RIP Akali

Jefftiffy·Nov 10, 2016·6 votes·1,247 views

They beat you so hard with the nerf bat they had to dig a second grave.

Rework was essentially straight up nerfs just to add in a dash on her W. Because her issue was mobility. The only nice thing about it the ability to jump small walls.

[zombie-brand-facepalm]

I forgot to mention that they also nerfed her core build path in the early game as well. .

Tried building her AD hybrid (focused more on AD than AP) to see if her E buffs helped and how the healing works out with the huge scaling. Does not help at all.

4 Comments

AvienalNov 10, 20161 votes

{quoted}

They beat you so hard with the nerf bat they had to dig a second grave.

Rework was essentially straight up nerfs just to add in a dash on her W. Because her issue was mobility. The only nice thing about it the ability to jump small walls.

[zombie-brand-facepalm]

I forgot to mention that they also nerfed her core build path in the early game as well. .

Tried building her AD hybrid (focused more on AD than AP) to see if her E buffs helped and how the healing works out with the huge scaling. Does not help at all.

Very sure Akali is not as fked as you said because the times i played her, she felt the same but instead of focusing on chunking her abilities to proc her passive, she can simply auto hit for them for small bursts of healing and damage instead, which in turn frees up some of her ability use and not need to constantly spam it to consistently heal and chunk out big damage.

Plus assassins work by 'bursts' not dueling, meaning that since Akali procs her heal and her 'boom auto hit' by simply basic attacking now, she doesn't need to constantly fight an opponent to keep her sustain and damage bonus to continue to be effective, meaning she fits better on being able to Q mark a target, jump them, auto hit, if there's enough time get the 2nd auto in then W escape away.

Not to mention the gimmicks of her E can now be a more effective wave clear method especially with the Damage jump up, CD refund and even if they 'damage nerfed the R', it was likely to make Akali's R to be used as utility, not as a huge instant damage bomb by constantly jumping on a enemy champion soon as the CD ends, plus Akali can dish out lots of damage already thanks to the Q mark and the damage burst on the 2nd auto hit now.

And her kit is still viable with the same items too since her gaining a 'burst of heal' or doing a 'burst of damage' would translate to a stronger heal from Hex'tech Gunblade then simply doing it slowly over time, making it more of a 'damage padding'. Oh and the passive resets every 8 to 4 seconds as time goes on, so it can keep being active almost constantly early on and prettty much every time you Q detonate a target.

[slayer-jinx-catface]

Sadly alot of other champions got hit much harder whether its good or bad:

Fizz got off safe too like Akali by not losing how his kit is still basically the same but by having his W work by procing a mark during its 'bleed' effect that can be detonated with the W's active for triple the damage it would normally add on and even refund 2/3rd the mana and set the CD to 1 second (which by default at rank 1 is 10 without CDR), it grants him a nice way to quickly push out last hits on minions without comboing his entire kit wrecklessly. The Shark now having a distance bonus to increase the shark's size, damage and slow power is also nice.

Katarina was definitely the one hit the hardest because she literally lost part of how her kit works by not being able to use her 'old W dagger spin' as a means to damage a target especially while chasing them and her Q not letting her applies those marks and the bounce getting cut down a bit makes it tricky for her, especially against range based opponents in the mid lane. While at the same time kind of ruining part of her controlled damage source, with her now being more focused around using her Shunpo to constantly proc her 'dagger on the ground pick ups' which are not always in the best of positions of consistently using them to hit an opponent strong (especially if they have easy measures to quickly run out of the way of the dagger before it lands) in trade power. Its hard to say how they can tune her properly but they might need to take out some of the power in the dagger spin and put it back in her other ways to dish out strong damage that she especially use as a strong initiator against a target.

I have yet to have a chance to properly play or see Shaco Rengar and Talon in action but what i've heard is Shaco got his damage source messed up a bit which makes it difficult for him to work, no idea if its a problem of him needing hot'fixes or people need to come up with a new item set setup, just like how Katarina might be in. Talon's in the place of being extremely strong because even with the long 'CD' on parkouring over sections of the map is already a pretty strong gimmick to let him get anywhere even faster then bard and probably just as fast as Rek'sai, meaning he can flank a target that managed to flash over a wall to escape him and he can still grab a kill off them, plus how im hearing it, his damage is quite strong combined with this near omni'presence like map roaming power'. Finally with Rengar, same with Talon though based on what i've read in his kit it seems its less on mobility being OP but more on his power being extremely strong, especially at how far it can skyrocket out of control by gaining a bit of flat AD plus % AD per unique target he kills. Which makes sense already since he is definitely one of the Assassins who can benefit greatly on items like the new item 3147 with jumping in and out of fights to get that leap bonus alongside duskblade's passive proc. In addition to being able to negate a part of damage he's taken by 'healing it back' with his roar and requiring 1 less ferocity stack to hit max means he can rotate much faster in empowered abilities.

Finally Leblanc feels like they didn't balance out her damage but instead made it a stronger spike and made her Ethereal chain E so 'strong' in ends that it makes me think that ability is maxed first by the Le'blancs i have seen to constantly root spam a target after using W to dive in and bop them once and hit them with the chain without a issue. Doesn't help on how much it gets silly when a Le'blanc intentionally stacked enough CDR to start off with 20% CDR right at level 1. Gets even more silly with the R mimic gag and her passive now instead of being her 'douchie' way of escaping, instead it lets her gain extra damage boom easily by marking a target by jumping on them with W, hitting them with Ethereal chain, W back if necessary, but likely the enemy gets hit by the 2nd dmg hit, the tether, thunderlord's decree because that was the third ability/attack hit and the passive's malice orb procs off dealing at least 5 instances of damage that can be done as early as level 3. Wouldn't call rushing MR asap a good solution since even then she can constantly play the dive, root, dive out even if you try to CC her and just repeat the process till your dead or low on healthy.

To summarize, They destabilized alot of Assassins in more ways then just a few.

[slayer-jinx-unamused]

TrueCalamityNov 11, 20161 votes

akali is fucked if you ever played her you would know shes fuck dont understand how weak she is i play her and i cant even assassinate the adc and thats her roll that old akali was amazing and all they had to do was change the fucking w thats it and she would of been perfect with out the changes needed

LimmieNov 11, 20161 votes

I don't have time to type up a proper response right now, so I'll just say this: her E was nerfed, not buffed. It now scales with bonus AD, not total. That means it does no physical damage at all if you don't build AD, and the only AD she gets in a traditional is the gunblade's 40. That means it's a straight up nerf. The cooldown refund doesn't even it back to the pre-rework CD too btw. Assuming you proc a refund, it cuts the cooldown (which was tripled) by half. That means a 0.5 seconds increase when you do get the refund.