Introduction Top
Table of Contents (some sections still WIP)
So you want to know more about Catherine? Well you've come to the right place! The build above is the one that I currently use and find very effective at SA—give it a go if you like, but the build isn't really the main point of this guide.
This main point guide is to explain Catherine's abilities to a whole new level of detail, particularly her
Stormguard which is not often fully understood. If you already know how to play Catherine and are looking to take your gameplay to the next level by mastering your understand of her abilities, then this is the guide for you. I have mained Catherine for a very long time now and am always learning new tricks as I go along. I'm writing this guide to share what I know with anyone willing to read it.
Catherine is currently one of the two main supports in this meta (1.13), with the other being Ardan. She fits into just about any team comp and can cause havoc for the enemy by locking down key targets and placing a devastating 3.5 second silence on the entire enemy team.
As someone who's almost exclusively played Catherine, my skill tier pretty much goes up and down with Catherine's strength. In season 0 when she had a 1.7 second stun on a 12 second cooldown I was PoA. In season 1 when Catherine's stun was nerfed and the popular Skye became her direct counter I fell to hotness. And now in Season 2 with Catherine being such a great counter to Kestrel and I'm sitting at the lower end of SA.
Anyway, the reason that I love playing the cooldown focused build on Catherine is that it leads to an aggressive playstyle that is really fun. Whether you get to be aggressive early or late depends on your team comp, but at full build Catherine can hold her own against almost anyone and dive right into the backline of a teamfight to lock down the enemy carry. Thanks to her heroic perk
Captain of the Guard and
Stormguard, stacking cooldown really does make her tankier. There are often games where my only standard support item is a fountain, and that's okay, because Catherine has 3 brilliant support abilities, bringing to the fold stuns and silences not found on any item in the shop.
Ability Mechanics Top
So you've read the descriptions of these abilities, but do you know how to REALLY use them? There's a lot more to Catherine's abilities below the surface so let's go into each one in detail.
Captain of the Guard
|
|
|
Regularly stunning enemies and getting triple silences will give Catherine quite a bit of additional shield and armour. I use every opportunity I can to build stacks of this as it really adds up if you work on it. One of the reasons for levelling your
 Merciless Pursuit slowly is to keep the energy cost low. Since the cooldown of it remains at 13 regardless of level, keeping it low lets you use it more often. The potions in the early game are primarily a cheap way to keep your energy up without spending 300 gold on an energy battery.
The neat thing about this perk is that it gives you defence without using a single item slot. Each stack is worth 10g, using
 Light Shield and
 Light Armor as a baseline, but the fact that you don't need to use an item slot is incredibly valuable as it lets you buy more cooldown while still being inherently tanky.
Here's a screenshot of a game where, despite losing, I really went to town with the stuns and got 114 stacks against a Krul, SAW, Ardan comp in patch 1.11.
|
Merciless Pursuit
|
|
|
There are four main uses for this skill:
- Locking down the squishy carry. This is the most important point. You need to target the enemy who has gone with a glass cannon build, preventing them from doing damage and signalling to your team mates that this is who they need to delete.
- Denying powerful ultimates. Many ultimates have obvious wind up animations, most notably Adagio's
 Verse of Judgement, or Skaarf's
 Dragon Breath. If you are playing against a Skaarf, his ult can be devastating if not stopped. A useful skill to have is to keep track of enemy ultimates that you know have long cooldowns so that you know when it safe to engage with a stun and when you might want to keep your stun.
- Speed boost for chasing and escaping. A cool thing about this skill is that it has a longer range than your normal melee attacks. You might be surprised at some of the stuns that you can get when chasing people down with this. It's also very satisfying to have more cooldowns than the enemy Catherine (soon to be obsolete with draft mode!!) and know that they can't catch you.
- Gaining stacks of your heroic perk by harassing. Harassing with merciless pursuit will get you quite a few stacks, but be careful and judge the situation. If you're at the shop and can't see the enemy laner in lane, they could be rotating down to shop. You don't want to put your stun on a 10 second cooldown when you might need it 2 seconds later.
- Proccing aftershock damage. Watch that aftershock timer, because when both your A and B are on low cooldowns it's tempting to use both skills in quick succession to only proc aftershock once. By waiting the 1.5 seconds after basic attacking to activate the next ability you can maximise the benefit of aftershock if you chose to pick it up.
Beware of opponents with reflex blocks. At higher tiers people will see your stun coming and block it. Another useful thing to know about this skill besides its increased range is that the ability to stun lasts longer than the speed boost. Depending on what skin you have, there will be some flashing/glowing effect on Catherine's shield to tell you that your next attack will stun the enemy. You can trick your opponent into using their reflex block early and then stun them once their reflex block has ended. Particularly useful if trying to stop an ultimate against a good opponent.
