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Recommended Items
Spells:
Ignite
Flash
Items
Ability Order
Voracity (PASSIVE)
Katarina Passive Ability
Introduction
Hey, guys! It's Tyler "ecco" Spesick here again with a guide for one of my favorite champions, Katarina! I was the former mid player for the LCS teams "Team MRN" and "Team Velocity eSports!"
I was always feel a little bit of resentment towards the aforementioned teams because they never let me play my beloved Katarina after she got beat down a little bit with the nerf bat but she is still a strong champion! Definitely after the recent buff to her ultimate where there is now no delay for it to start doing damage after casting it. Katarina is a very strong, unique champion who snowballs extremely hard. Her laning is a little rough in a lot of match-ups until you get very experienced with her but she is such a rewarding champion once you get the hang of her.
Pros
- Sooooooooooooooooo much fun.
- One of the strongest snowballers in the game.
- Heavy AoE damage with her ult.
- Arguably the best clean-up in team-fights due to her resets.
- High-mobility and roaming potential.
Cons
- Has a fair amount of weak match-ups.
- Not getting a reset in a team-fight makes her damage overall fairly underwhelming.
- Gets shut down hard by cc.
- Doesn't excel really well in an even game.
Katarina is a mobile, assassinating machine. As a result, she excels similarly to the team-comps and style that fnatic runs. This style is a very hectic, pick heavy kind of style. It revolves a great deal on denying vision, setting up picks, and then using your advantage of strength in numbers to force objectives and towers extremely aggressively. You can do this with champions such as




If you were to have a more team-fight heavy composition then you want either a very strong aoe-comp or another burst champion to help you get resets.









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These are my standard runes that I run on Katarina. Flat magic pen reds gives here the most damage with her burst and are overall by far the best choice for this slot. Flat armor yellows helps your laning because you will be getting auto-attacked so much since you are a melee who is fairly weak in her first few levels. Scaling AP blues is fairly greedy and makes your laning weaker but helps you scale harder into the late game. If you are against a very strong AP-mid and are worried about being bursted (such as against an



This is the mastery page that I have been running on Katarina since the beginning of season 4. It is very similar to that of season 3's and actually doesn't have any important differences. We go down the offense tree all the way to the bottom because having the most damage possible late game is very important. We then put our remaining 9 points into defense to help with Katarina's horrible early game!
The skill sequence shown above is the most standard leveling of Katarina's abilities. It gives you the most consistent damage, waveclear, and mobility. I use this skill sequence when I'm in a more even lane where I can be forcing trades a lot and spending a lot of time in the minion wave. The other skill sequence that I would use is maxing Q first before W. I do this in match-ups where it much more difficult. Such as when I am being zoned and it is my main form of harass and farming. Such as against a


sinister steel |
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Sinister SteelSinister steel is Katarina's most consistent damaging move. It gives you good damage in lane with your trading, helps with wave clear, is mediocre aoe damage in team-fights, and also gives you a pretty nice movement speed buff that helps you chase down opponents as well as run away from them. Once you are very experienced and are able to know the range of sinister steel down perfectly then you can use it to its highest efficiency. Such as running away but turning around for that split second to just baaaaaaarely get into w range to give you that movement speed buff to escape better. It also helps with trading in lane if you are able to throw your bouncing blade onto them and then hit them with sinister steel from the furthest range you possibly can. |

This will be your core for Katarina. Because she doesn't scale super hard off of AP and snowballs very well off of how you do early game it is best to invest into a lot of spell-penetration as quickly as you can.

As seen in example #2 this core can change depending on what you are laning against. If you are against a heavy AP mid then you want to get an early negatron and follow it up with an

If you didn't get an



By the time you finish your Deathcap, typically the other team (at least their tanks) have started to stack magic resist so you want to pick up a


Katarina has a lot of fairly weak match-ups that causes her to lose her lane slightly in cs but unless you play too aggressively and get punished for it, you should really never die due to your incredible amount of mobility with from
Shunpo. Such bad match-ups consist, of
Kayle,
Kennen,
Orianna, as well as many others.
The reason that they are bad match-ups is becuase they are all ranged, heavy hitting auto-attackers, who can always keep you down and punish extremely hard if you are ever aggressive when you shouldn't be. Just do your best to farm well, harass them when you can, ask for ganks if they are playing too far forward, and just to not get too far behind so you can be useful when the time presents itself.




The reason that they are bad match-ups is becuase they are all ranged, heavy hitting auto-attackers, who can always keep you down and punish extremely hard if you are ever aggressive when you shouldn't be. Just do your best to farm well, harass them when you can, ask for ganks if they are playing too far forward, and just to not get too far behind so you can be useful when the time presents itself.
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How your laning goes is going to greatly depend on what you are matched up against. If you are in more of a skill match-up (which is typically melee champions or those who don't have ridiculously strong early game) then you can be very aggressive and constantly trading with your opponent. Mostly you are last hitting with your auto-attacks or Sinister Steel and then harassing with your ![]() ![]() ![]() |
In more difficult match-ups, such as the ones listed in the match-ups section above, you will be playing much more defensive and mostly using your

Once you get past level 6, regardless of how tough the match-up is, you can start being more aggressive overall. As mentioned earlier, if your opponent wastes their cool-downs, then you should use

During the mid-game you should be typically looking for roaming options if you are able to clear your wave mid fairly quickly. One thing to keep in mind though is to not force ganks too hard. If you take too long to try and force a gank that isn't going to happen then your mid counter-part is just going to stay in mid free-farming, hitting your tower, while you're in another lane wasting your time. The best time to force a gank on Katarina is to tower-dive a weakened lane. Due to ![]() |
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As for your team's goals, it should typically revolve around denying vision and forcing picks through catching people in lane rotations as well forcing team-fights if you have a heavy AoE team composition. Katarina's team-fight can be one of the strongest in the game if it goes properly to the weakest if it doesn't. You /have/ to make sure that when you go in that it is the right time to go in. Know how much cc the enemy team track and try to keep track of which ones have been used and the rough time left until they are going to be back up again. I know that this sounds extremely difficult to do (I'm not saying it isn't) but the more experience you have on Katarina the better you will get at this. If you are able to catch a priority target away from the people who do have cc (such as an adc in the back-line all by their lonesome) then by all means dive them and do your best to single them out and murder them for your reset.
Typically you want to be dancing around the edges of fights throwing your

Your team's goals are the same as mid-game where you want to be trying to deny vision and catching opponents in their jungle as a result as well as forcing objectives. Your job is also the same but you must be even more careful than before because the longer a game goes, the more you get punished for even the smallest positioning mistakes.
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