LoL Classic Katarina Builds, featuring items, masteries, and rune ideas

Katarina is one of the champions players were and still are hyped to play in LoL Classic, with her strong skills, movement and skill expression. Now that she’s back, many players are terrorising the Rift. If you too want to dominate the mid lane and make the enemy bot lane tilt as you roam on them, here’s the LoL Classic Katarina build path you should be running.

LoL Classic Katarina Builds

Here’s the recommended skill order and core items to match the playstyle properly. Note, all her skills deal magic damage, despite scaling with both AD and AP.

Skill Max Order:

Take all 3 skills from Q >W >E from levels 1-3. But below is the recommended skill order.

• Q — Bouncing Blades: main damage skill. 45% AP scaling
• W — Sinister Steel: melee AoE attack. Hitting an enemy champion grants a burst of speed. 25% AP scaling and 60% AD scaling
• R — Death Lotus: spin around, hitting all enemies in range with flying daggers. 450% AD scalings and 300% AP scalings
• E — Shunpo: Katarina instantly moves to a target location. She takes15%  reduced damage for several seconds. If she clicks a champion she deals damage 40% AP scalings.

E gets maxed last as its your utilities skill. If you want more CD for it then consider grabbing Deathfire Grasp earlier on, or running more cooldown reduction in your runes.

Core Items:

• Doran’s Ring / Health Potions — starter items
• Hextech Gunblade — core first item. Grants lifesteal for auto attacks, 20% spell vamp for healing from your spells, an active slow, and both 65 AP and 45 attack damage
• Sorcerer’s Shoes — needed boots for roaming and early magic penetration
• Rabadon’s Deathcap — core magic item that ramps your damage. Can be your third or fourth item depending on the situation

Situational Items:

Most situational items go into your third or fourth slot, followed by your final items. There are scenarios where you can consider taking Deathfire Grasp as your second main item if you need to fight tankier opponents.

• Mejai’s Soulstealer — if you’re already snowballing, get this as soon as possible to continue snowballing. Ideally take it after Hextech Gunblade as your second or third item depending on whether you need boots first. It’s only 1,250 gold so it should be affordable if you’re ahead. Avoid it in slower games or against lots of tankier players, even if snowballing. DFG is much better in those situations.
• Sword of the Occult – Its Majai’s but for AD.Your W and R have higher scalings with AD so, you can benefit from that too. But, Mejais is more consistent across all your spells. If you’re super snowbally consider getting both items.
• Zhonya’s Hourglass — Decent if you’ve fallen behind or there are champions with stuns on the enemy team like Leona, Lulu, etc. Can be a solid third or fourth item if needed early, or fifth item if the game is threatening you.
• Rylai’s Crystal Scepter — okay item if there is a lot of movement speed on the enemy team, such as Janna’s global movement speed passive, Nidalee or Lee Sin. Can be treated as a defensive item given the 500 HP it provides.
• Deathfire Grasp — solid item in the third or fourth slot to amp your damage against key targets or burst down tanks. Not recommended as a final item since it loses a lot of its value late.
• Void Staff — Magic Penetration against very tanky magic resist teams. Likely becomes more relevant when Galio enters the Rift, or if more AP tanks are being played in top or jungle, or when Leona is on the rift.

Masteries: 21 / 9 / 0

Offense (21)

• Sorcery — 4 ranks
• Deadliness — 4 ranks
• Blast — 4 ranks
• Arcane Knowledge — 1 rank
• Mental Force — 3 ranks
• Spellsword — 1 rank
• Brute Force — 2 ranks
• Archmage — 1 rank
• Executioner — 1 rank

Defense (9)

• Perseverance — 3 ranks
• Durability — 2 ranks
• Hardiness or Resistance — 3 ranks (take Hardiness vs AD laners/heavy AD teams, Resistance vs AP. Can drop 1 point from Durability to get an extra point here if needed)
• Unyielding — 1 rank

Runes:

This is for players that seriously want to put time into LoL Classic. Using the default rune page is entirely fine. If you do want to invest that hard, then you want

• Quintessences: Spell Vamp x3
• Fury Runes: Should have a mix of attack damage and magic penetration runes.
• Seal Runes: Should be a mix of mostly h, with some AD scalings, as AD junglers like Warwick, Yi and Lee Sin and ADCs are still popular.
• Glyphs: Should contain a mix of ability power and magic resist runes.

Feel free to swap some rotations on personal preference, based on what you find yourself laning the most against. You may also want Cooldown reduction runes if you don’t like how high the Shumpo CD can be.

Against lane bullies, you’ll want more health and resistance, while more snowbally games want more damage, power and penetration runes

That covers the core builds for Katarina in LoL Classic.

Authored by Craig Robinson

Craig Robinson is an experienced gaming and esports writer with nearly a decade of coverage experience since 2015. With a background in software engineering, he combines his journalistic expertise with a strong understanding of technical SEO and web development fundamentals. He’s passionate about covering MMO games, competitive esports, and crafting guides that help players get the most out of their favorite titles. He's been writing about gaming and esports for over 10 years, which started as for fun project during university. He has since developed his skill set, contributing to newsrooms coverage of key games and event, and blending evergreen content strategy and a solid grasp of content marketing fundamentals. His work has appeared in Esports News UK, Gamer Guides, theEscpaist, and VideoGamer, and he now contributes to Gamehub's review team. When he’s not writing, Craig can usually be found running, at the gym, or tinkering with coding projects to keep his GitHub active.

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