What should I be building for bot lane karthus?

Is BFT a must first? Is liandry situational good? Is malignance a bait or should I be grabbing it?

I'm honestly tired of seeing this champ in Emerald lobbies. He's awful because genuinely people see how strong he is in bot and then try to pilot him. Yet, they end up running it down bc of just how difficult Karthus is to work with compared to other mages with their respective supports.

I really wish they would just not have him be strong so people can stop picking him and then running it down. It's ruining the quality of my games so much.

Sorry for the vent, I just feel so frustrated with this.

Hi! Won't link anything yet, before I know it's okay?

But i stream everyday, jungle karthus only. Would i be allowed to post my twitch here?

Source

Look at those cool, wildly colored icons...

His old values are slightly worse overall, a notable exception being his ult having 50 more base damage (which is actually pretty neat for L6 kills). But that's not what I'm excited about.

Unless Riot really disappoints me, we will get his old, red model with the old, red Q floor bombs and the old, red R beams. Like here.

Another great thing: Old champion roster. This means, way less assassins and almost no pesky untargetability outside of Zhonyas. The old red skeleton can finally farm in relative peace before dying in a teamfight, using Revive and TP, dying again and ulting.

I have been running two builds:

One with dark harvest where I go BFT, shadow flame, storm surge, deathcap, void staff

The other with DFT where I go BFT, liandries, shadow flame, void staff, deathcap/ storm surge

I feel as if DH works better against squishy, ranged comps and DFT against tanker, melee comps

I’ve noticed in the jungle everyone runs DH and bot people run DFT is that the most optimal?

(and gives 100 more health)

Is First Strike Karthus still good? I played it alot last year but since death fire touch was re-aded I been using it since.

I was wondering what's the AP threshold to make Q -> AA -> Q -> Q -> AA no longer the highest DPS pattern. Is there an AP amount that makes Q -> Q -> AA -> Q -> Q -> AA do more for example? When do you wanna just spam Qs and not AA?

hello guys, i'd like to share with you how i deal with early invades and with predators. Since karthus is weak early game if you can't hit your q's or if you dont go ignite you can't really win 1v1s, and starting plat+ most enemy junglers will try to invade and counter jungle you because they know you are a farmer champion and snowball really hard. If there is a maokai, sejuani, amumu whatever they wont invade you you can just default start blue but they are not meta right now assasin and predator junglers are the meta. so here we go

Most predators will be starting red or raptors and invade your blue level 2. For their invade to not work make sure to start red. At the start of the game quickly go to your blue and ward it, then go to your raptors and cover the red entrance. if you insist on starting blue, dont use your smite on blue and if they invade try to win the smite fight on gromp (they probably wont have smite because they usually use it on first camp to invade faster)

This is important if it is highly likely they will invade level 2 (shaco hail of blades, ekko hail of blades, master yi kindred belveth etc.) you start your raptors not red. Because if you start your red and by the tiime you're done with your red, you will see the enemy invading your blue. and you will want to invade their blue but guess what you just lost so much tempo because you either take your raptors and rocks and red and invade which is very very risky enemy jungler usually takes your gromp+blue then reset and go to secure their blue side and if you do this you are almost guaranteed to die in their jungle bcs you took a lot of time to invade

But if you start raptors, and you see enemy invade your blue you still have plenty of time to take your rocks and invvade their blue, if enemy only stole your blue so will you. if he took your gromp as well then you have time to steal it from them as well. same for wolves. you will always have time because you skipped red, you are one camp ahead of them. and because you reset the timers of your birds and rocks you have perfect tempo. red and blue doesnt matter as much as smaller camps. you can always skip them if you need to.

If you suspect the predator will start his blue and invade your red you can just start blue but if you have no info and you are doing the usual red start, then start raptors again. because predator will most likely take his blue and go to your raptors, by the time he comes raptors will not be there and you will have finished the rocks. now if you warded your blue level 1 you will not know the predator coming so you can kindly ask your midlaner to ward the river.

and the rest is fundamentals of jungling. split map whatever.

