The daughter of the void, Kai’sa is one of the most balanced and fun attack damage carry champions in League of Legends. Possessing consistent tank melting DPS and high scaling potential, she can be a lethal threat in late-game teamfights. Furthermore, being a high scaling champion also accounts for her weak early laning phase and vulnerability in early to mid-game skirmishes.
Good Kai’sa players often tend to farm safely while waiting for their mid-game power spikes. That’s when you have at least one ability upgrade along with a mythic in your pocket. Furthermore, her hybrid nature opens up a variety of itemization options. Thereby, helping you adapt to the game state accordingly.
For teamfights, your main objective as a Kai’sa player is to stay behind your peel champs and avoid getting caught in enemy crowd control or any assassin aggression. The main goal is to let your team disengage enemy plays, get the frontline low and when they start backing up that’s your time to shine.
If you compare Kai’sa against new champions, her kit is quite easy to wrap your head around but her high skill ceiling still leaves a lot of room for learning. There are a number of factors that distinguish a mediocre Kai’sa player from a 1v5 Kai’sa prodigy. Let’s have a look:
Teamfighting with Kai’sa: Threat Evaluation
As an ADC, you will always have a target on your back. Which only intensifies in teamfights with the imminent threat of enemy assassins and top lane bruisers looming over you.
Throughout the laning phase, you get used to dealing with your ADC matchup while anticipating support behaviors. But as you transition towards teamfights, you will be facing high mobility assassins along with unrelenting bruisers that possess numerous dashes and gap-closing abilities. Under such circumstances, we generally recommend you tone up your spacing and caution span since it’s quite easy to be caught off guard.
That’s why your map awareness should be at its peak during teamfights. Furthermore, you need to identify and track looming threats in order to ensure your safety. As a matter of fact, you should wait for your team to engage and force out important enemy cooldowns. For example, a Zed or Hecarim Ult can commonly give you a monochromatic trip to the fountain if you’re caught. You can often spot out bush cheesing assassins and enemy flanks with your W, which grants vision in its trajectory.
Teamfighting with Kai’sa: Positioning
The most integral part of an ADC’s gameplay is its positioning. How well you position yourself in teamfights ultimately dictates your damage output along with the ability to win teamfights. Good positioning will help you keep yourself alive while opening up opportunities to dish out maximum damage and ultimately, make you more influential in teamfights.
Even though Kai’sa has more mobility than someone like Ashe or Kog’maw, she can still be locked and burst down easily. Therefore, It is essential to track the enemy frontline while staying behind your own. As one overstep is often enough to get you caught in a chain of enemy crowd control. Additionally, always be vary of flank positions and try to stay out of vision whenever possible.
As Kai’sa, you should always wait for your frontline to engage enemies, and right when the enemy focus consolidates on your frontline, that’s your cue to all in. Focus on enemies closest to you and deal maximum burst damage to one target at a time.
Also read: How To Position In League Of Legends
Kai’sa’s kit facilitates good chase potential as you clean up the enemy team after they’ve burned their cooldowns. In particular, her E and Ultimate allow her to maneuver optimally in teamfights. Top it all off with a giga-ranged AP skillshot and no one can escape you in a winning teamfight.
Teamfighting with Kai’sa: Kite and Chase
Kiting is the bread and butter of a good ADC player, it’s a skill that has unlimited room for improvement, enhancing which can open up countless outplay possibilities. In other words, kiting is an auto-attack mechanism that allows an ADC to move back and forth around enemies while simultaneously auto-attacking. This is made easy by the auto move click action.
During teamfights, one of the biggest enemy team objectives is taking out the ADC which deals the highest consistent damage. As an ADC, moving out of safety will always bait out enemy aggression towards you. Consequently, kiting in and out of enemy aggression tends to waste their resources and time. Which then allows your team to turn the fight on them. Ultimately, forcing them to back out and that’s when the chase begins. Due to Kai’sa’s comparatively low auto-attack range, it’s much easier to deal damage when they are retreating. A W-Ultimate combo is an excellent tool for chasing down enemies.
Understanding Kai’sa’s Abilities
It is essential to understand the technical and mechanical significance of your champion’s abilities for maximizing their usefulness. At first glance, Kai’sa’s kit might seem unreasonably stacked, but in practice, she is still a comparatively well-rounded champion.
