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Akali Changes Will Encourage Tankali and Move her Away From Being an Assassin

TheNeemDream·11/3/2016, 9:40:54 PM·28 votes·1,581 views

Hello all, I was just wanting to throw in my 2 cents about the Akali rework. I have not seen any post that details all of the mechanical/clunkiness changes brought about by her rework (Just threads that focus on 1 aspect like her shroud) so I will highlight them here. In the end, the rework is going to make it so Akali must build tanky to be relevant and completely shift her away from being an assassin. I think post rework (As it is currently drawn up) will make her a back line diver that disrupts the enemy team, akin to a tanky Irelia. This is a complete change in playstyle and one that completely removes the fun of playing Akali, hence why the players who use Akali are so upset. What kind of assassin rework makes a champion who, in my opinion, typified the assassin class into a tank?

Passive: The passive is now super awkward, requiring you to get 2 auto attacks off to get use of it. Having the heal go off on the first auto attack and the damage in the second is not only worse than her previous passive in terms of scaling/damage and ease of use but the order is also off. You want to heal on the second autoattack and do damage on the first as you will oftentimes be at full health during the initial engage and unable to make use of the heal (A heal is more useful at the end of a trade rather than at the beginning). Nerf to her already horrendous early game while also being a nerf late.

W: Can no longer be used as a zoning tool, you must walk up to place shroud making akali vulnerable. The mini flash is neat and adds wall hopping possibilities but is not something that is super useful given that she was already good at hopping walls and the early game tradeoffs and vulnerability are not worth it for a mini flash. The shroud will no longer be countered by pinks which is a huge buff but it removes counterplay and the massive nerfs Akali is receiving make the new shroud definitively not worth it.

E: increased cooldown combined with a damage increase seems like a fairly fair trade right? The only problem is Akali has terrible waveclear. This will make it more difficult for her to CS in the early game (Where she is already notoriously bad) while also hurting her late game waveclearing ability.

R: The most harmful of the changes in my opinion. Not only did they completely gut R's damage but they added a cooldown. Now it will be significantly easier to escape/kite Akali. Also makes it much more difficult for akali to juke or escape. I think that was the entire point of the rework, to give her more counterplay and make her less feast or famine but with all of these changes and removing the thing she shined at (sticking to carries) she is going to become useless as a burst, get in and get out assassin. Furthermore, giving her 3 stacks immediately actually removes counterplay as she can now just jump right on top of you as soon as she hits 6. Akali will be more likely to steamroll you after hitting 6 now, at least before you knew that she was unlikely to jump on you as soon as she hit 6 because she has to wait to accumulate stacks.

In summary, severely nerfing Akali's damage ratios and base damage while nerfing her waveclear and making her super clunky is basically going to completely move Akali away from being an assassin. There is simply no incentive for building damage. The only place she will have in the game now is to build full tank (The thing most people hated about her in the first place) and dive the carry. Once attention is shifted to her she will shroud and zone out the carry simply because there will be no vision of her. Making her role one that distracts the enemy team. This is extremely upsetting as Akali prerework was in essence, the perfect assassin: Try to blow up the carry quickly or die to the focus/peel of the enemy. Now she is going to become something more like a tank/carry disruptor. She will dive your carry and force the other team to try to peel her off the carry. Once sufficient attention is paid to the Akali (If no attention is paid she will still be proficient at killing the carry because she will be so tanky and can stay in melee range) she will drop shroud, causing confusion as the other team readjusts to new target or starts throwing AoE's into Akali's shroud because they cannot use a pink to gain vision. During this time, the carry will likely have to back off as Akali may reengage. Building damage would run counter to this as she would simply die before doing anything with her much lower damage and clunky kit. This was never meant to be Akali's playstyle and ruins all of the things that Akali players liked about the champion

9 Comments

Hinagiku3311/4/2016, 3:16:23 AM5 votes

This is pretty much what worries me.

Melee glass cannon builds/play styles have always been a problem in League since it's never worth it unless it is massively over-tuned. Since ranged champions can kite perfectly because of instant turn around, it's always been a disadvantage to be melee and not build defense. Ever since the Beta it's been preferable to build tanky on melee champs just to survive team fights. Any melee champ that can't survive a team fight is pretty much doomed to be a mindless split push robot (see: Tryndamere, Shaco).

The better assassin reworks still allow for big bursts of damage, but add delays to telegraph it more and allow windows to use abilities and items to fight back. Talon got a massive bleed damage that he has to stack up to take effect, Kat got her daggers which give plenty of time falling to notice before they "activate", Leblanc got a mark on her targets that takes a couple seconds to activate.

But Akali already had this to begin with. Her Q has a travel time and her combo already lets her Q mark sit for a couple seconds before she dives in so she can use her Q a second time. Her combo currently is Q -> wait 3 seconds -> R -> AA -> Q -> R -> AA -> E. Sure she blows people straight up when she's fed, but everyone does that. The complaints were that Akali was too sticky and they couldn't escape, not that they blow up too fast to react.

Just the cooldown change to her R would have left plenty of room for counterplay. They had to make it reduced by CDR again on the PBE because she was just that bad with the cooldown change. The shroud duration could also have been reduced without any other changes if it really was too powerful with the stealth changes. Nerfing almost all of her damage and crippling her in-combat sustain just kills her.

If Akali's damage is too low to burst targets properly, then she blows up instantly and is useless. If you cannot 100 - 0 a target in 1 rotation, then you tank up. If assassin Akali can't get kills and just dies, then tank Akali can at least survive the fight to DPS a carry down and force the enemy to peel her off.

RavenMagus11/4/2016, 8:21:47 PM4 votes

I actually feel this way about all of the assassin reworks. They're introducing delays in all of the assassin kits so they take a few seconds to kill a squishy target ... but those squishy targets are ADCs, who have just as much burst damage as they used to have and will kill them in under a second lategame. Considering you can't dodge an ADC right clicking you, assassins will be forced to become tanky just to survive to see the end of their burst.

NGNL Asian11/4/2016, 2:03:17 AM1 votes

lol. "Tank akali :)". The days of tank akali and tank fiora :). Broken

TheNeemDream11/5/2016, 1:58:26 AM1 votes

Yes, I am not sure you can have true assassins in this game if they are not able to quickly and efficiently kill the ADC. I have not messed with the other assassins in PBE but if they are adding delay to all of the assassins kits then they may need to look into nerfing ADC damage. There is no point to picking an assassin if they can't even 1v1 an AD carry. AD carries already have the advantage of being able to siege, output continuous and high damage, take objectives, kite, and waveclear. They will obviously outdamage an assassin if they survive the initial burst so building tank is the only real response.

EROTIC RAID BOSS11/5/2016, 3:55:19 AM1 votes

I don't see why her being able to jump you right at 6 is a problem, that's the case with most ults especially in mid lane, you hit 6 first and try to use the spike to get a kill. I don't think that's that problematic on ahri for example

Pierce The Veal11/5/2016, 3:58:56 AM1 votes

Here have my upvote.