First impressions—Akali is a little too weak, and her learning curve is immense

Akali’s large-scale update went live last week with League of Legends Patch 8.16, and since then, everyone has been trying to get their hands on the new-and-improved Rogue Assassin.

The fact that she’s so much more popular isn’t exactly a surprise. When most large champion updates reach the live client, whatever champion is affected usually jumps to the top of the popularity ladder. Akali is no exception. After her update last week, her playrate jumped from her spot near the bottom of the ladder to fourth most-popular champion in the mid lane, according to League stats site Champion.gg.

Unfortunately for Akali, her success as a champion seems to have taken a major hit along with her newfound popularity, which also happens to most newly-updated champions. As it turns out, though, Akali’s winrate dipped below most other champion updates or new champions. Right now, her winrate is a very pathetic 39 percent. That means you have roughly a 60 percent chance to lose with her if you lock her in. Even if you’re Han Solo, those aren’t great odds.

This likely means that she was undertuned a bit. When we played her in a few normal queue games post-update we arrived at the same conclusion. We even had several chances to pick her up on the PBE, so we had a small advantage in familiarity on other Akali players post-update.

We don’t think she’s that weak, but she’s definitely weaker than probably any other assassin in the game at the moment. With nerfs to assassin runes on the way, she’s probably only going to get weaker unless she gets a little help from the balance team before then. The reason we only think she’s a little too weak, rather than just outright too weak, is because she’s incredibly difficult to adapt to. This goes for players attempting to lock her in and those playing against her. She has a very steep learning curve—more so than any other champion update or new champion in the past year.

If you have plans to lock in Akali, we recommend sticking to normal games until Riot’s balance team has a chance to look her over again. After all, the stats don’t lie. You’d probably lose.