As a result, she has remained a fun and stable pick in almost every meta. Having a decent AP mix on top of a well-established hybrid AD kit, Kai’sa has been extremely popular in pro play. With that being said, let’s take a deeper look at this kit of hers:
Passive: Second Skin
The basic form allows Kai’Sa’s basic attack to deal an additional 4 to 10 magic damage.
Passive (Caustic Wounds): Kai’Sa’s basic attacks and Void Seeker – alongside her allies’ immobilizing effects and polymorphs can mark enemy units with plasma stacks for 4 seconds.
Kai’Sa’s attack and Void Seeker against enemy units with four plasma rupture them, consuming them to inflict an additional 15% of the target’s missing health bonus magic damage.
Living Weapon: When Kai’Sa successfully gains a set amount of permanent stats from items and stat growth, she is able to evolve her abilities. Every ability is tied to a specific stat from items.
However, the upgrade is lost if the stat requirement isn’t met.
Also read: Is Kai’Sa Kassadin’s Daughter?
Kai’sa Q: Icathian Rain
During the cast, Kai’Sa will release a swarm of six missiles distributed evenly among visible nearby enemy units, each one hitting its target while dealing physical damage.
Enemy minions with 35% health or below take double damage from Icathian Rain. Meanwhile, enemy monsters take 25% damage from missiles beyond their first.
Living Weapon: This requires 66 to 100 attack damage from items to upgrade. Icathian Rain fires 12 missiles instead of 6.
You can only activate this ability when there’s an enemy near Kai’Sa.
Kai’sa W: Void Seeker
When activated, Kai’Sa will fire a void blast in a target location, granting her sight of the surroundings as it travels further—stopping at the first enemy contact.
Void Seeker deals magic damage to enemies hit, revealing them for 4 seconds while applying two plasma stacks.
Living Weapon: This requires 100 ability power from items to level up. Void Seeker can apply three plasma instead, refunding around 70% of its cooldown if it hits enemy champions.
Kai’sa E: Supercharge
Kai’Sa will charge for the entire duration of SuperCharge’s cast time, where she’s still allowed to move. Additionally, Kai’Sa will become ghosted and gain bonus movement speed, around 0% to 100%, while SuperCharge is in place.
After charging up SuperCharge, Kai’Sa will gain bonus attack speed and reduce her basic attack’s windup percentage to 6.44% over 4 seconds. Each basic attack reduces the cooldown of this ability by 0.5 seconds.
Living Weapon: This requires 70% to 100% attack speed from items to upgrade. After which, SuperCharge grants Kai’Sa invisibility for 0.5 seconds.
Kai’sa R: Killer Instinct
When activated, Killer Instinct lets Kai’Sa shield herself instantly for 2 seconds while swiftly dashing toward a target’s direction. However, this can only occur near a visible enemy champion affected by her Plasma stacks.
Killer Instinct’s shield duration refreshes once Kai’Sa’s dash ends. Plus, it can reset Kai’Sa’s “basic” attack timer.
Additionally, Kai’Sa can cast her other abilities when Killer Instinct is in effect.
Teamfighting with AP Kaisa:
Due to the surprisingly huge AP ratios on W along with the cooldown resets from the Living Weapon W upgrade, combined with the tank melting magic damage in her passive. We have seen major success with the AP Kaisa Builds even in pro play. This strategy revolves around rushing to your W upgrade with Luden’s Tempest as its core while stacking Tear of Goddess for Manamune.
AP Kai’sa has a distinctive approach to teamfighting; she just has to consistently hit W’s from a safe range. All in all, when enemies are low enough she can just dash in with her ultimate in order to finish them off. Most of your damage will be coming from your W and if you miss one, there is an 8-12 sec cooldown on it, during which, you will be rendered useless.
Conclusion
All in all, Kai’sa is a well-rounded champion with excellent team fighting potential, which only goes up as you begin to excel in the qualities mentioned above. From hybrid damage and burst potential to consistent DPS, Kai’sa has it all. Which allows her to burst squishees while still having the ability to melt tanks as well.
Kai’sa’s high scaling potential practically allows you to dominate late-game teamfights and ultimately win games. Furthermore, Kai’sa’s diverse build options keep your games interesting and adaptive. As well as, keeping Kai’sa a relevant and viable pick for any meta.
(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)
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