/dev: Karma Rework

A new champion coming to Wild Rift is always an exciting moment. It means new gameplay opportunities, pretty new art, and it also marks the end of the “day 204: please I need x champion in Wild Rift” posts.

Now you can all finally stop asking about Karma, because she’s here! And she’s brought a unique style of gameplay that has been missing from our roster for a while now: a battle mage. But bringing Karma over from League PC wasn’t as easy as just pressing Ctrl + C. Much like the Enlightened One, we had to go on a bit of a spiritual journey.

So sit back, grab a donut (trust me, you’ll be craving one by the end), and take a peek at how we made some harmonious changes to a classic kit.

BRINGING HARMONY TO A WILD RIFT

We’ve talked about this before, but when choosing which champions come to Wild Rift we try to prioritize the ones that add unique gameplay to the current roster. You might notice that until this point, we have quite a few enchanter supports who can heal, shield, and protect their allies from danger. But we’re missing someone who can help their allies while also being a mastermind who controls her foes over the course of a fight…and that’s where Karma comes in.

“We initially looked at Karma because of two gameplay-focused reasons,” says David “Papa Smoothie” Xu, Gameplay Product Lead. “One part was that we didn’t have any sort of battle mages in our roster of champions, and the other was that we also didn’t have any aggressive enchanter supports except for Lux.”

We’ve made adjustments to champion abilities before, but when we do our number one priority is to keep the champion’s fantasy the same. We wanted to make sure you could play Karma on League PC, then hop on your phone and play her in Wild Rift with her still feeling like the same champ you’ve known and loved for years.

“I loved reading and seeing comments on Reddit from over ten years ago when Karma originally released. I intentionally was thinking about them when making these changes, and didn’t want them to ever think ‘oh this is a completely new champion.’ I wanted them to feel the soul of Karma and view this as just an upgrade for our game,” recalls game designer, Wei “wei2troll” Xie.

However, in order to maintain a champion’s fantasy, we sometimes have to make adjustments to their gameplay to fit Wild Rift. We’ve discussed making changes like this before, and our gameplay adjustments still fall into those same three broad categories:

Dead buttons: We want every button you press to have meaningful output, which could come in the form of a small buff to your attack speed or a giant crystal arrow zooming around the map.

Control opportunities: Making the most of twin-stick controls, with more opportunities for abilities like skillshots.

Design opportunities: Adapting to Wild Rift’s smaller map, shorter game length, or a chance to innovate on a dated champ kit.

Now, where does Karma fit into all of this?

Well, she falls somewhere in between all three of these categories, and it’s why her adjustments are going to look different from anything we’ve done with champions so far.

“We’ve made a lot of customized changes to fit our game, but this is just our next step in the journey,” says game designer Sol “Solcrushed” Kim.

EVERY GOOD JOURNEY ENDS WITH A DONUT

Walking down a new path is something Karma mains are familiar with. In her ten plus years on the Rift, her kit has seen a number of adjustments and she’s had many different play styles. Whether she’s peeling for her Vayne who's 1v9’ing the enemy team, being an unkillable pest in the top lane, or a must pick mid-lane battle mage that even represented Faker in a cinematic, Karma’s done it all.

With Karma’s extensive past and long resume, there were plenty of places to look for inspiration for her new wilder journey. But, for wei2troll a lot of her inspiration came from watching what Karma did in all those cinematics.

“I saw Karma in so many cinematics and she was so popular, she even represented Faker in the Worlds one. But I saw in each one she was this supportive battle mage who had this measured power,” recalls wei2troll. “Karma will try to keep the peace when possible, but she will also take action when necessary. She’s like this support who will empower her teammates, but she also has the power to destroy you if you cross the line, or overstep too much. It was really important to me to emphasize that in her style and kit.”

Something key to Karma’s kit is her ability to empower and protect her team. In League PC this power comes from her ultimate, but for Wild Rift it’s been moved to her passive.

Karma’s passive is Mantra. She gains a stack of Mantra with each spell cast, and reaching three stacks empowers her next ability. This change meant Karma’s signature spell empowering remained while ensuring it wasn’t a “dead button.”

“Mantra also fully resets when she ults,” adds wei2troll. “We wanted to keep the empowerment from her ultimate while making sure players could optimize it in Wild Rift to account for shorter game length. Moving Mantra to her passive also lets her combo smoothly and makes her kit cohesive.”

One of those smooooooth combos that players can pull off will be with Karma’s updated second ability. Focused Resolve will now automatically tether up to two nearby enemy champions on cast, and if those champions fail to escape the tether range, they’ll be rooted for a short time. When empowered, it will form an additional tether, forcing the two enemies to scatter. If the tethers aren’t broken in time, the enemies will be more rooted than the Dreaming Tree.

“The double tether is a small upgrade to making the ability feel better,” wei2troll explains. “It’s different from PC because in testing it felt hard to use our twin-stick controls to select the champion you want to tether. It will also give players more gameplay options, because having a double root will create interesting situations and allow players to make more decisions on how and when they use the ability.”

“This was really a prime example of keeping that same champion fantasy, while making adjustments so they feel good on mobile,” adds Champions Product Lead Maddy “Riot Madz” Wojdak. “Karma’s second ability will still feel the same, but it just needed some adjustments so it could feel that way with our twin-stick controls.”

Using your ultimate should always feel good. It’s when your champion’s kit fully comes online and everything in it feels connected. It lets you do cool combos, sway the course of a teamfight, or maybe even an entire game. Karma’s ultimate has always brought her kit together and given her plenty of options on how to play games out and sway teamfights in her team's favor.

Karma’s original ultimate paired with her passive fits the longer, chess-like style of gameplay in League PC, whereas in Wild Rift games are shorter and faster-paced. And because we moved her ability-empowering ult to her passive, she needed an entirely new “big moment” ult that still gives Karma players the chance to shine in teamfights.

Karma’s new ultimate, Transcendent Embrace, forms a ring of spirit energy that deals damage, slows, and knocks enemies into the center if they’re caught on the edge. It was called The Donut in testing, and we all agreed to unofficially call it the Donut Danger Zone if you dared to stand on the edge.

“We tested a lot of different variations of what Karma’s new ultimate could be. I was thinking of ways to turn the power from enemies into something against them. The first version I tried was a teamwide cleanse, which is something we don’t have in any other enchanters’ kits. It would cleanse all your teammates and then turn it back into a damage wave and shoot it back at the enemies,” laughs wei2troll.

“It’s important that abilities always feel good for players to use. This aoe cleanse is one of those things that could maybe be really good in the right hands or be really strong in that one perfect teamfight you randomly get. But that’s not the only thing that matters, we want players to feel good when using an ability. Because if they don’t, it doesn’t matter how strong it is or could be,” says Riot Madz.

And with that (plus a lot of other stuff like modeling, animation, sound effects, visual effects… you get the idea) Karma was ready to tip the scales and make her big debut in Wild Rift! Hopefully the new battle mage brings a little bit of harmony to your life and to your winrate. And if not… you can always blow up your enemies to brute force the wins.