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Akali Rework Idea

Akali is SO HOT··7 votes·706 views

Pls read instead of auto downvoting me because of Akali. Some of the numbers are just ideas and placeholders.

Passive: Twin Disciplines: Discipline of Force: Akali's basic attacks deal bonus on hit magic damage (scales with AP and AD)

Discipline of Might: Cooldown: 12 seconds Scaling: Bonus AD While near enemy champions, if Akali is hit by an enemy champion spell she gains a shield for a short amount of time (small base and high scaling). This shield increases with the number of champions Akali is around when she is damaged by a spell. Damaging champions with spells lowers the cooldown of the passive effect by 2 seconds.

Q Mark of the Assassin: Range: 850 Cooldown: 7/6/5/4/3 Cost: 50 Energy Scaling: AD and AP Akali throws out a Kama in a straight line that marks and damages every target it passes through for 6 seconds. If the Kama hits an enemy champion Akali gains 10/12/14/18/20% spell vamp for 5 seconds. The duration is refreshed if she hits a champion again with another Q. The mark can be proced by auto attacks and abilities for bonus damage and will return 40 energy.

W Twilight Shroud: Range: 700/400 Leash Range: 600 Cooldown: 22/21/20/19/18 Initial Cost: 50/45/40/35/30 Energy Second Cast Cost: 40/35/30/25/20 Duration of Reveals: 90%/80%/70%/60%/50% Slow: 10%/15%/20%/25%/30% Akali throws down a shroud of smoke and is stealthed while she is inside it. Using an ability or auto attacking while in the shroud will reveal Akali for a short amount of time before she is stealthed again. While stealthed in the shroud Akali has increased energy regen. Enemies in the shroud are slowed. Akali can activate the shroud again (costing more energy) and when activated the shroud explodes (procing Mark of the Assassin) and Akali dashes to the middle of the shroud (within a certain leash range). As Akali puts more ranks into the ability, reveals will be less effective against Akali and will last for a shorter duration. Pink Wards reveal Akali for 5 seconds.

E Shadow Dance: Range: 660/670/680/690/700 Recharge Time: 35/30/25/20/15 Cost: 1 Essence of Shadow Scaling: AP

Active: Akali dashes to a unit and deals damage upon impact. This ability does not proc Mark of the Assassin. Akali can store up to 3 charges gaining charges of Shadow Dance periodically as well as 1 stack through kills and assists.

R Crescent Slash: Range: 600 Cost: No Cost Cooldown: 70/55/40 Movement Speed: 50% Scaling: AP and Bonus AD

Passive: Targets marked by Mark of the Assassin grant bonus range to Shadow Dance of 50/100/150 against them.

Active: Upon activation, Discipline of Might's cooldown is reduced by 80% of its current cooldown. Akali sends out her Kamas in a massive AoE around her and marks all targets hit with Mark of the Assassin (no cast time). Targets that have already been marked by Mark of the Assassin take the proc damage but are not reapplied with the mark. Akali can use this a total of 2 times (with a static cooldown of 1 second between casts) and gains movement speed on each cast.

Summary: No longer has free spellvamp to make herself a sustain monster in fights. Now she has to land a skillshot to get spellvamp that isn't permanent so she has to take advantage of fighting to make use of it. Instead of the free spellvamp she has a temporary shield that acts as a second form of defense because her shroud is still somewhat unreliable as a defense mechanism. By playing well she can take advantage of being able to lower its cooldown so she can stay safer more often but it doesn't act as a get out of jail free card. She still has the bonus magic damage on hit because that's the Twin in Twin Disciplines.

Her Q is now a skillshot so she can't instantly kill people with her targeted damage with little counterplay so people have a chance to outplay and react to her. As said above, she doesn't get free spellvamp anymore but now if she lands her skillshot she is rewarded with spell vamp for a short amount of time. It now has an AD scaling to go along with it to emphasize her dual scaling play style.

