Buzz
Katarina will find it challenging to prioritize attack speed items, with strike effects being more pronounced with this update.
Yesterday - on 9/6, version 12.11 officially landed on the Vietnam servers with significant changes. This implies that testing for version 12.12 has also been introduced on the PBE server and has garnered significant attention from gamers. Essentially, this is a patch aimed at fixing bugs as the last two updates were massive and caused numerous issues in League of Legends.
The first name brought to the editing table by Riot Games is none other than Katarina, as they inadvertently 'forgot' about this character in previous updates. In the latest updates on the PBE server, Riot Games heavily nerfed Katarina's ability to interact with the LCK and her attack speed. Specific changes include:
Katarina
The base interaction rate with the LCK Dagger reduced from 75% to 65% for Phi Dao.
The interaction rate with LCK of E - Shadow Step decreases from 50% to 40%.
The interaction rate with on-hit effects of the ultimate increases from 25-35% to 28-38%.
The interaction rate with LPT per hit of the ultimate decreases from 19% to 18%.
The interaction rate with attack speed per hit of the ultimate changes from 80% attack speed to 166.6% base attack speed.
Observing these changes, we can see that building items to increase LCK and attack speed will become significantly less effective with Katarina. Perhaps Riot Games intends to steer this Sinister Blade back towards items that increase LPT rather than going for the Infinity Edge and Bloodthirster as of now.
However, these changes still fail to satisfy true Katarina enthusiasts. According to KatEvoled's stream, Riot's update with this champion seems quite meaningless. The reason being that the rush to the Death's Dance first playstyle remains unaffected, making it still the most optimal build path for this champion rather than LPT-increasing items.
Naturally, the aforementioned changes have only been applied for a few days on the PBE server, and Riot still has plenty of time to continue testing and adjusting Katarina. I believe they should consider impacting the interaction between Katarina's abilities and items like the Bilgewater Cutlass to reduce the strength of the Death's Dance rush playstyle.
