Introduction
Hello everyone and welcome to Kinslayer’s guide on how to play Karina! Karina is one of the most efficient assassins and can easily wipe out the entire enemy team if left undisturbed!
If you’re looking for a hero that can come out on top of most heroes in a 1 v 1 situation, or a hero that can swiftly jump from one end of the battlefield to another, look no further! Karina is the hero for you!
Below we will discuss the lore, abilities, gear choices, battle spells and good combinations of heroes to pair your Karina with!
Lore
Unlike the friendly moon elves, night elves were born into a world of darkness which casts a gloom on and twists their personalities. They offer their services as assassins to the other races, as all night elves are born killers. Karina is a standout amongst them.
In this guide, you will see exactly how good of an assassin Karina is!
Abilities
Combo Hit (Passive) – In short, the more HP your enemy is missing, the more damage you deal to them upon the third consecutive hit.
Note: There is a green ‘scythe-like’ indicator to let you know how many attacks you’ve made.
Elusiveness –
Lets take a look at this spell, it allows you to be immune to basic attacks (spells however still hurt you) and increases your movement speed.
This is the skill you will spamming the most often to chase people, to run away or to just simply win favourable trades against the opponents in your lane.
[Getting a kill or assist will lower its cooldown by 60%]
Note: This spell allows for animation cancelling, meaning if you attack then use it straight away, Karina will perform two attacks in a row, ignoring the backswing of her normal attacks. (abuse this!!!!!!!!)
Dance of Death –
There isn’t much to say about this skill other than the fact that it has a crazily low cooldown and is good for clearing waves of minions and doing decent AOE damage in team fights.
[Getting a kill or assist will lower its cooldown by 60%]
Shadow Rush – Lastly, Karina ultimate, Shadow Rush!
At first glance this skill has a fairly long cooldown for a skill that doesn’t seem to do much, but if you look closely, it says ‘If the enemy is killed within 5s, the cooldown time for this ability will end immediately’.
This means if you jump into clashes and are able to kill an opponent using your ultimate, you get to use it again! An assist will lower the cooldown for this skill by 80% as well!
This spell allows you to dash around the battlefield picking off the opponents with low health repeatedly!
Conclusion: After examining all of Karina’s spells, one can tell that she is a hero who relies a lot on killing other heroes to make full use of her spell refresh!
When all 3 spells are used together, it’s usually enough to kill off 75% of a backliner’s health!
Items
Many people may not agree with the build I’m going but this is what I usually use in ranked games on Karina.
+ 70 Magic Power
+ 400 Mana
+ 10% Cooldown Reduction
Unique Passive - Calamity: After using an ability, the next basic attack will carry an extra 150% magic damage. This effect has a 2s cooldown time.
Karina is a hero who fully relies on her spells to deal damage. However every usage of Elusiveness will result in her doing a basic crit attack on the opponent too. Calamity Scythe is the perfect item to increase your damage output even further!
Calamity Scythe also comes with a sweet boost to your mana to allow you to spam more spells without having to return back to base to regenerate!
+ 15 Magic Penetration
Unique Passive - + 40 Movement Speed
This item slightly increases your damage output while giving you the necessary mobility to traverse around the battlefield, we do not go for Magic Shoes as Karina does not require the cooldown reduction provided on those boots!
However Rapid Boots work too if you want more mobility at the cost of slightly less damage!
+ 75 Magic Power
+ 5% Movement Speed
+ 15 Magic Penetration
Unique Passive – Scorch: Burns the target for 3s when the skills hit, dealing 2% – 2.5% – 3% of the target’s current HP as magic damage, at least 10 pts.
This item gives each of your skills extra damage and allows them to apply a burn effect to the opponent after usage of every skill!
3% of the target’s current HP every second may seem little but as you cast more and more spells the burn racks up and it results in exponential increases in your ability to hunt opponents!
The extra movement speed also allows you to better escape or chase your opponents!
+ 150 Magic Power
Unique Passive - Covenant: Adds 2 HP for every 1 pt of magic power added.
This is the best item for mages, hands down. It gives a MASSIVE (150!!!) boost to your magic power and also it’s passive allows you to become MUCH tankier in teamfights!