Twilight shroud, for the most part, acts the same with a few new effects. She can now dash back to the middle of the shroud and cause it to explode to proc Mark of the Assassin which gives her an opportunity to outplay her opponents if she uses it will and screw up if she plays poorly. Think of it like the second part of Zed's ult only it is limited by a range (only 200 more units than the area of her shroud). In addition, it no longer has the movement speed bonus and instead is able to lower the duration of reveals including pink wards. Note that at rank 1 it only reduces the duration of reveals by 10% which is not that much and only gets down to the noticeable 50% reduction at max rank. This still offers the enemies tons of opportunity to beat her up while in her shroud with reveals but she is no longer completely hard countered by pink wards and reveals.

Akali's E is now her current ultimate and works the same way for the most part. Her dash can still store up to 3 charges and gets extra charges on kills and assists but the difference is that it has a lower range than it does now until max rank and that the initial charge time for the charges is a little higher at early levels and the same at max rank. This makes it so she can't totally zone people with her ultimate because of its shorter range early on as well as her Q being a skillshot.

Akali's Ultimate is now a reworked but similar version of her current E. It has an interesting effect now as a passive that allows Akali to have bonus range on Shadow Dance against targets that are marked by Mark of the Assassin. At rank 1 of her ultimate and max rank of her Shadow dance she can get up to 750 range and at rank 3 of her ult and max rank of her Shadow Dance the range can get up to 850. This allows her to chase her targets really well but only if she plays well and lands her skillshots. The quick animation and no cast time of her ult makes her assassination pattern still very quick but not completely targeted so she can still mess up and miss. It also gives her good waveclear when she needs to clear a wave like she can do now with her current E only it will be on a higher cooldown.

I think overall this seems pretty good because she is still good at chasing her targets but can't faceroll her keyboard to victory if she gets ahead with her targeted damage. She still has a good assassination pattern but it can be dodged and outplayed if she misplays or you outplay her. She also has a way to survive better in fights and isn't as much of a sitting duck while she is in the middle of the enemy team but still has plenty of opportunity to be outplayed and killed. It also fits her theme pretty well as a hyper-mobile, high damage assassin that dodges in and out to chase her targets to kill them.

The only problems I could foresee with these changes would be tank Akali becoming too powerful but that wouldn't be too much of a problem because she has minimal utility and it could easily be fixed with base number and ratio changes. She also may be too good at chasing and killing her targets but that could also be fixed with number changes as well.

15 Comments

Are2 votes

Passive The name of her passive should remain "Twin Disciples". Unless they're planning to retcon Akali (haven't heard anything yet, but I doubt it -knocks wood-), the name shows her ties with Zed somehow. E is already super essential to her kit, you should move the magic on hit passive back to Fist of Shadow/Twin Disciples.

Q Her spells are mostly AoE now, so the spellvamp is going to be weak. It might be better to just buff/add a difference defense mechanism for her than to stick in some spell vamp. Giving her Armor/MR when she lands Q might be a good idea. Maybe she can gain more armor/MR with each Q she hits (1 stack per Q)

W Duration of reveals is kind of weird. What if a pink is placed down 4 seconds before shroud ends?

It also feels weird that Akali wastes a bunch of energy only to receive energy regen in the shroud, unless you wanted to gate her skills through energy. It would be interesting to split the energy cost halfway between casting and exploding the shroud.

Not sure how I feel about Akali gaining a reliable escape, it might make her too strong. Does exploding shroud use a charge of shadow dance? Ignoring whether or not having an escape makes her too strong, what if exploding shroud spawns a shadow (kind of like Zed's) that she can choose to dash to, consuming an essence of shadow?

E Moving shadow dance to E scares me. It's going to have to receive the Shunpo treatment.

I can't imagine how this works unless numbers are involved. How much of a power spike would Akali get once she has E?

