About assassins

Their long-running problem in this game has been that they don't offer counter-play because they murder the minute their damage rotation starts. The whole reason why the assassin rework was attempted to begin with was because the resounding sentiment of the player base was that assassins were a fucking pain to deal with when they just wiped people the moment they were spotted.

So CT designs , an assassin that is pretty much unable to quickly kill anyone without landing multiple moves at melee or close-to-it ranges. Well, because of this notion, coupled with how squishy she is, we run into new problems. She needs a way to not die while doing her damage rotation (Note that Akali's base armor is so low that she even with +5 armor, she has less starting armor...than Nami. She has a base armor of 23. Just a quick factoid for how easy it is for her to die if she messes up in even small ways). Other assassins don't need as powerful defensive tools because their job is much faster.

Akali's Twilight Shroud gives her the room to actually do her combos without being clicked on and beat down the minute she's in range. Alright, but we have a new problem. Akali's Shroud used to have a blink, and doesn't now. How does she turret dive? This is solved by allowing her W to drop turret aggro while she's in it, and counter-play is provided by allowing enemies to see her outline so they can hit her with freely aimed attacks to slow her down or stall her shroud. Even if she zones you from cs for a bit, if you're pretty healthy you can just walk back up while her W's down and punish her, and if you're low, you needed to go to fountain, anyway.

However, the resounding sentiment from the community is that it apparently hates Akali more than all the one-shot machines we had BEFORE Akali.

So here's the big question: If you guys hate getting LeBlanc'd on, but you ALSO dislike Akali because of the logistics of her game play, do you guys even like the concept of assassins at all?

Like, there's only 2 ways to go about it. Either they 1-shot people on sight or they have defensive mechanics that give them the time they need to chase down and finish up targets. Doing something like Evelynn where they just delay the inevitable doesn't really make much of a difference (I'm given a warning symbol, then she flies out of the darkness with the quickness and murders me before the Charm's done...what have we accomplished by designing this champ?) and pretty much has the same issue as the older assassins (all their game play is concentrated around one singular moment, and their job is to just delete you in that moment and hightail it out of there before you get to do anything about it...or they just die). Akali's the only solo lane assassin we have in the game that isn't designed around bursting people in a singular moment like this, and thus offers more time to play around her in fights...which was the ENTIRE POINT of everyone's complaining like 2 or so years ago. If you guys hate this as well, the hell else are assassins supposed to do?

I personally like this direction of assassin design that gives them stronger defensive tools and gives me longer to try to save myself somehow instead of getting K6'd the minute an assassin's on screen, so if anyone's wondering, the reason I defend Akali like I do is because I don't want the NEXT assassin to be a throwback to the cancer we've been dealing with before Akali. I DO NOT like being 1-shot.