First time in this thread. I play the game casually, mostly ARAM, and I need some advice.
Some background- people have gotten onto me about playing Karthus too passive in ARAM before, so I've been looking to improve on that.
http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1893108020/36037?tab=stats
This game was torture. Early on, I looked at the enemy comp, ate a few hits while accomplishing nothing with harass, and decided to hang back a bit. Kalista, Heimerdinger, and Varus especially ripped me apart without any real chance to do damage. I figured I'd play second line, not first, build tanky and jump in when
a) an enemy team member was out of position and I could count on the rest of the team to try and support them
b) a team fight broke out
c) i could land a snowball on the backline with enough of my own team up to expect support when i jumped in.
d) the enemy team was pushing a tower/defending a tower
Basically, I looked for commitment, then jumped in till I died. I figured I couldn't just sit on the frontlines and zone them through fear of my passive given their comp. They'd just kill me from a safe distance, back out, and my passive would accomplish nothing.
My team ripped into me for this, early game, and, when we lost, blamed it on me, and told me to reroll Karth next time I got him. Said I was too passive and didn't commit enough. (And I actually did try just jumping in non stop after we lost the first tower, so either I was doing it wrong, it was already too late, or it just didn't work against their comp)
While I'm a little hurt and not exactly looking to be further ripped apart by criticism, I don't want validation either. I just really want to know how to play Karthus aggressive in this situation.
I'm accustomed to playing super aggressive in dota, but that's typically on heros/champs where I have some combination of a) mobility, b) survivability, (which is Karthus is certainly not early game, and only slightly decent at built tanky- his stats and skills don't support sustain in any way) or c) lockdown. It's also typically in a normal game where manning up isn't barrelling towards an entire enemy team most of the time, but 2 or 3 people in a lane. Furthermore, even as an aggressive initiator, if I don't have the mobility to jump a Varus equivalent- let's say Sniper- I'm not going to just charge the guy in plain sight and die if I don't have the tankiness to make it to him and do something. So this situation is entirely new to me.
Questions are:
a) how do you play Karthus aggressive and frontline against range comps that outrange you, especially in ARAM where that's typically a team of 5?
b) what kinds of builds would you recommend?
Thanks for any help you guys can provide.