Karthus

Karthus runs on one blunt idea: Lay Waste comes back almost instantly, costs little, and detonates in a tiny area on a delay. The whole champion is your ability to read where a minion or a champion will be standing when the blast goes off. Played well, he empties a wave faster than any mage on this roster and turns poke into steady rainfall.

Death Defied rewrites how you read every fight. When you go down you don't leave the stage, you keep casting in spirit form, and a Requiem fired from beyond the grave has won more games than most clean openings. The price for that identity is a body with no defenses, no dash, and slow feet.

You have the strongest wave pressure in the midlane and a reach nobody else matches: your ultimate touches every enemy champion wherever they stand, which gives you a veto over low-health escapes and fights happening across the map. Defile makes you untouchable the moment you're surrounded, and the energy you steal from each kill keeps the mana flowing. Wall of Pain shreds the magic resist of anyone who crosses it, so treat it as a damage multiplier, not just a slow.

On the other side, anything that reaches you kills you. No mobility, mediocre movement speed, and a Defile that drains your mana bar dry if you leave it on out of comfort. Your ultimate channel is long and loudly telegraphed: any well-timed stun or silence cancels it outright.

Max Lay Waste and learn to place it in front of your target, never on top of them. When the enemy steps up for a minion about to die, drop the blast exactly where they have to stand to hit it: now they pick between the gold and their health bar. On the wave, spread your casts instead of stacking them on one spot, and you'll steal minions they never get back.

Keep Wall of Pain for two jobs only: cutting off a jungler coming through the side brush, or splitting the escape path of a target you're about to finish. Using it as poke leaves you defenseless for a very long time. Watch your mana too, because Defile switched on to clear one wave often costs more than the recall it saved you.

Your ultimate level is a genuine shift, but not for your lane: from that point on, every fight your team loses elsewhere becomes an opportunity. Build the habit of checking enemy health bars before you shove a wave, and never spend Requiem on one guaranteed kill when two enemies are sitting in the red.

The second spike lands with your first big ability power items. Lay Waste stops being poke and starts being a two-tap execution on squishies. At that stage Defile turns from a clearing tool into a close-range weapon: anyone who stays inside your radius during a scrap loses a huge chunk of health without you pressing a single button.

Your goal isn't to survive the fight, it's to stay useful in it as long as possible, dead or alive. Sit behind your front line, switch on Defile the second an enemy enters your radius, and rain Lay Waste onto the pile: in a tight brawl, cadence matters more than precision. Wall of Pain goes across the enemy retreat path, never behind you.

When you die, don't panic and don't leave the screen. Count the low-health targets, keep dropping blasts, and only start Requiem once nobody left can interrupt the channel. Plenty of players waste their best asset by firing it on reflex at the opening: the ultimate is measured by how many enemies it kills, not how many it hits.