Hello! Welcome to my Kalista guide. I'm a Gold S5 Kalista main (170k pts) and in this guide I'll be explaining the way I like to play and build Kalista. You'll be kiting your enemies in no time! So sit back, relax, grab some snacks and get ready to learn all about Kalista.

There are two common builds that Kalista can go, which I like to call Kitelista and Kritlista.

Kitelista focuses on survivability and sustain while Kritlista focuses on high damage auto attacks with much less sustain.

Personally, I prefer Kitelista, as I am more accustom to it and find it more comfortable.

But if you prefer to go for the Krit build (which is considered "more meta" at the moment, as runaans gives crit now), it goes as follows:

Bork>Berserks>IE>Runaans>Last Whisper (Lord Dom/Mortal Depending)>Defensive item or 6th offensive item


As for Kitelista, its essentially the same but instead of IE you go for a BT.

For masteries, I prefer 18/0/12. 18/0/12 gives you more sustain and kitability as you receive more healing and lower cooldown on your summoner spells.

Alternatively one can take 18/12/0 but I just prefer 18/0/12.

Both of these setups work, it just really depends on how you want to play her. I personally find 18/0/12 to be much more effective in the mid to late game for extra survivability whereas 18/12/0 tends to shine in laning phase as it gives you a good bit of damage, and the biscuits are alright as well.

In ferocity, one can take Feast or Expose Weakness, but I find feast more useful for the extra sustain in laning phase.

As for runes, I just take standard runes.

Flat MR Blues, Flat Armor Yellows, Falt AD Reds, Flat Attack Speed Quints.
Alternatively, one can take scaling MR blues in a low magic matchup.
Some players also like to swap out a few MR blues for attack speed, and that can work as well. I personally would not recommend this as it is a large sacrifice and should only be taken against extremely low magic damage teams.

Maxing rend first is pretty much the only strategy that works on Kalista. Maxing Q used to work against certain matchups but due to certain nerfs I find that maxing Q is counter effective. So Max E>Q>W while also leveling R at the appropriate ranks.

Q: Pierce- Pierce is a linear skillshot that throws a spear which also grants you a hop of Kalista martial poise. The spear can proc your W's passive, and also applies a single stack of rend in any target hit. If the spear kills a target, it will continue on to the next target passing over all the spears from the first target. While this sounds like it could be extremely useful, its only really useful for farming. Rarely will you ever get an opportunity to pass 20 spears from gromp into the enemy ADC.

W: Sentinel- Sentinel's grant vision and essentially act as free wards when used properly. Sentinel's can also grant an assist on a kill if the sentinel grants vision of the target. (This means if the enemy jungler executes while your sentinel scouts them you will get the kill credit!)

As for the passive part of her W, basically if you and your support auto attack the same target within a 2 second window, it deals % health magic damage to that target (with a 10 second cooldown per target). This is really useful for free damage in laning phase when utilized properly.

Additionally, as of patch 6.6, Kalista now gains more attack speed ranging from 9%-27% based on her level.


E: Rend- Activating rend will rip all the spears of out a target dealing more damage per spear in them. Rend's cooldown also refunds upon killing one target, while the mana cost refunds upon killing two or more targets. Rend is extremely useful as a farming tool, trading tool, and execution tool. When trading a good trick is to put enough spears in a minion to kill it, auto the enemy adc, then pop rend; refunding the cooldown from the minion and slowing the adc so you can then put more stacks of rend into them, hopefully being able to kill them.

R: Fate's Call- Pulls in your Oathsworn and throws them back out knocking up all enemies in front of them. This can be used offensively or defensively, for example if your support is about to die, you can pull them away from danger; or you can use it as a tool to engage with.

Kalista is in an extremely weak SoloQ champion as of right now because of the changes they made to her W in Patch 6.6. They essentially made Kalista extremely reliable on her support and staying with her support 24/7 so if you plan on playing Kalista in ranked I highly recommend you find a duo support partner that you can trust.

Pros:
-Fun to play
-Extremely rewarding when played correctly
-Much more entertaining to play than other adcs

Cons:
-Extremely Difficult
-Requires ALOT of practice
-Requires full attentiveness as you're constantly hopping
-Not exactly the strongest ADC at the moment :c (18/19 based on winrate)

While there are more cons than pros, she is still really fun and I highly recommend learning her as she is super fun to play once you play her correctly.

It might take 5 games, 10 games, or even 20 until you break even but its alot of fun once you learn how to play her properly.

That's all I have to say about Kalista. I wanted to keep it short and simple. If you want a more in-depth guide I'd highly recommend the HastaKalista guide as that is where I learned most of what I know, with experience of course :) Anyways, thanks for stopping by! Hope to see you playing Kalista on the rift!