After Sylas launched in League of Legends Patch 9.2, he was the undisputed worst champion in the game, bottoming out the winrates of four different roles—top, support, mid, and jungle. It seemed impossible to find someone quite as weak as he was. But then the Riot balance team said, “Hold my beer,” and pushed Akali nerfs in Patch 9.3.
These nerfs completely destroyed her, and she went from already being kind of bad in solo queue to being the actual worst champion you could play in both the top and mid lanes. Her winrate in each lane today sits at 42 and 38 percent, respectively, according to stats site Champion.gg. But there’s good news for all of the Akali fans out there, because today, after three weeks of eating literal dirt, Riot is finally planning some buffs, according to the company’s post on the official forums.
That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that we have zero clue what those buffs may be. Riot, as it often does, remained a bit ambiguous when describing the buffs in the post, opting to say that the company wants to make sure she’s stabilized in the dirt before any buffs were pushed rather than detailing what those buffs may be.
There are a whole lot of other buffs on the PBE right now for champions such as Trundle, Azir, Hecarim, and more—but there’s no sign of Akali anywhere. That means we’d hopefully get some sort of PBE patch including her today, but there’s no guarantee for that.
Right now, the best Akali fans can hope for is that when the buffs actually are visible on the PBE or somewhere else, that they hit what she needs. Without reliable healing on her Q and true invisbility on her shroud, she lacks the tools that made her stand out. Her damage was never all that incredible compared to the game’s other assassins, so now she’s just a lackluster assassin. If Riot doesn’t want to add tools back into her kit, she’ll need damage, which can be a scary thing to hear if you dislike her.
Any change that ships for Akali probably won’t go live until Patch 9.5, which means her fans would have to go over two more weeks with the champ in her current state.
