Champion Relaunch: Katarina, the Sinister Blade

This patch, we'll be overhauling one of our classic champions: Katarina, the Sinister Blade. Although Katarina's manaless, cooldown-based abilities put a unique spin on her gameplay, she's historically faced a number of challenges in the very early game and in team fight situations. In this update, we've made a few changes to her kit aimed at addressing these difficulties, while retaining the core elements that make playing this Noxian femme fatale a fun and satisfying experience. We also gave her a complete visual upgrade, including a new model, animations and spell effects on all of her abilities!

Katarina's New Abilities

• Voracity (Passive): Champion kills or assists reduce Death Lotus' cooldown and refresh your basic abilities.
• Bouncing Blades: Katarina throws a dagger that bounces from enemy to enemy, dealing magic damage and marking them. Striking a marked target with an ability or basic attack will consume the mark to deal additional magic damage.
• Sinister Steel: Katarina whirls her daggers around her, dealing magic damage to all enemies in the area. If she hits an enemy champion, Katarina gains Movement Speed for a short duration.
• Shunpo: Katarina instantly moves to her target's location and takes reduced damage from enemies for a short duration. If the target is an enemy, she deals damage.
• Death Lotus (Ultimate): Katarina becomes a flurry of blades, throwing daggers with unrivaled speed at up to three nearby champions. Daggers deal magic damage and reduce incoming healing on targets hit.

The first problem that Katarina players often faced was weak performance very early on, primarily related to the steep damage curve of her core damage ability, Bouncing Blades. While Bouncing Blades scales dramatically as it levels up, early on it ricochets only a few times, dealing relatively low damage. This forces Katarina players to play conservatively early in the laning phase, encouraging passive play until Bouncing Blades can be used to harass effectively.

To address this disparity, we normalized the damage inflicted by Bouncing Blades and made it bounce the same number of times at every level of the skill. In addition, each ricochet will now select the nearest available target instead of bouncing randomly. This change should both facilitate interesting counter-play for opponents and open up new harassment opportunities for advanced Katarina players who are able to predict where their daggers are going to bounce.

(read more on LoL forum)