Can we PLEASE talk about Akali?

I saw a thread in here yesterday claiming that Akali had the range on her ult completely gutted with a picture from the PBE. Unfortunately discovered this was false and it's simply a bug with her tooltip indicator when you have no points spent in R.

The sad thing is that before people realized it was a false claim, the thread was upvoted to hell because it was an attempt to nerf Akali. That's the state she's in right now - people are so fed up with this champion that they will upvote a change even if it completely dumpsters her lol.

Now I would rather not have the champion completely removed from viability, but I think something seriously needs to change to bring her back down to Earth. As it stands, her levels 1-5 are fairly weak (surprisingly strong against some champions like Yasuo, but I digress). After she hits 6 she gets an enormous power spike.

At this point she becomes nigh unapproachable by most champions. Her trades in lane are pretty high, but they're manageable assuming you can return some damage (until she finishes her gunblade of course, but by then you could have a hydra or whatever so that point is relatively moot). I think a major problem here comes from her design - high sustained burst mixed with a cheesy stealth mechanic.

People who complain about Akali often get shot down with "buy a pink ward." And it's true for the most part (at least before she gets 3+ items). A pink ward will let you put damage on her while she waits for the cooldown on her mark; it actually goes a long way towards fighting her. The problem is that you are then limited to buying a pink ward and not using it on the map, and you can't expect all 5 of your teammates to prepare in this fashion. It's simply unreasonable for your team to spend 500 g on pink wards just so they can sit in your inventory just in case Akali runs into them while they're farming or fighting.

Of course, later on the pink ward hardly even helps since a 3+ item akali will one shot a carry without defensive items. But I won't talk about that because there are plenty of champions with that capability in the game.

But there is one major difference that I do want to talk about. Most assassins in this game have a majority of their burst damage centered around their ultimate. Leblanc, and Talon come to the forefront of my mind here, but also Akali. Now what's the major difference between these 3 champions? Well to begin, they can all take down a carry 100-0, but Leblanc and Talon then have to wait a fairly long period of time for their ultimate cooldown to reset.

Akali, on the other hand, will have at least one charge left on her ult (but generally 2 or 3 due to the reset). This, combined with the short cooldown and energy return from her Q (mark of the assassin) and her incredibly high sustain from gunblade + passive makes her overwhelmingly mobile and powerful in teamfights compared to how assassins are typically designed.

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So having rambled for awhile, here are some of the overpowering strengths of Akali that I think should be addressed. Not all of these at once of course, but maybe tinker with them one at a time until we come across something manageable.

Q returns energy on proc. This dramatically increases her sustained damage, which is overpowering when you consider how much burst damage she applies.

R resets on kill. Same reason as above, but it also serves as a ridiculous generator of mobility and sustain.

Abilities are all single target meaning there is no loss in sustain from spell vamp.

I still consider her shroud to be very cheesy, albeit manageable. It's the last thing I would touch but I still want to put it in here as a point of discussion.

Last of all is her synergy with Zhonyas. Hilariously enough I think if Zhonyas wasn't a viable item on Akali, she wouldn't be nearly as strong right now. The active allows her to bait and dodge a ton of CC and skillshots (because if you don't CC akali immediately you get penta'd). Not sure how you nerf Zhonyas on akali while leaving it up for other champs. I'll leave that to smarter people than myself.

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Okay that's all I got. Anyone else?