R Aside from the utility it provides, I can only see it being the same Crescent Slash (since numbers aren't involved yet). It feels like a good Akali will not need Crescent Slash at all. With this kit, she either has a giant power spike when she has E, or her entire combo will be nerfed because she has Shadow Dance (or Shadow Dance gets Shunpo'd and loses ALL the damage). Not really enjoying how Crescent Slash is just something she mashes as a part of her kit. She could just wait for the engage go in, R twice and get the damage dealt. There needs to be more thinking. The only main concern with E I'm seeing is whether or not you'll catch the enemies in it (but it's instantaneous).

tl;dr It makes her a little bit more mechanically difficult (+ easier to counterplay bc dodge), and stops her from being a sustain monster, but I think that's it. She can counterplay more with W, but I think she needs more thinking involved in her kit, specifically her R.

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

{quoted}

Passive The name of her passive should remain "Twin Disciples". Unless they're planning to retcon Akali (haven't heard anything yet, but I doubt it -knocks wood-), the name shows her ties with Zed somehow. E is already super essential to her kit, you should move the magic on hit passive back to Fist of Shadow/Twin Disciples.

Yeah good idea I'll make that change

Q Her spells are mostly AoE now, so the spellvamp is going to be weak. It might be better to just buff/add a difference defense mechanism for her than to stick in some spell vamp. Giving her Armor/MR when she lands Q might be a good idea. Maybe she can gain more armor/MR with each Q she hits (1 stack per Q)

The massive sustain of current Akali really comes from that Q proc because of her auto attack, bonus magic damage on hit, and the big Q damage (and lich bane if she has it) going off at the same time for massive single target damage along with her ult being single target as well. Since she would still have that proc on her Q and her ult for single target damage I still think the spellvamp would be nice to have there. The goal would be to keep the spellvamp in her kit without making it too annoying to deal with like it currently is and the numbers could be easily tweaked if it's too over or underwhelming.

I'd rather stay away from giving her defensive stats because one of her weaknesses should be being able to be blown up if she misplays and getting armor and mr could screw that up especially if it allows her to build tankier and make tank Akali an annoying thing to deal with.

I guess I could also make it so that she gets spellvamp for 5 seconds or something and then she can refresh the duration of the spellvamp by landing another Q.

W Duration of reveals is kind of weird. What if a pink is placed down 4 seconds before shroud ends?

It also feels weird that Akali wastes a bunch of energy only to receive energy regen in the shroud, unless you wanted to gate her skills through energy. It would be interesting to split the energy cost halfway between casting and exploding the shroud.

Not sure how I feel about Akali gaining a reliable escape, it might make her too strong. Does exploding shroud use a charge of shadow dance? Ignoring whether or not having an escape makes her too strong, what if exploding shroud spawns a shadow (kind of like Zed's) that she can choose to dash to, consuming an essence of shadow?

If a pink ward is placed down 4 seconds before the shroud ends then she would just be revealed for the rest of the time she is stealthed in the shroud assuming that she only has a single point in w. If she had W at max rank then the pink ward would only reveal her for 2.5 seconds before she stealthed again (I might have not made it clear that pink wards are also affected by the reveal reduction). So as soon as a pink ward is placed down Akali is affected by the reveal for however long it will last and then once it's over the pink ward won't reveal her again unless another pink ward is placed down.

Maybe I could make it so half of the energy cost goes into using the shroud and then half of the cost goes into recasting it for the explosion. It would also be pretty interesting if something spawned in the center for the explosion like a shadow and then she could recast W one more time to jump to the shadow for a charge of essence. Would make using the escape a little bit riskier because it requires a whole charge to do so but would still allow for some extra mobility and outplay potential.

E Moving shadow dance to E scares me. It's going to have to receive the Shunpo treatment.

I can't imagine how this works unless numbers are involved. How much of a power spike would Akali get once she has E?

The current range on Shadow Dance is 700 so starting the initial range at 660 and having it scale up to 700 means that she can't zone people as hard because it will be a shorter dash until max rank and it will stay at the 700 unless she can land a Q for the bonus range. The numbers would probably be made so that her whole damage combo isn't frontloaded into Q, R, Auto Attack and with this it would be so that Q, R, Q Proc would still do a decent amount of damage but not chunk them like it currently does so she would be required to use her Ult to help her kill the target unless the target is already low.

