The Akali Update has turned out to be a Disappointing Downgrade
Before the rework, old Akali had a low pickrate and a low banrate with a good winrate. Most people didn't really like her that much, but she wasn't widely hated by the players. The rework was supposed to modernize her kit and make her better for modern League. Now she's back to a low pickrate and low banrate, but now she has a garbage winrate and everyone hates her. As long as she has her current kit she'll stay this way because if she is at all decent in soloq she'll be busted in pro play. The whole design of her kit just isn't good and is what keeps her in this awful state.
A big reason she is this way is because they decided to make her kit entirely revolve around her shroud. It turns out that this isn't a good idea and in order to make a champion that functions around a single ability good you have to make that ability completely busted. This could potentially end up working out in theory, but when you make the ability incredibly unfun to play against and insanely good it just doesn't. It should've been very apparent from the beginning that obscurity under turrets was a bad idea. There weren't any Akali players that I knew that supported the idea of her being immune to turrets with her shroud. You would think that even when she was still 100% p/b in pro after the first couple rounds of nerfs that they would've decided to remove it, but they just kept other pointless ones coming. It also turns out that when you make the one ability the champion is balanced around super bad, then the champion will also be super bad.
Another bad thing about her kit is the fact that she has an execute on her ultimate. This is also another reason why she was p/b in pro since release. She can go into a fight and even if she can't kill her target she can still use R2 to kill whichever enemy her team got down low. It's the same reason Urgot is currently high priority. They changed her ult from something that she could use to stick to her target to a big damage boom stick that she uses to instakill whoever is low on the enemy team. It also doesn't help that it isn't targeted anymore so if she's in trouble, then she has two free range dashes to get away with.
The third problem with her kit is how she goes about killing her target. At this point she is really just a bad and squishy bruiser pretending to be an Assassin. The only part of her kit that screams assassination is the execute on her ultimate which is, again, broken. Unless she is far ahead, she has no burst in her kit that she can use to kill carries with. Having to go into melee range to proc her passive and then run away from the person she's trying to kill and then trying to run back in to auto attack them is bad. Dancing around like a headless chicken trying to get passive procs off isn't a well designed assassination pattern. This all goes back to her shroud as well. Due to the fact that her burst pattern is so slow, she needs her shroud to be able to survive long enough to use R2. She just absolutely cannot fight without shroud in almost every situation. Having such a busted ability be her whole crutch for actually killing people is so bad.
Thematically, it would make sense to focus on her shroud as it is a unique ability that no other champion has. Gameplay wise this is an awful idea. Long time Akali players didn't love playing Akali because of her shroud. They enjoyed her because of how mobile and sticky she was with her ultimate. For gameplay, she could function perfectly fine without her shroud. Back when pinks revealed her and oracles was in the game she was still doing just fine. It should've been painfully obvious to focus on her ult and dashes for the rework. You could've made her shroud look and feel super amazing without turning it into the crutch she relies on to function as a champion. Instead of focusing on her constantly being able to dash around all of the attention was focused on a gimmicky and broken ability and she was given a 2 dash ultimate on a long ass cooldown with one of the dashes being completely busted. Her ult even has one of the highest cooldowns of all of the Assassin ultimates in the game which is even worse because she probably relies on her ult the most to kill her targets.
Her whole kit is just bad design. It has no redeemable features in it aside from her shroud which is a flawed ability. She's just a poorly designed bruiser trying to be an Assassin, but failing at it. Having a whole kit based around a badly designed ability and requiring high a cooldown ultimate to kill people is just bad design.
This isn't even to mention that she is almost nothing like old Akali. The only thing that she had in her kit left that resembled Old Akali was her heal and now that's gone too. Her new personality is just complete ass and super lame. If I wanted to play an edgelord champion I would play Kayn or Zed and not Akali. The voice lines they wrote for her are all just bad and lazy and are super generic. Riot has always said that they keep long time Akali players in mind when making changes to her, but they've just lied over and over again and now we're here. A champion with a lame personality and a poorly designed kit with a busted crutch of an ability.
It's very frustrating that they kept her in that state for so long and let her be p/b in pro for so many months. It feels to me like they hyped her up with the KDA skin and now that they've cashed out on it they smashed her into the ground because they don't need her anymore. I have little faith that the future changes they have planned for her will really fix anything and she'll just be like this forever.
It's pretty hard to sympathize with players who are unhappy with their champion rework until it happens to you. I hope other players who love their champion don't end up like this when it's their turn for a rework.
