I get Akali all the time in ARAM and Mark doesn't do a damn thing to help

Johannes Kepler·8/10/2015, 2:47:36 AM·4 votes·2,081 views

I've been playing virtually nothing but ARAMs recently, and a couple weeks ago I bought Akali. I don't own a ton of champions, so I get randomed Akali all the time. I've been playing her with either ignite or mark, and I've noticed that mark is pretty much useless for me. So I've started taking ignite pretty much all the time. Then this week was Naut and Galio free week and holy crap it's the most frustrating thing in the world to play against them when they take mark. Especially Naut. It's a nightmare to get away from him without mark and it's impossible with it.

Wasn't the whole purpose of adding mark supposed to help champions like Akali? Can we just get something completely different to help melee dps instead of mark that's, you know, helpful? It's retarded how strong it is on all the wrong people.

Edit: If you vote please explain your choice.

14 Comments

Zielmann8/11/2015, 2:28:54 PM3 votes

Snowball is a 2-edge sword for Akali. On the one hand, if you're doing it right, it should be helping you mercilessly stick to opponents (a good Akali with snowball can easily become an absolute nightmare). Unfortunately, it makes Akali's shroud pretty useless for her. If she's in it, the other team just has to chuck a couple snowballs into it, and chances are they'll hit her and reveal her.

All that aside, I'm in general agreement that snowball has created an artificial 'balance' to the game, but isn't actually that good for it. What I mean, is that because it exists, people are more willing to actually play the melee fighters and tanks since they feel like they have easy access to an engage tool with snowball.

The last pass of changes on snowball did help some. At least I'm not feeling like it's a required spell on absolutely anything (including poke mages / adcs). But by and large, it helped the melee champs that were already fine on ARAM (with their own engage tools to begin with) become even more absurd to play against.

Minarde8/10/2015, 6:12:10 PM3 votes

Wasn't the whole purpose of adding mark supposed to help champions like Akali?

Sorta, the purpose of adding Mark/Dash was to help melee champs deal with poke champs. Evidently the best way to do this was to add engagement tools, even though lack of engage generally wasn't/isn't the problem. On the other hand, Mark/Dash seems to have addressed the (mistaken) perception that melee champs are weak.

Essentially, "fun, but bad for balance."

Xypher8/10/2015, 3:05:42 AM3 votes

Mark/Dash is just incredibly annoying if you get a squishy and the enemy has tanky bruisers. It's just frustrating, hardly any fun and no balance at all.

Earl Eulrich8/11/2015, 2:32:23 PM3 votes

her kit just sucks if she doesn´t snowball...and it´s about as unlikly as it gets to snowball with her in aram, as she canßt teamfight well without snowballing.

and yea, snowball still has the standard issues that are towers...melee-centric comps mostly can neither clear waves effectivly to save their turret nor can they attack the turret well when they are pushing towartds it, so there´s not much they can do vs poke/waveclear setups that just poke from underneath their turret...with or without snowballs.

FaRmErX8/10/2015, 4:27:21 AM2 votes

people are still dashing into 1v5's.. espescially during this bilge water event

Ozias of Scagnar8/11/2015, 11:40:24 PM1 votes

I think the main problem with Mark/Dash is that it made the strong engage champions even stronger while not really doing anything for the champions it was supposed to help. Yes it was nice that they balanced it a little bit, but it has a 40 second cool down and deals true damage while allowing you to engage. A perfect problem of this is Amumu, M/D in, and then either ult right then or Q to finish that last little bit and then ult. but most of them have gotten to the point they don't need to Q now which just gives them extra CC that wasn't there before. Did Naut, Garen, Talon, Lee Sin, Darius or several others honestly need a new way to engage? It's taken some melee champions and made them more viable and fun to play like Nasus and Mundo who only had the option of running at them, not that they did bad but they had no 'easy' engage, but with the changes that have been made and were made, Garen is once again one of the most broken ARAM champions around because you can just dash in and spin, and then walk away like nothing happened and do it again in 30 seconds or so and just constantly harass that way.

I have been on both sides of things now where I was an all tank team trying to survive against the poke, I was on an all poke team trying to burst out the tanks. With the state of the game the way it is, tanks or most people, no longer worry about clearing minions out to push because you just engage none stop, but tanks if they can get some gold will win every time, tanks are just too strong right now and normally bring some form of CC or engage with them, adding Mark/Dash took away most of our outplay options because it's hard to dodge 3+ snowballs coming at you when you get bunched up on the bridge.

RpgDusky8/11/2015, 3:02:23 PM1 votes

Do you not realize how many more champs are viable because of mark? Create a custom game, don't use mark. 5 poke champs vs 5 melee champs. Spend 15+ minutes getting poked and hiding under tower till you lose because of team comp.