League of Legends has seen some extremely weird champion builds so far this year. There’s been AP Varus, jungle Singed, Jhinsoo’s Rageblade, and now, full-blast AP mid lane Rakan.
Mid lane Rakan sounds weird, but after some sizable buffs to his AP scalings in Patch 8.6, it makes a little more sense. With impressive bursts of damage now coming out of his Grand Entrance and Gleaming Quill, the strategy is at least possible, albeit still not optimal.
Those high(ish) damage bursts were put on display on Team Liquid ADC Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng’s Twitch channel recently, propelling the bizarre build to new heights of popularity.
After all, Doublelift is an excellent ADC, and if AP Rakan can assassinate him in under a few seconds, it can’t be that bad, right? Wrong. Keep in mind, the Rakan in Doublelift’s game was abnormally ahead. Rakan’s AP scalings aren’t nearly as high as any normal assassin or mage, which means his damage is even more reliant on buying items.
This particular Rakan was not only better at playing Rakan in general than most players, but he could also afford to buy those expensive damage items he needed so desperately for this to work. When G2 Esports’ long-time mid laner Luka “Perkz” Perković annihilated rival mid laner Rasmus “Caps” Winther in a solo queue game, the same thing was true then, too.
That small, unimportant fact didn’t stop hordes of players from locking it directly into solo queue, however, and one player even managed to climb a few ranks in Platinum with it. Not only that, but they also claim the strange build reignited their desire to climb to Diamond, and they have the full intent to use this build to do so.
We wonder if he’ll use full-AD Katarina if it doesn’t work out.