I normally don't take this ability at level 1 because
Stormguard does more damage in a level 1/2 jungle shop fight. However, if you do plan to use this in a fight take note that this ability allows you to perform an instant basic attack (with 10 extra base crystal damage). If you use this to initiate then you have wasted a free basic attack. Perform two quick basic attacks in succession for maximum benefit. I would probably take this at level 1 if facing a Skye in jungle (don't level up either ability until you confirm who is in lane if Skye is on the opposing team).
|
Stormguard
|
|
|
There are four main uses for this skill:
- Body blocking for your carry. This doesn't just apply to Kestrel's
 Glimmershot or Skaarf's
 Spitfire. Heroes like Celeste who deal large amounts of AoE damage will be unable to damage your carry without hurting themselves badly if you walk on top of your carry with this up.
- Deflecting large chunks of damage back at the enemy while taking minimal damage yourself. On overdrive this has a 4 second cooldown. If you have 255% cooldown acceleration then that drops to 1.6 seconds. This makes it pretty much impossible for most enemies to kill you, unless they're Skye. However be careful, the downtime of this ability is increased the more it deflects. I'll explain more below.
- Dealing decent early game damage with the bubble's burn damage. Speeds up clearing of the double backs before you get a
 Stormguard Banner. Particularly useful on the first rotation where speed, and getting to the shop before your opponents is crucial.
- Proccing aftershock. As mentioned above, watch the 1.5 second aftershock timer to gain maximum benefits.
Let's talk about the exact mechanics of this ability.
The burn damage is crystal and is split into 2 ticks per second. This is only currently significant against Ardan who will take decreased damage from this thanks to his
 Julia's Gift being procced twice per second. Finishing off an Ardan is very hard because he gets tankier on lower HP. Sometimes (but rarely) useful is the knowledge that range of the burn damage is very slightly further than Catherine's basic attacks. If just barely out of melee range and without
Merciless Pursuit this lets you deal a little damage while chasing someone in the early game.
The cooldown on this ability is made up of two parts and starts ticking from the moment that you use the ability. The first part of the cooldown which cannot be reduced by cooldown is the 6 second duration of the bubble. The second part is the (at level 5) 4 second cooldown which can be reduced by cooldown acceleration. With 255% cooldown acceleration, the time between stormguard bubbles is reduced from 10 seconds to 7.56 seconds. This may not seem like much, but consider that making 4 deflections will reduce the duration of the bubble by 0.5 seconds each leaving you with 4 seconds of protection. You now have 3.56 seconds of downtime instead of 6 seconds. Basically, having the duration of the
Stormguard reduced by deflections does not let use it again sooner!
So how much damage is deflected? Well first of all, the ability description should read that it deflects damage above 10% of Catherine's base health instead of 77 (+7 per level) which is a rounded off approximation (it's actually 77.2 + 6.7 per level), and it also misses out some key pieces of information:
- Damage is reflected as crystal damage regardless of source. This means that deflected damage is reduced by enemy shield, and also benefits from Catherine owning
 Broken Myth or
 Eve of Harvest. I tested this by taking Kraken damage which is 50% weapon and 50% crystal. Lifesteal against the Kraken is halved (confirmed by attacking it normally), and Eve of Harvest healed Catherine by 5% of damage deflected. Against the minion miner eve of harvest healed 10% of the damage deflected.
- Damage reflected is calculated before armour and shield. This means that buying armour and shield does not reduce the damage that you deflect. If your enemy has 300 weapon power and you are level 5 then your base HP is 1040 meaning that you deflect all damage above 104 back to the attacker. The base crystal damage deflected will therefore be 196, and if the attacker has 100 shield, they will take 98 damage from your deflection if they are the only target in range.
- Damage taken after being cut to 10% of Catherine's base health is then further reduced by her defences.
In the above example Catherine doesn't actually take 104 damage as that 104 damage is then reduced by her armour, to 52 if she had 100 armour. Hypothetically, if the bubble was permanent and you had 200 armour and no health items, it would takes 30 basic attacks to kill Catherine as each incoming attack can deal no more than 104 base damage, and that 104 base damage is then reduces to just 34.7 damage. Now you see why she's so tanky?
- Damage deflected is split evenly between nearby targets. If there a bunch of minions around you, you will deflect much less damage back to you attacker as it will also be split up among the enemy minions. I have not yet tested if there is a limit to how many targets you can deflect to, but in any case it is enough to significantly dilute your damage if surrounded by lane minions.
