Akali's Sustain

This is more of a PSA than anything. The real PSA is at the bottom though.

So, to be quick and to the point. Pre-Gunblade I actually think it's fine. She heals for alot but in lane you have a lane opponent who can punish you for it.

Post-Gunblade though (most likely post-6) she is able to heal from any point in her health to full in a single wave and easily shoves out anyone who can't:

1. match her sustain
2. consistently tank her damage or at least be able to ward off a dive
3. still have the threat to kill her.

But for each of those:

1. almost noone matches her post-GB sustain that isn't a lifesteal champ
2. being only able to ward her off taking the turret means you have 0 map control
3. in order to stay a kill threat, you have to be able to survive.

And after all that there seems to be only a handful of champs who can continue to lane against post-6 GB Akali.

So in the ranked game I played against an Akali top, I was like 3/0 on Illaoi at the time (thnx to jg) and she was 0/3. I think levels 9 and 7 respectively? I built full damage with no MR (yeah yeah ik) but everytime we traded at that point (she had GB), she would just heal back all the damage after basically a single Q and auto. It was actually pretty baffling how ridiculous that was. Luckily being an Illaoi with your ult up is scary enough to not get dove but to even be in the position where you're scared of someone 2 levels and 3 kills down because they have absolute ridiculous sustain and kill pressure is baffling regardless. Similar champions exist in the kill pressure department but most don't heal back that insanely. Riven/Firoa with Ravenous comes to mind, but both don't function as well with kill/level deficits and even then Ravenous doesn't usually take em to full right away and you can atleast not be afraid to walk that little distance out of your tower to farm with ranged tools a bit before the wave pushes (or just fight them in general half the time).

So anyway, this post-GB Akali kept trying to take moderate trades under my turret where she'd then just go back and heal off the next wave, rinse and repeat until I was forced to use ult. Then, being fearless as I am (cocky), I stayed for one more wave and so full health Akali killed me. After that I decided screw this lane and just tried to make the teamfights work, which is probably what you should do since Akali does worse the more enemies there are. Luckily she sucks at splitting too so this really seemed like the right call but I can't help to think it only worked since our ADC was ahead of theirs and we were just pressing an advantage.

So TL;DR: Akali's Gunblade sustain is ridiculous. Don't know if it needs a nerf since there's the "counterplay" of don't even lane against her at that point and just group up and end but idk if the solution should really just be "you can't lane against her anymore".

So anyway. If you're having trouble laning vs Akali the current solution is pretty simple: just don't. Just group with your team and try to make the 5v5 or 5v4 if she's splitting work. Or if your team doesn't want to group yet just take the top&bot swap strat. Half the time the Akali will do this one her own anyway.