Formerly OP #22: Old Akali

She was standing right there. You just couldn't see her, and neither could your turret.

Old Akali didn't need to leave. That's what separated her from every other assassin of the era. The rest of them killed you and ran. She killed you, stepped into a circle of smoke, and waited for the next one.

Formerly OP

Old Akali

The Fist of Shadow · Relaunched Patch 8.15

She was standing right there. You just couldn't see her, and neither could your turret.

The dread with this champion came from the interval after the burst. You'd trade with her, you'd come out level, and then she'd disappear into a patch of ground you couldn't fight into and come back out at full energy with the same combo up. Losing to her was rarely a single moment, more a slow realization that the lane had become a place you weren't allowed to stand.

When She Ruled, And What Ended It

Akali arrived in May 2010 as the Fist of Shadow and kept that identity for eight years (geological, by League standards). She was never permanently the best champion in the game, and that's the wrong frame for her anyway. She was the champion who, in the right hands, made a lane and then a game feel unplayable, and Riot spent most of a decade trying to make that experience fair without deleting what people liked about it.

We were writing about it at the time. A post on this site from September 2011 is a straight complaint about her being suddenly, obviously too strong, and the reason it gives is that streamers had just shown everybody how to play her properly. The kit had been that good the whole time.

Riot gave up on the balancing act in 2018. Patch 8.15 landed on August 1st as a full relaunch (new abilities, new visuals, new voice, new lore and a new title), which is more than a rework in the sense this series usually means. The Fist of Shadow became the Rogue Assassin, and every single thing described below stopped existing on the same day.

What She Actually Had

Four of her five pieces were fine on their own. Together they removed the three costs a melee assassin is supposed to pay: getting there, staying alive once she did, and running out of resources while doing it.

Twilight Shroud [W]

Eight seconds of ground you couldn't enter safely. Inside it she was invisible, faster, and enemies standing in it were slowed. Invisible in this game means untargetable, and untargetable includes turrets, so diving under one against Akali was a coin flip rather than a plan. A Control Ward was the answer and everybody knew it (so the real answer was hoping your support had bought one before the fight rather than after).

Mark of the Assassin [Q]

A thrown kama that marked the target (her next attack on that target detonated the mark for a second chunk of damage). The detonation also handed her 40 energy back. On a four second cooldown at rank five, that made her poke effectively free, and it's the reason old Akali lanes felt so one sided: she could throw it, walk up, hit you, and be at more energy than she started with.

Shadow Dance [R]

Not an ultimate so much as a fuel tank. She stored up to three charges, regenerated them on a timer, and got one straight back for every takedown. Each charge was a targeted dash to an enemy (with only two seconds between casts). Reaching the carry was never the question. Killing the carry refilled the tank to reach the next one.

Why It Was Broken

Assassins are supposed to be a gamble. You commit, you either get the kill or you die for nothing, and that risk is the price of the damage. Old Akali's kit priced all of it out.

She got in for free, because the dash was targeted and she had three of them. She got out for free, because the shroud was a button rather than a window she had to hit. Her resource never ran dry, because her main damage ability refunded her for using it. And her passive gave her bonus magic damage from ability power and sustain from attack damage at the same time, so there was no bad first item and no build path that left her weak while she got there.

Stack those and the counterplay narrows to a single item on a single teammate. That's the pattern this series keeps finding: a champion is rarely broken because one number is too big, they're broken because every honest cost the design was supposed to charge them got refunded.

The Fall

Patch 8.15 rebuilt her around the opposite idea. The smoke is still there, but it moves with her now and she has to stay inside it, which turns a hiding place into a commitment. Her ultimate became a two part dash that goes out and then comes back, so the reach is bigger but she pays for it with a real cooldown instead of a charge counter. Her energy economy went from self funding to something you can actually run out of at the wrong moment.

The relaunch wasn't a quiet success. Riot spent the following two years adjusting her more or less constantly, because a champion this mobile who does this much damage sits on a knife edge between unplayable and unbearable, and there's very little space in between. That's the real legacy of the old kit: the problem was never the shroud specifically.

Where She Stands Now

She's one of the hardest champions in the game to play well and among the most punishing to play against badly, which is roughly where a champion like this belongs. Modern Akali wins games by threatening a lane, taking a bad matchup and surviving it, and then picking one person to remove. She loses them by using her mobility to walk somewhere she shouldn't be.

The thing that's genuinely gone is the sanctuary. Granted, she still has smoke and she's still slippery, but there's no longer a spot on the map where she gets to be safe and dangerous at the same time. That combination is what people actually remember, and it's the one thing the relaunch made sure never to give back.

Players have gone looking for the sanctuary in odd places since. One of the odder ones is building her as a tank, which trades the removal for the ability to stay somewhere she shouldn't be.

Nominate The Next One

Old Akali is the clearest case yet of a champion whose numbers were fine and whose costs were not. She didn't hit harder than her peers. She simply never had to pay for anything. Look through the rest of the series below.