- Damage deflected has a range of 10. This was an easy one to test as it's just very slightly less range than Blast Tremor which has a range of 11. If there are no targets within 10 units of Catherine then Catherine will still take reduced damage, but won't deflect anything.
Image: Range shown is the 11 range of
 Blast Tremor. Catherine is standing at the maximum distance at which she can still deflect damage to the small minion in the bottom right. The deflected damage can be seen travelling towards the minion.
- Damage can only be deflected onto targets that you have vision of. So you can't deflect damage onto people hiding in bushes with this, or around walls if you don't have vision over it. Confirmed in practice mode as I could not deflect minion miner damage over the wall to the two small shop minions until I placed a scout trap over the wall.
- If an enemy is hit by deflected damage you will draw lane minion and turret aggro. Be careful activating this when trying to down a turret. If an enemy pokes you and is hit by a deflection the turret will focus you instead of the minions. On that note, be careful around the Kraken and minion miner too. You could incur the wrath of the Kraken on your team if you deflect damage towards it during a jungle teamfight. It's helpful in these situations to know that it has a range of 10!
- This ability has no effect on turret damage. I often see Catherine's retreat from turrets after taking too much damage and put on
Stormguard as if it's going to help them. It has no effect, but if you really want to, the burn damage can bring the turret down very slightly faster, although requires you to huddle quite close to the it due to weird hit boxes on turrets.
- Is there a maximum number of targets to which damage can be deflected? According to this post on the official forums the damage is deflected to 3 targets max prioritizing heroes. I'll go with that unless I find out otherwise.
An interesting scenario with Skye which I alluded to near the top of this guide in the threats meter is the case where Skye has a level 5 forward barrage and 278 crystal power. Catherine has 1509 base HP at level 12 meaning that anything above 150.9 base damage caused a deflection. 278 crystal power is the tipping point at which Skye reaches 1510.5 raw DPS on her forward barrage. Forward barrage deals 10 ticks of damage and can therefore cause 10 tiny, insignifcant deflection within a single second, effectively deleting your shield. This is with target lock but without broken myth stacks. If she has 6 BM stacks then she only needs 194 crystal power to reach 1512.5 raw DPS. The meta build for Skye right now is Frostburn, Broken Myth and Eve, a total of 225 crystal power. Yup, good luck out there against Skye.
|
Blast Tremor
|
|
|
Although the primary use of this ability is the silence, the damage and range on this ability is definitely not be underestimated. With 620 base damage, you can chunk a good 300 health off a squishy lane carry who only has a reflex block.
Some people like to use this ability to initiate team fights. What I find is that if you open with the silence then the enemy will just retreat, so for maximum impact I like to use it in the middle of a teamfight. A 3.5 second silence is a real tide turner against ability dependant heroes such as Skye and Kestrel.
The problem with using this in teamfights is that is has 1 second cast time and a fairly obvious animation. It can be easily reflex blocked, unless you dip into a bush to use it. I recommend if you can to always cast this from a bush, it really helps, but know that if you've just basic attacked something, it will take 2 seconds before you become invisible in the bush. You can see that from your health bar if you are visible or not as it becomes transparent when you are invisible (save for scout traps in the same bush).
If you land this on Kestrel then you more than halve her damage. And if you land this on CP Skye then you completely disable her for the duration. You can waste it though, so pay attention to how they are using their abilities. In Kestrel's case, if she had just loosed 3 glimmershots then she only has 1 left before she needs to stop attacking anyway. Therefore this is probably not the best time to use it. Against Skye, she has a 3 second forward barrage, and silencing her just as she starts it is not going to have as much impact as using it towards the end of the duration. That being said, silencing her gives you a free stun that cannot be reflex blocked, but requires you to follow up if you don't want to waste the silence.
The above thinking applies to all heroes, Kestrel and Skye are just two examples. Pay attention and you'll be able to pull off some really great silences.
|
Enemy Abilities vs Stormguard Top
This section is under construction - please wear your hard hats!
Some abilities we all know are great to block with
Stormguard like Kestrel's
Glimmershot. And others not so great like Skye's
Forward Barrage. In this section I'm going to take a more in depth look at how Catherine's B interacts with various heroes' abilities and do a complete analysis of the best and worst abilities to walk in front of.
This section is still a work in progress, but just to get started here is one example of something very counter-intuitive which you might not have expected regarding SAW.
