Akali – a name considered to have undergone the most successful transformation among all champions that have ever been put on Riot’s “operating table”. After the adjustments, she has become a hot pick, powerful enough to be compared with big names like Yasuo, Zed, or Lee Sin. This is all thanks to her dazzling skill set, allowing players to showcase their skills. However, it is precisely because of this dominance that Akali has received numerous nerfs, affecting both her stats and her skills directly. Yet, it seems that this is still not enough to clip the wings of this ninja, as currently, Akali remains a hot pick for professional players in the Spring 2022 LCK tournament.
A total of 15 players have chosen her and performed quite well. Along with this is an impressive pick and ban rate of 69.8% and a win rate of up to 60.9%. The main reason for Akali becoming a hot pick after several disastrous nerfs is that she can build a variety of items, ranging from tanky to dealing continuous magic damage in team fights.
She remains a nightmare for current meta marksmen like Jinx, Aphelios, Caitlyn, etc. The common trait of these champions is their ability to deal massive damage, yet their mobility is extremely poor, making them prime targets for this assassin to exploit.
Explaining the meta of Accelerated Agility for Akali, typically, assassin champions in League of Legends do not utilize stats like health, armor, or magic resistance effectively as they don’t provide additional damage. However, Akali is a pretty special case as her playstyle leans more towards that of a fighter than a pure assassin. Especially with the use of the Conqueror rune, it allows Akali to gain both additional damage and survivability in fights to disrupt the enemy team’s formation.
And the Accelerated Agility Armor is the perfect tool to help Akali become more “tanky”, easily stacking Conqueror and “stirring up” team fights. Moreover, with the ability to activate movement speed increase from Accelerated Agility Armor, Akali can fully utilize her skill set to deal damage instead of sacrificing one of them just to approach the enemy. This playstyle is so “terrifying” that Riot had to nerf it in patch 12.3.