LoL: Karma And Malignance Isn't Healthy For The Game
Malignance is a new item that was introduced to the game at the start of season 14 with the item rework. It enhances a champion ultimate, which is usually on a long cooldown. Karma has access to her ultimate from level one and therefore some very special interactions with this new item.
Karma is designed around her ultimate ability - Mantra. It is a low cooldown ability that enhances her next basic ability. Her Q will deal more damage, her W will heal her, and her E shield will cast onto more people if she activates ult before the basic ability.
Malignance is a new item that enhances the ultimate ability of champions. It gives them ultimate ability haste and even some more damage.
LoL: Karma Uses Malignance A Little Too Efficiently
Since Karma's ultimate is rather important for her, she has a passive that allows her to reduce the cooldown of the ability by hitting enemies. Hitting an enemy with a spell reduces the ult cooldown by 2/3.5/5 seconds and auto-attacks reduce the cooldown by 1 second as well.
Obviously, ability haste still applies, so Karma should be able to ult like two or three times in a team fight.
Malignance amplifies that by a lot. As mentioned before it automatically reduces the cooldown of the ultimate by quite a bit with its ultimate haste, but it also gives 25 ability haste anyway.
With this item alone Karma is allowed to use a lot more enhanced abilities which not only makes her poking stronger, but she also has better wave clear. Malignance Karma is mostly played in the mid lane as a sort of support mage, but even in the support role, players are rushing this item.
Her next item would be Cosmic Drive, which gives her even more ability haste and synergizes great with the ability spam playstyle. You just become a fast mage that throws around enhanced abilities like it is nothing.
The problem with this combo is that neither Malignance nor Karma are necessarily broken. But combined they absolutely are. Karma has been struggling with the changes to some of the support items and Malignance has just recently been buffed because such few mages can utilize it well.
Nerfing the combo would mean nerfing the interaction between Karma's passive and the Malignance item and as such would reduce Karma's viability back to zero.
What do you think? Should this combo be a thing?