Mobile Legends Karina Guide

Mobile Legends Karina Guide by LookAtitGo123

Karina 32kbp 599 diamonds hero. Mage/Assassin. Charge/Reap. Melee.

Passive
Combo Hit. After attacking a target twice in a row, the third attack will deal extra true damage equal to 8% of HP already lost by the enemy.

Notes: First skill does not add the debuff, it simply modifies your auto attack to add extra magic damage, The auto attack will however add one. 2nd and 3rd skill adds one by themselves. The cleaves from the auto attack does not add as well. you can only add one from your auto attack to one target at a time.

Skill 1: Elusiveness
Karina enters a state of Elusiveness for 3 seconds, making her immune to basic attacks and raising movement speed by 35%. Her next basic attack in this state will deal an extra 165 pts of magical damage and must crit strike. Adds 60% slow

Notes: Used to be physical damage long ago, also used to be able to dodge tower hits. you can no longer do that. This will only make you immune to basic attacks. skills like chou first skill will still hit you. often at times when duelling YunZhao, you can use this to bait them while you buy time for your 2nd to cd. also kills and assist will reduce this cd by 60%

Skill 2: Dance of Death
Brandishes double swords, dealing 260 pts of magic damage to surrounding enemies.
Notes: Basically your nuke and helping you to achieve combo hit. everything hit by this adds a debuff. It is long enough to stay so that you can add another. It is your wave clear although not a very good one but better than nothing I suppose.

Ulti: Shadow Rush
Makes 1 attack in a row on a target, dealing 430 pts of magic damage to the target. If the enemy is killed within 5s, the cooldown time for this ability will end immediately. An assist will lower the cooldown for this skill %80.

Notes: The niche of Karina and what makes her scary. whenever there is a Karina around, most ppl tend to not let their HP drop below 50%. This skill also tends to give you the pentas, and it is really fun killing 3 or more with this alone when all of your enemies are low on HP. nicely comboed with heroes like eudora or moskov miya who tends to aoe down everyone.
I tend to max elusiveness first, ulti whenver possible, then 2nd skill as it comes on by.

Battle Spells

Execute, arguably the best skill for her. It’s synergy with her passive makes it do 8% more. with this at late game, marksmen and mages will have to fear you. your full combo will likely drop them from 100 to 0 before they can react.

Retribution, the next best skill for her. As a Karina you want to get fat, and get fat fast! your first skill allows for roaming and jungling for a karina is prolly only behind fanny/natalia/yunzhao. I have tested using the wind shard but found it rather lacking. will explain more in the items section.

Flicker, situationally useful but not really.

purify, if you absolutely do not trust your team to peel for you.

interference, allows for diving, but you should have no trouble getting out if you had execute and killed your target fast. let someone else take this.

anything else. You might find a use for them but nowhere near as good as execute/retribution.

Emblems

Magic Assassin. All the penetration and power you need! Full burst damage incoming.
Magic, if you dont have enough fragments to level the previous this is your next best.
Roamer, not too shabby, as it comes with penetration but the other 2 are better.

Items

CORE ITEMS

Eternal Scepter,
Absolute core for Karina. The extra HP and MP is a nice bonus, however the real sweet deal here is the 5% magic attack increase as soon as it fully stacks. takes 5mins to fully stack. You can feel the difference almost immediately. You want this ASAP.

Guardian Relic,
Another Absolute must have. it gives you a +25% magic power. As soon as you get another 2 AP boosting item this becomes a total beast. Synergy with blood wings is rather insane. The increase in magic attack after a skill hits means that doing a 3 1 2 combo is your highest damage output. Therefore when there is a chance, I tend to use 1 first, then jump in and use the auto attack before finishing with execute/2nd. However it is not likely that you will always have the chance to do this. Situations can call otherwise in fact sometimes you want that first skill to get out. More so in solo q where you cannot trust your teammates to peel for you.

Astral Wand,
Everyone has magic resist which increases based on level. even should no one buy any extra magic resist which I doubt they will facing a karina, this greatly boosts your damage output. There was a thread that did resists calculations few weeks back, and as far as we know, ML has weird damage calculations. Still this is a must have.

BOOTS

Arcane boots,
my first choice. playstyle might differ, however I love to stack penetration as much as possible.

Rapid boots,
another good choice. Your job as a roamer will require alot of movement speed. It also helps chasing and escaping.

Magic Shoes,
good choice if you are going calamity later. gives you 40% CDR tgt with blue buff. no boots,
only applicable end game which really shouldnt be happening as you should have closed the game before then but in such a situation, this is your final last ditch attempt at winning a team fight and going for gold.

SITUATIONAL ITEMS

Blood wings
Almost core actually, the raw magic power is unmatched and it adds health to make you alot less squishy. it adds even more since you have guardian and eternal.

Immortal
Dying late game is a disaster, I ever did get a comeback by baiting with an immortal, have my teammates clean up but die, then upon my revival get a quadra. the 2nd chance is quite critical during late game where a mistake could easily lose you the game. you may sell this the moment your death is used up. just keep in mind the timer to buy it again 3 mins later.

Calamity Scythe
The passive is strong on this one as a 6th item. This is probably what you will get upon selling the immortal. your 132 combo should really be able to almost one shot most heroes.