Despite the look of the animation, this ability only deals 5 large ticks of damage during its 2.5 second duration. That means that it might be possible to actually deflect something back at SAW. Let's break down the damage by tick and see.
|
Level |
Damage Per Tick |
|
1 |
50 (+80% CP) |
|
2 |
80 (+80% CP) |
|
3 |
110 (+80% CP) |
|
4 |
140 (+80% CP) |
|
5 |
206 (+80% CP) |
At level 1 all of this damage gets under
Stormguard. At level 2 it will cause only small deflections against a level 1 Catherine. In fact, until it gets overdriven there is not going to be much for Catherine to deflect. However, this ability has a 400% CP ratio, equating to an 80% CP ratio per tick. Against a WP SAW you're not going to deflect too much, even if he overdrives it but against a CP SAW you're going to be able to do a lot with your bubble.
Consider a level 8 SAW with a
Shatterglass who has maxed this ability first. They will deal 286 damage per tick with suppressing fire. A comparable level 8 Catherine with 1241 base health and 156 shield (81 base shield + fountain, not even counting perk bonus) will deflect 161.9 raw crystal damage per tick and take only 48.5 damage per tick. A SAW at this stage is likely to have no shield yet, perhaps just a reflex block, giving them a shield stat of 48. This means they will take 109.4 damage per tick, a total of over 500 damage.
As a side note,
Suppressing Fire does full damage to everything in its path and does not split the damage between targets.
In Summary...
Against a WP SAW, get out of the way. Against a CP SAW you can get in the way of this and deflect back a lot of damage (280 + 400% of SAW's CP ratio in total if you are level 12). Of course don't forget that this is split up between nearby enemy minions so check your surroundings.
I recently noticed that standing on top of a burning goop pool would cause deflections, but it's difficult to gauge in game how much damage you are deflecting and therefore whether you're just wasting your bubble or not. After testing I discovered that
Goop deals 2 ticks of damage per second and also applies 1 stack of
Fan the Flames on you.
|
Level |
Damage Per Tick |
|
1 |
12.5 (+55% CP) |
|
2 |
17.5 (+55% CP) |
|
3 |
22.5 (+55% CP) |
|
4 |
27.5 (+55% CP) |
|
5 |
57.5 (+55% CP) |
A typical Skaarf might build a
Frostburn,
Broken Myth and
Eve of Harvest for 225 crystal power. Let's consider 4 possible scenarios that can occur.
|
Scenario |
Damage Per Tick |
|
Level 4
Goop no BM stacks |
151.25 |
|
Level 4
Goop 6 BM stacks |
205.7 |
|
Level 5
Goop no BM stacks |
181.25 |
|
Level 5
Goop 6 BM stacks |
246.5 |
So does it look like a good idea to deflect this damage? Well Catherine at level 12 deflects all damage above 150.9 so it would definitely be wasted in the first scenario. In the next two scenarios it would still be a waste, but in the final case Catherine will be able to deflect almost 100 damage every 0.5 seconds while herself taking about 70 (220 shield estimate based on level 12, fountain, and 32 stacks of the perk) so is that any good? Well the 100 deflected damage will get reduced by Skaarf's shield and result in Catherine still take more damage than Skaarf, but's not even all.
There is also the 3.75% health loss per second from
Fan the Flames which is done as a seperate tick of damage. After reducing it for 220 shield that is an extra 30 damage or so per second which also lasts for 3.5 seconds after leaving the goop. In total Catherine will take about 85 damage per 0.5 seconds while deflecting only 100 raw crystal damage back to Skaarf.
In Summary...
Do you want to step into Skaarf's goop pool to deflect damage? No, not really.
Energy Problems Top
This section is under construction - please wear your hard hats!
In this section I'm going to breakdown Catherine's ability to constantly use her abilities at various stages of the game with different item builds and ultimately answer the question: is there a point at which Catherine can use her abilities constantly when off cooldown and not run out of energy, and if so, when is that tipping point?
Final Builds Top
This section is under construction - please wear your hard hats!
In this section I'm going to talk about some of the possible final builds and when you might want to use them. My favourite build consists of 2 clockworks and 1 aftershock, and is arguably one of her strongest late game builds, but it suffers from a weaker mid game.
Tips and Tricks Top
I'll keep adding to this section as I come across useful things worth pointing out.
When body blocking Kestrel's
Glimmershot get as close to Kestrel as you can. People say that you can't body block a CP Kestrels glimmmershots, but you can if you remember that the crystal damage starts from the point of impact and has a limited range. If you get right in Kestrel's face then you reduce the range of her CP damage and can prevent it from reach your carry. Merciless pursuit is a great gap closer.
Poke the enemy laner with merciless pursuit for a free stack of
Captain of the Guard, and in doing so draw lane minion aggro so that your laner gains +50% gold from that entire wave! Another benefit of drawing lane minion aggro is that if your laner is being made to overextend, you can drag the lane minions back towards your side as they chase after you.
Quick Comment (5) View Comments
You need to log in before commenting.