Please please please stop picking Kalista

I have made a similar article to this – so no, you’re not going insane if you saw this before.

However, teams are still picking this horrible champion; and she hasn’t got much better – if anything, the game has evolved to make her even worse. How many times must we see this champion fail to either get a lead or do much with it before we realise this?

The botlane’s Renekton

Kalista is a champion that demands you play through her.

She has kill threat when combined with an aggressive support at most stages of the laning phase and with her mobility, becomes scary in skirmishes. If your jungler plays around you, you can go a bit crazy and rack up early kills.

But… that’s about all you can do. 

Her teamfighting is probably the weakest – later on – of any ADC; though she can avoid skillshots a little bit easier, she needs to freehit for longer and relies on ramping up for the huge Rend. In the same time, Jinx, Aphelios, Kaisa or Xayah has already won the fight.

And that’s a champion that you need to play through – if she’s weakside, she’s useless. You put this much effort into getting her ahead, and if she doesn’t end the game by 30 minutes, you probably lose.

Though he hasn’t shown it too often in the past few weeks, Gumayusi is probably better than Shogun. Via Lance Skundrich/Riot Games

This is especially bad when you’re picking it into an ADC who actually has hands, like Gumayusi, Gala, Flakked or Danny. Or Unified, or…

Yes, you can run over a massive underdog with it and the champion looks crazy, but as soon as the other ADC is any good, the champion looks worthless. They will play weakside properly, outscale you and just generally have a better time.

Kalista does such little damage and requires so much more effort to do that damage than a Xayah, who is also capable of avoiding skillshots with the movespeed buff and, you know, the ult.

She really is similar to Renekton; it demands attention from your own jungler to not be completely worthless in the midgame, gets out-teamfought and outscaled by everything else in the lane but gets picked because it’s scary and having early power feels really nice.

She was screwed by the item rework and is now forced to buy zero damage items. Her first three items are, most commonly, Shieldbow, Rageblade, Runaan’s Hurricane. How on earth is she expected to match the Galeforce RFC/PD IE/LDR builders?

I understand that teams want to play for the early game and get priority and all that jazz, but with objective bounties and kill bounties being such a prominent factor this season, a single mistake – dropping one dragon, losing one skirmish, giving up Herald – can completely flip the game and bring it to an even state.

Why would you risk everything on an ADC that can’t carry late game?