Reign of Gaming

Except that, you know, that's 1 support champion in the middle of several AD bruisers with an occasional AP mage/AD carry thrown in.

Basically, Riot is making Kat 2.0 except even MORE useless competitively and even more stompish at low levels, based on this item alone.

It's not snowballing on kills that makes Kat bad, it's the fact that she has no utility and her main damage is prevented by smart use of CC, something that the majority of competitive teams have an awful lot of.

The snowballing on kills part is what I meant, though. I understand that it's not her biggest flaw, but it's still rather large and it confuses me as to why Riot would ever consider making a champ who quite possibly has an item slot taken up by a mandatory snowball item that would mean that either you get kills or you get screwed.

Snowballing isn't necessarily bad. Every champion does it, and some champions that do it especially well are used quite often competitively, i.e. Vayne. Just because a particular champion has something that makes them snowball harder doesn't make that part of the champion bad.

For instance, Katarina gets her CD reduction and extra gold on kills, something that obviously makes her snowball a bit harder than other champions. The major problem with Kat has nothing to do with this, and her passive actually isn't a problem at all (it used to be one of the things people wanted nerfed the most). If she had a reliable ultimate or any utility she would be very broken, and the snowballing would be a huge problem.

For this champion, he gets a mechanic that allows him to gain free stats when he is doing well, but he also automatically gains 22 AD at level one. This should make for an easy lane against many champions, especially when he, obviously, has a leap of some sort to go with it.

I will agree that a mechanic that exists only for snowballing will probably hold a champion/item/mastery back, i.e. Mejai's or Mercenary, but if the snowballing is in addition to something you already want, i.e. free bonus AD or free CDR, then it can actually be quite good.

My only real complaint here is that snowball champions tend to be a nightmare to balance properly, and he will probably either be incredibly overbearing or completely useless on release.

I would like to point out that this item costs 1000 gold, so it's more likely that he will have to buy it, instead of starting with it. That will keep him from being too easy in the early early laning phase, but I can see this being a priority buy on him. With a single kill, he effectively has boots, as well.

maybe that is the upgrade; its just not showing to weaker version, since it shouldnt be there anyway