Let’s talk changes, starting with the biggest - we’re giving Karma a unique mechanic in line with her identity. Karma is a spiritual leader of the Ionian people, and like all great leaders, Karma has the ability to see the potential in those she works with and help bring out their fullest ability. Realizing this mechanically, we’ve added a new ally-cast mode for Karma’s W. When she targets an ally with W, she reduces the cooldowns on their basic abilities by a flat amount. The mantra, Harmony, increases the amount of CDR and grants the ally mana.
We’re pairing this with a Karma-only visual effect - as a passive, Karma will see an indicator representing how far an ally’s spells are on cooldown. In conjunction with W, she’ll have a better idea which allies are good targets for her W at a glance. We hope this mechanic will inspire Karma players to craft unique lane combinations and team compositions.
With these changes, we also want to level the current playing field between pro players and average Karma players in two main ways:
Much of Karma’s power is rooted in her Mantra usage - optimizing her passive’s Mantra CDR is something pros are quite good at, allowing them to gain significantly more power than the average Karma player. We’re changing her live passive to operate on a charge model similar to Spellthief’s Edge, triggering on any damage on champs or monsters. This will allow Karma players to not have to spend their entire time basic attacking to gain max passive value, freeing up time to reposition, ward, etc.
We’re generally reducing the benefit of movespeed in the kit, most notably by changing her Mantra-E, Defiance, to reduce the movespeed given to allies near your primary target (the same as the reduction to shields). Movement speed, especially Defiance’s shared AoE movespeed, is much more powerful in highly coordinated play than standard ranked play, so stripping power out here will free up a lot of power and allow us to buff her elsewhere.
The last set of changes are a set of tweaks aimed at each of her Mantra spells, to give more flexibility of use in a variety of situations.
For Soulflare (Mantra-Q), we’re loading more of the damage into the initial hit of the projectile, and less into the detonation damage - using Soulflare to poke should remain powerful even later into the game.
For Renewal (Mantra-W), we’re changing the scaling to scale both with Missing HP and directly with AP - even if you’re building AP instead of tanky, your healing should be substantial.
For Defiance (Mantra-E), the shared shield (and movespeed) percentage will be much higher than live, but will be split evenly across all nearby allies - now using Defiance will still be quite effective in a 2v2 or 3v3 scenario.