My close circle of friends have gotten REALLY into Dominion as of late. We've been playing around with different Champions and strategies, and we finally settled into a groove. We've been winning a lot recently, and our rating is going up: queue times are increasing, we're seeing more Revives in-game, and we're seeing less people oblivious to the fact that you need to defend your points to win.

Part of this rise has been our playing 3 Champions: one friend on Varus, one on Katarina, and myself on Malphite. We've lost games playing those Champions, but lots of the games we've played thus far have been rolls in our favor.

So, my question to the Dominion community is:

Are these Champions actually really good on Dominion? Are we just good WITH them? Are we getting lucky?

Edit: Kat and Varus have both gone bot when needed, but we have our best luck with all 3 of us top.

Malphite is really good.

Malph is stupid OP.

Kat and Varus have too much power in their ultimates, but can still be good. Varus is like one of the top 3 poke champs, which is pretty useful.

Malphite is good in Dominion primarily because he counterpicks the current metagame:

First of all, he ensures your team has a tank. Don't laugh... Ive seen countless games with no real tanky champ, and glass cannon autoattackers like Xin.

Second, his AoE stomp hugely reduces attack speed of enemy champions. This doesnt affect their initial hit, attack-resetter, but definitely messes up their sustained damage...especially vs Xin, Jax, Fiora, and the like.

He also tends to want to build lots of armor, tho theyve nerfed his scaling down to ****. Most of the tanky Derps in dominion don't like it when you build lots of armor and are tanky.

He has adequate early poke ability, and dominion keeps him from running out of mana all the time, normally a problem.

The best way to build him is to make him really tanky, rely on base damage values, and work on CDR.

Why CDR? This allows him to keep someone permanently slowed and him hasted by Q spam, and ensures as much groundstomp debuff as possible. Also ensures ability to use Ult to initiate tower attacks as much as possible.

Sure you can build AP for his crappy Q, R ratio (worse than nunu even).
Or build 500 armor, to get a whopping 150 extra damage on his stomp. (seriously, that ratio is ****!)
And build AD/triforce to try to play bruiser and use your 30% dmg boost.

But CDR of 40% lets you use your stuff 67% more often. Win! Frozen Heart is the usual way of doing this, adding massive CDR, extra mana, and huge armor, with the nasty aura that adds to his AS-hozing role.


-------------
Kat is so so. Varus is so so. Your teamwork and skill of players makes more of a difference there.

It's more important to play a champion YOU'RE good with than a champion that's just "good".

Jayce is considered Top tier/OP bot laner, but I've beaten plenty, some even as Varus.

I say you guys have not just found champs you guys are really good with, but a team comp that works for you, gj.

In the correct hands, Katarina is pretty scary (particularly after the change). Obviously a full-cc team will hurt her, but a good one can work around it pretty well.

Yo, I'm the Kat, Clueless is talking about.

We played one game last night against a stupidly CC heavy team. Funny thing is, it wasn't that hard and was one of my best games. Granted, at this point I've had the practice with her and a bunch of general play tips from watching Tiensi no Akuma (I know watching people doesn't make you good but I did learn how to deal with CC because of him) It was the games that had many high damage or extremely tanky champs that I had the most trouble with.

Over all, I think that us being pretty decent (I hesitate 'good' because of myself ><) with these champs and meshing with each other kinda pinpoints why this trio has been working. Generally, each game, Kat or Varus will get fed, the enemy team trying to focus one down while the other does stupid amounts of free damage. When I notice Kat is getting focused, though, or if it's Varus/Kat defending a point alone, I know my friend's ability to kite and his freaking scary aim with his Q will mean that if I initiate something or let myself be an easier target than him he can generally clean up even if we are out numbered. When you add in Malphite and everything he can bring to a fight, even if both Kat and Varus die, Malph will take out many who are left and then hold a point for reinforcement. And we all know it, we know what we have to do to set up each other for these champs and we do it.

Your team fight potential with that trio is really good. Malph's AS reduction is disgusting when its maxed, so your teammates won't get too beat up by bruisers. Assuming your kat can wait to ult, Varus can lock everyone in place for her ult (tons of damage while opponents are snared). Between Varus's ults kat still has damage reduction from shunpo and malph ults can act similarly to varus's when eveyone is knocked up (allowing kat to ult and varus to spam poke and aa).

Not a bad comp by any means. Throw in a wukong top for even better results imo.

You mean too little?

Katerina's ult got SCREWED by the changes. Yeah, the rest of her kit is super awesome now, but even getting a full ult doesn't feel very rewarding now.

Malph is really good on Dominion even afte rhis scaling and percentual attack speed reduction were nerfed hard. Malphite ensures you Punishing enemy teams that refuse to Pick AP or Darius just by the sheer fact os stacking armor and scaling with it plus greatly reducing their damage output once you get a frozen Heart and E burst them.

Varus is really good, something that took a really hard time to figure out to the Sr community and still gives them a hard time to their close mindness is that your steroid linked to your pasive is something pretty strong on teamfights since you are not relying on any cds to get "on steroids", he also has a nice range and a really useful ultimate that can capitalize on the other two ultimates or viceversa, Overall you found a great team composition but it's mostly caus eof Malphite :3.

@Halfhearted, The Healing reduction debuf fon KAt's ultimate is nothing to scoff at.