Maybe the range could be lower to start out with but that would mean she could be stuck with a measly short range dash that doesn't do much for her because of how short it is. I think as long as the numbers are right Shadow Dance could still do damage but would make it so it isn't too much of a zoning tool and doesn't chunk them for a ton of damage.

R Aside from the utility it provides, I can only see it being the same Crescent Slash (since numbers aren't involved yet). It feels like a good Akali will not need Crescent Slash at all. With this kit, she either has a giant power spike when she has E, or her entire combo will be nerfed because she has Shadow Dance (or Shadow Dance gets Shunpo'd and loses ALL the damage). Not really enjoying how Crescent Slash is just something she mashes as a part of her kit. She could just wait for the engage go in, R twice and get the damage dealt. There needs to be more thinking. The only main concern with E I'm seeing is whether or not you'll catch the enemies in it (but it's instantaneous).

Most Assassins have some form of button mashing in their kits and I think this would be alright if there was a static cooldown involved between casts so she can't instantly get off Mota Procs on multiple targets instantly. What would you suggest to make it more interesting or involve more decision making?

tl;dr It makes her a little bit more mechanically difficult (+ easier to counterplay bc dodge), and stops her from being a sustain monster, but I think that's it. She can counterplay more with W, but I think she needs more thinking involved in her kit, specifically her R.

Are1 votes

Q The massive healing chunk on Q is a result of the Gunblade changes, but it was still strong even before omnivamp because she was single target. If you're thinking Morgana type of deal, I can kind of see it working with her passive shield. I'm envisioning it like Sona's W for damage mitigation. I see what you mean about the defensive stats. I just really miss the resistances on shroud...

5 seconds sounds like a bit much early game. I'm thinking maybe the duration scales with level (3/4/5 seconds at ranks 1,3,5?). Or the spell vamp starts out weak, but with each stack gained (1 per Q for a max of 3) the strength of the buff increases. We could just stick with refreshing the buff for each Q.

I forgot to ask earlier, how long will it take for her to burst someone? Will it stay the minimum of 12s (assuming no CD) like the current kit?

W I forgot to clarify this: she should use her E to dash to the shadow and not W, because if you use W to dash back to shroud and it consumes a stack, the cost of explosion then becomes X energy + 1 essence. If we wanted to add risk to explosion, it could just remain that W uses no stacks but forces her to go back into the shroud.

E Oh okay. She might still suffer the "get within range and I'll kill you" problem, but maybe not if she is reliant on R.

Does E still strikethrough? Can Akali throw Q while in flight? Will E remain clunky like it is right now, or will it return to its former glory? Basic dash skills are usually slow (think Lee/Maokai), so it might have to remain clunky to justify it being moved. (God forbid Riot nerfs another champion through clunkiness though).

R I guess you're right about the button mashing part. As for adding depth/decision making to the skill, I'm completely blank on that, sorry. I can't really think of a solution.

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

I think the spellvamp could probably go along the lines of lasting for 3/3.5/4/4.5/5 seconds and is refreshed if she lands another Q.

With this kit I would say if she lands her skillshot she could assassinate squishies pretty quickly. I would say a lot faster than 12 seconds if she executes it properly.

So I think for her W it would be something like this. It costs initial energy to be placed down. Akali can then press W again costing more energy to cause the shroud to explode and proc Mark of the Assassin of anyone who is marked and is inside the shroud. She can then press E to use a charge to dash to a shadow that has been formed where the center of the shroud was.

Either that or I could just make it so if she presses W again then she uses energy to make the shroud explode and she automatically dashes back to the middle of the shroud without having to use a charge

Her dash would probably be just returned back to the way it was before with the fast dash speed and no strikethrough. Probably shouldn't let her use Q mid dash because that might cause some problems and make her feel clunky if she is able to.

Are1 votes

That sounds good.

A burst that is shorter than 12 seconds might not be able to warrant Akali having 3 dashes, might be good to push that down to 2, and have her be able to jump to shroud for W for a cost of 40 energy instead.