SAVE ME

Love the champ but I feel like his q is just not for me.

Any tipa?

I mainly use two builds on Karthus:

Against 3+ tanks/bruisers:
BFT → Liandry's → Shadowflame → Rabadon's → Void Staff

Against mostly squishy teams:
BFT → Shadowflame → Rabadon's → Void Staff

My confusion comes from the last one or two item slots.

I usually buy boots early, but I often sell them in the late game because I prefer maximizing damage with 6 full items

If the enemy team has a lot of healing, I normally buy Morellonomicon. If they don't, I tend to default to items like Malignance and Stormsurge

What I'm trying to understand is this:

Ignoring anti-heal requirements, what is Karthus's absolute highest damage 6-item build against:

1. Tanky team compositions (3+ tanks/bruisers)
2. Squishy team compositions

I also have a few more questions:

• Is Liandry's still worth buying against squishy teams?
• Would a build like BFT → Shadowflame → Rabadon's → Void Staff → Stormsurge → Liandry's make sense for maximizing damage against squishier comps?
• Against tankier teams with little or no healing, what would be the optimal sixth item after the core build?

I think generally a lot of karthus players know the right thing to do, but sometimes don't. I see many karthus players straight up throw the teamfight or even worse game because they wanted a dark harvest stack and i cant blame them because i used to do it when i used dark harvest but after testing deathfire touch and dark harvest for many games, i realized deathfire touch + last stand is just better and overall deals way more dmg. You can't be throwing a game because of a rune and dft prevents you from doing so.

Secondly, shadowflame. Sometimes there are situations where you want to ult even though the enemy won't die, or even if you can't get value from shadowflame passive. And unfortunately by the time you realize that this is true, either your teammate died or got too low to have to reset and you couldn't impact the fight in any way. That's why i personally stopped building shadowflame because in a teamfight if they are below 40% hp already they will most likely still die to liandry burn, i now go blackfire torch into liandry or zhonya rabadon, yes shadowflame gives you 110 ap but your ult only has 70% ap ratio so 40 ap loss is really just means 28 less damage.

if the enemy composition consist of a lot of mobile champions and your team lacks lockdown/cc do you go with e max ever?

here's an example:

Enemy toplaner: Riven

Enemy jungler: Hecarim

Enemy mid: Ekko

Enemy adc: Vayne

Enemy support: Karma

Ally toplaner: Garen

Ally jungler: Karthus (me)

Ally mid: Fizz

Ally adc: Ezreal

Ally support: Lulu

In theory it sounds good but I keep flashing into their whole team and dying and ulting and doing nothing and losing

Over the past month or so, I was in a huge rut in League.

I dropped from Plat 2 all the way down to Gold 4. After getting completely outjungled by some really good players, I lost confidence in myself and started role-swapping, trying different champions, and experimenting with everything just to figure out my identity as a player.

Needless to say, that only made things worse.

I was hard stuck in Gold with terrible win rates, even though I genuinely knew I was capable of playing at a much higher level. Eventually, I went back to my main role and started looking for the fastest-clearing junglers because I absolutely love playing for tempo.

That's when I discovered Karthus.

I tried him in a few normal games, and honestly, he felt insanely strong for a champion sitting at a 48% win rate. So I took him into ranked and... what the hell?

I almost instantly climbed from Gold 2 to Plat 3.

My stats have been ridiculous. I'm almost always MVP, usually top damage, top CS in the game, and in most skirmishes I'm two or even three levels ahead of the enemy jungler. Even in games where I get heavily cheesed early, if I stay disciplined and keep power farming, I eventually outscale and take over.

So my question is:

How on earth does Karthus only have a 48.9% win rate on U.GG? He feels unbelievably strong. Is this champion secretly broken and just disliked or found "boring", or did I finally find the champion that perfectly matches my identity as a player, but he's not actually that broken?

I used to be hardstuck emerald 4 and took a short break from league in which I'd keep up with the game by watching karhus before I sleep. After coming back I've established an 82% winrate up to diamond 3!