Flame of fury
I used to run this alot until I realize how far back it set me. the cost price for this item is huge. As a REAP specialist you want to get to your end game alot faster than others do. Attempting to farm for this takes too long, If you are able to get it you are prolly already ending the game. It is far better to get guardian first and then astral also does almost the same job as this item does. the move speed is also not extremely useful. I have since stopped using this on karina.

Notes: CDR is it important do we need it? Yes, it is helpful but not entirely critical. 20% from the blue buff is more than sufficient. just make sure you get resets from kills. Tank build karinanamely dominance ice, oracle and spell vamp. A build I thought of, however the specialty of karina which is an assassin. if you want to play a tank go pick tigreal.
Depending on the first min strat, I might pick up a hunter knife if i am going for my blue. or boots if i am invading enemy blue. Having a mana regen necklace also helps a bunch for you to stay outside longer. eternal gem if you can get it before level 4 is perfect you can make use of the bonus regen to go alittle more offensive.

Strategies involving Karina

Minute 1 strategy

Basically what you do as soon as the game starts. There are a couple of things you can do here and I will list them from the worst to the best. as well as explain their ideal scenarios.

1) Go farm bottom lane. pretty much the worst! you barely make use of her skillsets at all, also unless you are on the side with the turtle you might be able to sneak one but other than that you are just gonna farm, get fat win, not get fat, lose. That is pretty much about it. 0 Strategy, just farm and forget brute force your way through.

2) Go farm middle lane. It is not that bad, but you aren’t exactly the best candidate for the midlane. you want to give this to a marksman so he can accelerate his farm. moskov in particular. But if the hero lineup dictates so, mid lane is pretty good for you to get a fast lvl 4 to start ganking.

3) Go farm top lane. Here I would buy hunter knife and start to kill off the blue camp first. Make sure you link them together so you can cleave and be efficient! make sure you tell your partner to stay FAR AWAY so he dosent fk it up. With the blue buff you should be able to get to lvl 4 faster than your lane opponents. So make use of that early advantage. Immediately here, you can go contest the jungle. they would be farming the small jungle and stealing that is pretty good. Good partners to allow you to do this are heroes like Freya, yunzhao or any other tank.

4) Same top lane, but clear the lane first. you buy magic necklace in this case as your starting item. clear the lane, get lvl 2 get hunter knife and go farm your jungle. the logic works the same way as above, however the goal here is trying to make your opponent miss out on one wave of minions. If you have a good wave clear partner, you can also cut the first wave before they reach their tower and kill them there right behind the tower. other than that you pretty much do what you do in 3.

5) Advanced strategy. Raid enemy blue. Now blue buffs are important to Karina, say you have a fanny on your team, who should take the blue buff instead? fanny? you? Why not BOTH? There are 2 blue buffs that spawn at 32s in this game. one at your jungle the other at your enemy. By invading and raiding their blue. you cause them to lose out on a lot of exp. A few heroes are exception at doing this. Fanny, Natalia, YZ, Karina notably.

There are also 2 ways of doing this. the first is getting retribution. you sneak in with whatever you have when it is low and take it with retri, then you get out. This is usually not recommended. In the case where you fail, the 2 opponents will be at lvl 2. there is no way you are getting out of that if they have a cc. So here is the better way of doing this. 4 man raid. Send one of your guys to farm top and marksman like moskov to clear the midlane. he will be done as soon as the blue buff spawns. The top guy can be ignored as he will do his own stuff and farm. so 3 of you + the mid MM will now attempt to control the enemy blue buff.

Your goal here is to get the blue, being able to kill one hero is an added bonus which normally happens. Your mm will be lvl 2, and 3 of you should be able to rotate CCs and bring one guy down. maybe even 2. However in higher level games, people are not stupid, good teams will know how to protect blue or they could just raid yours the same. Who raids who largely depends on the lineup and this is why you look at enemy battle spells during the loading screen to discern if this is feasible or not.

The game plan here is simple, after a successful raid, one hero will hold the lane while the other starts to roam. now having 2 roamers is scary, the mid lane has to play ultra safely or risk getting another kill in. once you guys get lvl 4 or 5, you can start grouping up and force down a tower. Doing this helps you gain MAP CONTROL something which is very advantageous as you will now be able to contest objectives like turtle and lord SAFELY! take not however GOODLUCK TRYING TO GET YOUR TEAM TO DO THIS SOLOQ. if you don’t have friends, im sorry please go make some. While this strategy is fantastic, it is not possible to do so without communication! you might spam request backup but no one will come.

Also further note on controlling the blue. These buffs spawn at 32s and have a duration of 2 mins. at min 2 35, you want to start heading towards the blue camp again to contest it once more. If you are the one holding the buff, you should ping to let your team know that it is about to expire. Timers are really important in all MOBAs, take for example in Dota, Enigma black hole, a teamfight changing ability but has a cooldown of 200s. The moment you see it being used, you look at the clock, that’s what its for and then for the next 3 mins you know that you can FORCE a teamfight as it will be to your advantage. there will be no blackhole to control your team! after the 3 mins your window of teamfighting is up, please go farm or try to gank and do pick offs. attempting to fight under a tower when blackhole is up is literally asking for it. in ML I normally keep track of buff timers where possible as well as immortal timers. Things like tigreal Johnson ultis are also important to know.

How did I come to know of this strategy? I got rekted by it once. watched a replay and then learned from there.

How to play mid game

coming soon.