Reaper Review1 votes

{quoted}

Passive The name of her passive should remain "Twin Disciples". Unless they're planning to retcon Akali (haven't heard anything yet, but I doubt it -knocks wood-), the name shows her ties with Zed somehow. E is already super essential to her kit, you should move the magic on hit passive back to Fist of Shadow/Twin Disciples.

It's "Twin Disciplines", not Disciples.

As in, Discipline of Force and Discipline of Might, her two passives.

Are1 votes

Yeah... It's one of those things I always mix up =/

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

Why do I even make these threads

Are1 votes

Don't give up brother. It took me awhile bc I'm feeling guilty about procrastinating, but I replied.

xl Kirito lx1 votes

Well, someone saw Akali, and downvoted it. Really well thought out though. It's an interesting kit.

Moving the dash to a basic ability though, she might be a bit of a lane bully after that. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something to note. I'd almost suggest the range being 600-700 scaling.

The vision changes, I like the concept. I do feel though that invis. based champs should be balanced around things that can counter invisibility, instead of a reduction in duration. Pink wards have an effective 105g cost, making them less effective, especially when Akali can move out of range with good positioning is arguable. I'd rather have her passive reset on being revealed in the shroud or something similar.

The way you worded her ulti, I'm assuming it's Talon-esq in terms of radius. The double cast is pretty cool actually, but you would need some cast time / delay imo. Give the opponent some room to outplay.

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

Yeah that's one of the problems that I have with the kit. Moving her ult to her E could be problematic but with the right numbers I think it could work. It would also give her a slightly better early game than she does now so she doesn't just get zoned and lose to almost 100% of her matchups pre 6.

I agree that champions with invisibility should be balanced around being able to be revealed but one of Akali's most glaring problem is that once she is revealed her shroud is almost useless and if a pink ward is put down then you can forget about using that ability. What makes Akali different from other champions with stealth is that hers is kept to a specific area that she chooses so her enemies will always know that she is somewhere in the shroud which makes her stealth much weaker than other champions stealth in a lot of cases. Khazix, Twitch, and Vayne for example can all move freely about while they are stealthed so it is much harder for enemies to counter them with reveals whereas Akali is basically a sitting duck. With the changes she would still be able to be revealed by reveals and pinks but they wouldn't counter her as hard.

Yes her ult is sorta like a Talon ult only it goes outward twice instead of out than in. I like Talon's ult and I thought it would look pretty cool on Akali too. The double cast could probably have like a 1 or 1.5 second static delay between casts to give them more room to avoid the damage and outplay her that seems like a good idea.

Irelia Bot1 votes

To be honest I kinda think making Akali's twilight shroud apply NEARSIGHT (same thing that graves and quinn have) to enemies so they can not see in or outside of the outer ring meaning that they have to actually go inside and place a pink ward to do targeted damage to akali would be a huge step in the right direction for making her have a way out. Keep the stealth when not dealing damage as well as the movement speed and slow. This would however likely be so strong that it would have to be changed to her ult.

I am fine with light counters but the pink ward is far to strong of a counter to akali and is part of the reason why she is super binary.

Then make her current ult her new W with a max of 2 charges but damaging enemy champs reduces the cooldown on the next charge by 20% of the charge time. This would add some more value to Crescent Slash as well since it can hit more then one target.

LankPants1 votes

To be honest I kinda think making Akali's twilight shroud apply NEARSIGHT (same thing that graves and quinn have) to enemies so they can not see in or outside of the outer ring meaning that they have to actually go inside and place a pink ward to do targeted damage to akali would be a huge step in the right direction for making her have a way out.

I'd say remove the stealth and make it so enemies outside of the shroud can't see into it at all, kinda like a reverse smokescreen. That way the counter becomes to run a tanky guy in and CC her, which has some risks due to the range required rather than just throwing a pink and watching her die.

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

Updated the abilities a little more

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

Changed her Q around a little bit because some of the numbers didn't make sense for how the ability functioned so I changed it around.

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