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Akali changes

Chewedon·5/18/2019, 4:41:46 PM·3 votes·1,530 views

Hello everyone,

After trying out the new Akali (yeah I know, I'm always late) I got some ideas about Akali changes:

Can we make her Twilight Shroud (W) complete circle and not a donut shape?
Would it look better if after marking an enemy with Shuriken Flip (E), pressing E again makes her instantly vanish into green leafs and teleports her behind her enemies? Feels more ninja-ish like Naruto anime.
Can we get some healing back? Old Akali could recover 70% of her HP in two chops...How about healing in addition to recovering energy when she's inside her shroud?
Some more burst damage? Doesn't feel like she can delete a champion fast enough like a Zed, Talon or a LeBlanc can.

I'm not the type of player that plays assassin champs much in the past as I find they win too easy, I like underdog champs. I recall playing Talon many years ago where I press Q for empowered stab, E to blink behind enemy LeBlanc/Zed, R, W to delete them in one shot, the moment they saw me out of fog of war.

This new Akali is fun to play in the sense she takes more skills to play now compared to the old one. However, she could use some buff in damage and the changes mentioned above to take her to the next level sweet spot burst assassin she's been known for.

Will likely get lots of down votes I assume.

12 Comments

Spooks and Null5/19/2019, 10:29:06 AM1 votes

I'll respond in turn, just out of courtesy, as to some of the design decisions behind the choices.

1): Doing this would remove the already limited information that the opposing player recieves on Akali's location. You get 7 - 9 seconds of untargetability, but your movement is limited to that donut to make it not absurdly unfair for champions who lack spammable AOE. This would make her even more of a pro play nightmare.

2): Not much to say here. The delay on her E dash is to give opponents time to react to her charging towards them. Theres a big difference between instant teleportation to a target, and travelling quickly to a target.

3): She used to have healing in this Rework. Her Q used to heal her. It was incredibly obnoxious and ridiculously unfair for anyone who couldn't poke her down like they were Xerath and have peel like they were Syndra. This allowed her to have one of the safest lanes in the game and transition into an absurdly powerful mid and late game. It was removed as it was a mechanic that just added free power and made her incredibly frustrating to play against. Gunblade is her first item anyway, so you get healing regardless.

4): Oookay. So the big one. This was a pretty controversial part of her rework. She was changed to be a bit more of a skirmisher assassin. Her burst pattern isn't the same as a Zed or a Talon, shes supposedly meant to weave in and out of the shroud with her passive. Adding burst damage on top of her already strong sustained damage is a really dangerous thing to do, especially when she can snowball out of control and deal high burst damage anyway.

Its pretty dangerous to buff Akali in her current state. Shes currently extremely powerful in high MMR and pro play, but pretty much trash for everyone else. The changes you'd like would push her over the edge by removing a tonne of her weaknesses and counterplay at both levels, shes difficult to play of course, but shes incredibly difficult to play against for many champions.

Much of old Akali's identity is gone, which I'm sure saddens a lot of her older fans. I'm not really in the camp for preferring either akali, but I just thought I'd drop some context as to why some of these changes are a lil ludicrus.