldowns/abilities are used.

- Hit Tanks

• Hit tanks after tank cooldowns/abilities are used.
• Forces out backline cooldowns/abilities
• Carries in range of 1 person.

- Kill Backline

• APC flash on backline or finish off tanks.
• ADC can dive if no enemy burst cooldowns/abilities are up.
• Tanks can make a flash play.

- Clean Up

• Flashes to kill fleeing enemies, this will ensure objectives are much easier to take without anyone contesting or the potential of throwing the game away.