Akali, the Rogue Assassin is an assassin who is moderately hard but quite fun to play.
She is a hybrid champion meaning she inflicts damage by both attack damage and ability power. With her constant burst damage and high mobility, she can be a very useful champion.
Akali is often used with Ability Power builds, either with a burst damage build that can one-shot careless ADCs or a bruiser build that will help Akali stay in the fight and shut down enemies one by one.
Today, we will be examining a different build, one that heavily prioritizes Attack Damage. This build was used commonly in Season 11 and although it has lost some popularity since then, it is still a fun-to-play build that absolutely works.
It provides Akali with much-needed sustain and allows her to take on tankier enemies as well as the squishy ones she usually works well against.
The Divine Sunderer Akali build scales the damage of her abilities with Attack Damage and gets the optimal use out of her “Assassin’s Mark” passive.
Because of this, to be able to utilize Divine Sunderer Akali as best as possible you would need to be proficient with using her passive correctly.
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Akali’s Abilities
Before we begin talking about the build, let’s take a close look at Akali’s skillset.
For her passive, Akali has “Assassin’s Mark”. Whenever Akali successfully hits an enemy champion with one of her skills, she “marks” them. This mark is in the shape of a ring around the enemy and it allows Akali many advantages.
Akali will gain bonus movement speed (30 / 40 / 50 / 60%) when she is moving towards a marked target. After Akali has crossed this ring, her next basic attack will have double the range and inflict bonus damage (35-182 (+55% of ability power) (+0.6 per bonus attack damage)) in magic damage.
With the Divine Sunderer Akali Build, her passive will be more powerful than any other option. Not only the passives Attack Damage multiplier is higher than the Ability Power multiplier, but this build also has the added advantage of Akali’s basic attack damage being higher.
Akali’s first skill (Q) is “Five Point Strike”, making Akali throw, you guessed it, five daggers in a narrow arc.
This ability inflicts Area of Effect damage (30 / 55 / 80 / 105 / 130 (+60% of ability power) (+0.65 of attack damage)) on all enemies it hits and slows down enemies by fifty percent for half a second at where the daggers ended.
The second skill Akali has (W) is “Twilight Shroud” which creates a ring -or donut-shaped cloud of smoke centered on a point within range. For the abilities duration (5 / 5.5 / 6 / 6.5 / 7 seconds), she can enter the chamber of smoke and gain invisibility.
She loses this invisibility temporarily when she attacks, uses an ability, or is hit by an ability that grants true vision.
This ability also provides Akali with a bonus of 80 to her maximum energy and with a movement speed buff (30 / 35 / 40 / 45 / 50%) that slowly fades over two seconds.
Using “Shuriken Ring”, the third ability of Akali (E), Akali can throw shuriken and dash backward by doing a flip.
This ability provides damage in two steps; first, the shuriken Akali throws will hit the first enemy -or smoke cloud but we’ll get to that- and deal damage (30 / 56.25 / 82.5 / 108.75 / 135 (+36% of ability power) (+0.255 per attack damage)); then, if you activate the ability again, she can dash back to the target hit and deal more than double the damage (70 / 131.25 / 192.5 / 253.75 / 315 (+84% of ability power) (+0.595 per attack damage)) of the throw.
A very important tip to remember is that Akali can also throw her dagger into a smoke cloud.
This will mark the point where the shuriken hit the cloud instead of an enemy and will allow Akali to teleport into the smoke by activating the ability again.
Lastly, we have Akali’s ult; “Perfect Execution”. Using this skill, Akali dashes in a direction, dealing massive damage to any enemy on her path (80 / 220 / 360 (+30% of ability power) (+0.5 per bonus attack damage)). Like Akali’s Shuriken Ring, this ability is executed in two moves.
When the ult is activated again Akali dashes again but this time “executing” her enemies by applying damage based on the missing health (60 / 130 / 200 (+30% of ability power) to 180 / 390 / 600 (+90% of ability power)) of the targets.
The second activation of this spell will have noticeably lower damage for this build than the Ability Power-focused ones.
This is because the second part of the “execution” only scales with Ability Power and not Attack Damage.
Still, this is not too big of a trade-off considering the other skill’s Attack Damage scales as well as the higher Attack Damage scale of the first activation of the ult.
All in all, an Attack Damage build like the Divine Sunderer has very high synergy with Akali’s skillset overall.
For the skill progression, you first want to max out Five Point Strike as that will be your main damage-dealing ability.
Then, you will max out your Shuriken Ring for extra damage and leave the Twilight Shroud for last.
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Divine Sunderer Akali Runes
For this build, the “Conqueror” rune is a must. Not only does the Conqueror rune give a noticeable boost to Akali’s Attack Damage it also converts some of the damage given to true damage.
As the cherry on top, it will also heal Akali to some degree ((8% for Melee / 5% Ranged) of the post-mitigation damage) which is literally a life saver during long fights and end-game team fights.