Karina is a hybrid Mage/Assassin so naturally she is considerably fragile. This item adds a massive boost to her spell damage output and allows her to survive more damage from opponents as well
+ 70 Magic Power
+ 700 HP
Unique : + 30% Spell Vamp
Passive – Recharge: Regen 10% of one’s HP after killing a hero.
This is one of the items that I feel is perfectly made for Karina, it gives you HP, magic damage. As a mage who is able to repeatedly cast her spells, spell vamp goes a long way to aiding your survivability.
Look at the passive as well, every time you are able to kill a hero on the battlefield, you regenerate 10% of your HP! That’s on top of the spell vamp from all the usage of your spells and with the boost from Blood Wings, you are able to easily heal back any damage taken.
Other Items
There are other items that may situationally be better for Karina, that is entirely up to the player to decide on the better option!
Some other items that may be good for Karina would be:
Clock of Destiny
Holy Crystal
Ice Queen Wand
Devil Tears
Cursed Helmet
Immortality
Dominance Ice
Oracle
Of course any items can be purchased on any heroes but it is up to you to make the most out of your purchases! Mix and match the items to see which one suits you the best!
Battle Spells
After skill is released it will immediately remove all negative effects and grants immunity from disables for 1s and increase hero’s movement speed by 30%.
Why Purify? Karina is a hero that is very susceptible to CC spells, she has no reliable way of dodging them and yet she is a hero who likes to be in the middle of the battlefield, slashing her twin blades.
Purify allows you to do just that! Every time you rush into a fight and get stunned, one tap of this baby and you’re ready to go again!
Personally I feel this is the best to help make sure that you are able to get the best out of Karina’s kit!
Other spells
There are other spells that can be used to help out different aspects of Karina’s game as well! Try all of them out and choose the playstyle that suits you the best in game!
Flicker – Allows you to reliably blink away to escape from enemies or chase.
Retribution – Helps you clear neutral creeps in the jungle even faster, used to help boost your farming.
Healing Spell – Karina has fairly low sustain early game, this may be the spell to go for if you have problems surviving early in the laning phase!
Allies
Karina is able to make the most out of heroes who excel at distracting and engaging the opponents (Tanks) and also heroes who are able to catch out of position enemies (Moskov, Franco, Chou, Ruby etc)
If your enemies are singled out from their team against you, it will almost always mean certain death for them especially if you have an ally to help you CC them!
Skin Preference
Personally I love the Christmas Cheer skin! I’ve been using it since I bought Karina and it’s a skin I would definitely recommend you to buy! (Although it doesn’t fit her lore chuckles)
The skin also gives an addition +8 Magic Power to help you in the early stages of the game, so why not? ;)
Emblems to Use
Magic Emblem is definitely the way to go as it gives Karina much needed HP for the early stages of the game and also Magic Resistance as she is very susceptible to being CC-ed by spells!
However if you have a high level Magic Assassin Emblem Set, you can use that as well!
In Game Tips
Being an assassin/mage, your priority is to burst down the opponents or at least severely damage them so that they would be taken out of the teamfight.
Of course you want to burst them down, so you get to abuse that sweet cooldown refresh on your ultimate, right? :”)
With that being said your prime targets during the clash should be the backline such as mages (Aurora, Eudora etc) or even the supports (Estes, Rafaela), however if the two categories of heroes are already looking at their respawn timers, you may turn your attention to the other heroes and go ham!
I would also like to remind all of you Karina players out there that all your skills add towards the ‘attack count’ on your passive!
Meaning the crit attack from Elusiveness adds +1 to the attack count, Dance of Death adds another and lastly Shadow Rush adds one last one!
With this you can see that every time you execute your full combo, you will definitely trigger your passive! (Assuming none of your spells miss!)
Ending Note
I hope you guys enjoyed this guide that I’ve written for Karina, do comment down below any other guides you’d like to see, or if you have any alternative builds for Karina and would like to share them, I would definitely love to hear them!
Never let a loss get you down, practice the hero more and you will start to get better! With enough practice I’m sure you can master Karina as well.
I’m looking forward to hearing the comments from you guys!