[2020] Thoughts on Katarina after playing like 40 games of her this season

Originally posted by czartaylor

actually yes though.

kat isn't a good champion. She's just good when people play bad. She gets smashed in lane by nearly every mid laner (if you have either a dash or a quick form of interruption and are ranged, you probably beat kat in lane), can't roam bot effectively when people ward, and as a result is rarely relevant in teamfights. Sometimes shit does happen and she gets kills and snowballs, but it shouldn't be happening frequently except for the fact that solo queue players are lazy and don't ward properly and won't learn how to deal with her.

There's a reason why even diana sees niche pro play despite (if you judge purely by solo queue stats) being worse than kat: she has less abusable weaknesses than kat, but even then she's still pretty bad and frequently gets exposed when played in pro play for similar reason to kat.

it's not daddy riot's job to hold people's hand and nerf champions because the player base doesn't want to learn how to deal with them. It is riot's job to nerf champions that are unbalanced no matter how good you actually are.

Originally posted by czartaylor

'solo queue players would rather bitch about how unbalanced a champion is rather than learn to deal with them' falls firmly under 'not riot's problem'.

kat has clearly defined weaknesses that pro players exploit to make her trash in pro play. Solo queue players could learn how to do those things and have the same result, but they would rather blame kat being unbalanced and their team being bad than do it. 'my team ignores pings' is not a reason to not learn how to ward properly vs her or lane properly vs her.

Originally posted by czartaylor

riot shouldn't balance the game around solo queue at all aside from dealing with ridiculous ouliers (like, 55%+ outlier at a minimum).

you balance the game around people who are actually good at it, not around people who are a bad at it. People who are good at the game give objective statistics. Pro players are equally skilled, as good at a champion as they can be, and play properly. When they test a champion therefore, the only factor that varies is the power of that champion. The most powerful are then played on stage. When you balance around solo queue, you have to consider how good people actually are at the game. Which is why akali had a 46% win rate despite being absolutely broken.

Originally posted by czartaylor

no one said pros are infallible, but they are by far the best metric for determining champ balance, not solo queue shitters.

When you look at solo queue balance, you have to account for

player skill in general

player skill at that champion

how hard the champ is to play

how high the skill ceiling on a champ is

skill of the teams relative to each other

stuff like secondaries/autofill

general shit happens.

and a couple other things

there's so much that can affect the data that you can't control for.

when pro players test a champion, the only factors affecting it are:

champion power

general shit happens.

pro players are roughly as skilled as each other and roughly as good at a champion as they can be. It produces more reliable data.

Originally posted by czartaylor

but it's as close as it's ever going to be. While it's true that the worst pro player is substantially worse than the absolute best, the range is actually relatively small. The best pro player in the world isn't actually that much better than the average pro player.

There's a reason why 'import the best players' hasn't been working for NA for years: just having good players doesn't make a good pro team, and a lot of it is that the skill gap just isn't that big.

Originally posted by Magehunter_Skassi

The consensus of almost every top Katarina player is that she's trash.