After that, comes the “Presence of Mind”. This rune will boost the energy regeneration (1.5−11 mana per second (depending on level), reduced to 80% effectiveness for ranged champions, for 4 seconds) of Akali whenever she damages an enemy champion.
Allowing her to sustain herself by applying pressure for longer periods or deal continuous damage.
The Presence of Mind rune will also refill fifteen percent of Akali’s energy one second after a champion takedown. This will help Akali to take down multiple opponents by a big margin.
Also taking the “Legend: Tenacity” rune will help Akali be less fragile. Given that we want Akali to be more of a bruiser champion and be able to stay in the fight as much as possible and that mobility is the most important skill for Akali’s survival, decreasing the effect of crowd control is extremely useful.
The bonus Tenacity this rune gives will initially be five percent but can be stacked ten times with each stack providing a bonus of 2.5% tenacity.
To gain a stack, Akali must earn a hundred points by doing any of the following; taking down a champion (hundred points), taking down an epic monster (hundred points), killing large monsters (twenty-five points), and killing a minion (four points).
Last in this line, we have the rune “Last Stand”. Since the goal of this build is to help Akali take a more hands-on approach to combat, she will inescapably take more damage.
With Last Stand we can use the damage Akali will receive to our advantage. What does the Last Stand do you might ask.
Well, it will provide five to eleven percent increased damage; starting at five percent when Akali is at sixty percent health and maxing out at eleven percent when she is below thirty percent health.
The rest of the runes you will choose can be changed depending on if you want to be tankier, decrease damage taken, or increase lifesteal. As for the bonuses, two adaptive damage along with an armor or magic resistance always does the trick for Akali.
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The Best Items for Divine Sunderer Akali
The Divine Sunderer can be used with different items depending on your playstyle and enemies but first, let’s take a look at what Divine Sunderer provides us with.
Divine Sunderer has base stats of twenty Ability Haste, thirty-five Attack Damage, and four hundred Health.
While the Attack Damage and the Ability Haste will improve Akali’s damage output, the extra Health will give her more time to inflict damage. However, the real beauty of Divine Sunderer Akali comes from the item’s passives.
Divine Sunderer’s Unique Passive is an auto-attack improvement similar to the item “Sheen”s.
Whenever Akali uses an ability -including Twilight Shroud- her next basic attack within 10 seconds will grant her extra damage ((12% for Melee / 9% for Ranged) of the target’s maximum health as bonus physical damage on-hit, with minimum damage equal to 150% base AD and maximum damage against monsters equal to 250% base AD).
On top of that, Akali will heal for a proportion of this damage ((6% for Melee / 3% for Ranged) of the target’s maximum health, with a minimum heal equal to (97.5% for Melee / 60% for Ranged) base AD).
After the improved basic attack is executed, Divine Sunderer will have a one-and-a-half-second cooldown before this passive can be activated again.
Since the Unique Passive of Divine Sunderer scales with Attack Damage; the more Attack Damage Akali has, the more she will deal damage and heal with it.
The Unique Passive is definitely not the only trick of Divine Sunderer though. As it is a Mythic item, it also has a Mythic Passive. Thanks to Divine Sunderer’s Mythic Passive, Akali will gain five percent Armor Penetration and five percent Magic Penetration for every Legendary Item she has.
For boots, we will want to go with “Sorcerer’s Shoes”. It might be confusing as to why we are buying an Ability Power Carry item for an Attack Damage build.
Well, although Akali’s skills scale very well with the Attack Damage we are prioritizing, they will deal Magic Damage nonetheless.
Because of this, the Sorcerer’s Shoes Magic Penetration will be very useful for us. Especially when Akali is going against tankier enemies with higher Magic Resistance.
“Sterak’s Gage” is another essential item for our build. It is especially good if you want to be tankier and don’t need to prioritize Magic Resistance or Armor.
It will give us a whopping 400 Health and has two passives that will go very well with the bruiser playstyle you will adopt. The first Unique Passive of Sterak’s Gage is bonus attack damage equal to forty-five percent of Akali’s Base Attack Damage.
This will be another considerable addition to our basic attack damage bonuses. The second passive of the item is what makes it preferable for tanky builds. Whenever Akali drops lower than thirty percent in Health Points, Sterak will give her a shield equal to seventy-five percent of her bonus health.
This shield will deteriorate over 3.75 seconds and the passive has a one-minute cooldown. This passive of the Streak’s Gage makes a good duo with the Last Stand rune that was mentioned earlier.
Other useful items for the Divine Sunderer Akali build are; Ravenous Hydra, Void Staff, Spirit Visage, Thornmail, and Abyssal Mask.
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Conclusion
If you did everything correctly, your Akali should have been turned into a head-on fighter who will give your enemies hell in team fights instead of the usual fragile but deadly assassin she is.
Some important things to remember are that Akali will still be susceptible to Crowd Control and you will need to pay a lot of attention to how you cast Akali’s abilities, never forgetting to attack in between them.
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