All right guys, here we are.. another AP akali build. but this one is a little different i would like to think. so this build is simply how i play akali if you look at the guide and you see something that works better for you by all means, especailly the rune page. (i don't have the ip to buy the best runes :/ ) so this is like a squish killer kinda thing, you find a rampaging master yi and you could take him out kinda thing. but thats all late game. imma tell you as we go through the guide.

alright this is a quick rundown of the runes and masteries. first with runes, make sure you pick up the AD on your marks, activating your passive early with the marks go a long way. being able to have that spellvamp makes laning alot easier. sure its only like 10hp a pop but that multiplyed out during laning and you could of harrassed and stayed above in hp to make a kill. that and its the difference between making a kill and having to go back to base or making a kill and being able to stay on lane. the others are more or less at your leisure, i went with dodge seals because they are pretty much the only ones i have. if i had my pick though i'd go with the energy regen or the HP runes or something like that. glyphs don't really have too much to offer here except magic resist which whenever you use shroud and go invis the first thing to happen is you get like 3 AOE spells right on your head, so the resist makes life a little easier. the quints i had to use one for AD still and i use the others on magic PEN because we are going practically straight AP.

for Masteries i go down the defensive tree, some for the resistance once again and some for that 60 hp right off the bat. but mostly just because your a squisher, and this helps alittle with that. also it makes me feel like im not wasting my dodge runes that im adding to them somehow with the dodge and speed thing (nimbleness) but in the end whatever floats your boat here.

Allright items this one is pretty important so i'll break it down

first you buy the amplifying tome and a hp pot and you go out on lane and pull shenanigans, but remember that the amp-tome activates your AP side of your passive while your runes activate the AD side.

after you farm a bit and lane (which i'll go more indepth about later) you eventually have to come back. so your first goal is to get rylais which is a really powerful item for akali in many ways but you also need boots, sometimes depending on how i feel the lane is i go straight for the rylais and worry about boots later and sometimes i buy the boots outright before i continue building rylais. i feel no build should be SET, it should change a little from game to game to meet the challenges of each game seperatly.

so your starting off around mid game, anywhere between level 6 which is the earliest ive ever had both times or around level 9 or 10, at this point you have both rylais and your boots. the next item you go for is your sheen, you kinda figure why we use sheen right? you get the sheen proc when you use mark and when you activate mark you also activate sheen so you do lots of damage well times 2. we either finish out lichbane which i more often than not do or we get hextech gunblade. we need both and the situation to get gunblade first would be if they have alot of AD champs with magic resistance which never completely happens id just go for lichbane which should be AP Akali's bread and butter. because you basically hit your mark twice at the same time which is where alot of AP akali's pain is.

usually i don't get much further after gunblade, the items in this build are pretty pricey but really effective, if you do end up getting alot of kills or the game goes late game some items you want to think about are void staff for raw AP power and PEN and Guardians angel for the armor magic resist and simply the unique effect, but also some other items to consider would be haunting guise (more around the middle of the build not as a 'finisher'), mejai's soulstealer (once again not at the end of the build for obvious reasons), rabadon's deathcap, or my alltime favorite item (which i don't usually get on akali but its happened) Randuin's omen.

just generally move along the build set i have at the top of the page or put your own items in but the 2 absoult most important items in this build are rylai's and lichbane.

the skill sequence just kinda makes sense, if you ever played akali for real but just incase you haven't or you disagree i'll break it down.

first the skill order than an explanation of the skills
Shadow Dance > Mark Of The Assassin > Cresent Slash > Twilight Shroud

although level 1-3 you should focus on getting each of your basic skills so that at level three you have all three of your skills available.

Shadow Dance is your ultimate, and its a scary one at that. it has pretty good range and it not only does decent amount of damage but it teleports you right there at the target, which helps with your assassin's mark, it is the best chase down ability there is short of a global, the cooldown with it is a little tricky to explain but once you play akali it'll make total sense. you obtain a 'stack' every like 20 seconds or so, to a maximum of 3 stacks, using your ult uses 1 stack. getting a kill or an assist gives you a stack, so if a fresh minion wave rolls by you can turret dive, if you make the kill you can count on at least having on stack to ult (for getting a kill) to a enemy minion out of turret range

Mark of the Assassin (Assassin's Mark is what i call it) this is basically your workhorse and your bread and butter, it does the most damage out of any of your abilities and proc's real nicely with your lichbane, what it does basically is sends out the 'mark' and does a base amount of damage with a 1/2 AP ratio added, the mark lasts for 6 seconds and if you attack the target using your auto-attack it'll do the damage again that it did for applying it, the move has like a 3 second cooldown, but it does lots of damage with the application and the using of it + your AD so at level one it does like 50 damage base plus our tome, it'll do like 59 damage plus our auto attack for like 60 somethin and than the orginaly 59, your looking at a level one doing about 175+ damage to one target with one ability once, plus spam that every 3 seconds, late game it also wrecks shop, although we only end with 300 AP, you do like 250 for the move plus another 150 making just applying the mark do 400 damage and you proc lichbane, than your auto attack for 170, lichbane for 300 and the application of the mark for another 400 making a total of one ability late game 1200 damage we add up the mark 400 auto attack 170 mark 400 lichbane 300 so like 1270 or so well without resist about 850 or 900 in reality but still thats alot of damage to spam.

Twilight shroud, this i think is what makes akali the true ninja, she can repeatively go invisibly and destroy people than and her ult makes her a ninja as well, we use twilight shroud for the resistance it offers the slow, and most importantly the invisibly it offers you. we use this baby in all sorts of ways, from getting turret dived and giving the stupid enemy champ a giant F YOU to using it in team fights to carefully apply damage where you need to yet not really be available as a target, the resistance is pretty nice for 1v1 but its never really noticeable so i wouldn't ever count on it, just mainly use it to slow your enemy and to most importantly go invisible on people (works best if there are no other champs on your team that go invisible that way people never think of buying an oracle for akali but if they already have it for that twitch on your team, bad things happen..... to you

and finally cresent slash, this baby is pretty nice when laning but beyond that its not the best skill ive seen but you take what you can get, we don't focus this one as much because it should be scaling AP and AD off of you so it'll still do decent damage but it doesn't do much to ONE target and you chase people down for a living, but we need it for early-midgame farms so i don't complain about it, also remember to use it in teamfights or really everyfight, just don't expect too terribly much of it beyond farming

the summoner spells i usually take is flash exhaust, because they are the two best at either running away or chasing someone down

with flash people don't expect you to get in thier face as if you already had your ult at like level 4, it just helps using flash because it doesn't require a target so that you can use it when you can use your ult say jumping over barron for the chase or to run away, that and you only have a limited amount of stacks on your ult, you need to be able to get close to someone without burning all your stacks.

exhaust has alot of uses from slowing someone thats chasing you down to slowing someone that your chasing down, either way it helps the end goal you have in mind, getting the kill or not getting killed, the damage reduction helps when taking out a carry like that fed master yi mentioned above, you do your thing he smacks ya once or twice you shroud and do your thing and exhaust him so that he stops doing anything effective and just destroy him with your mark and what not

here we are, one of the hardest parts of the game for akali. laning you should start off with amplifying tome and a hp potion. with your marks you should have both sides of your passive up and ready to go. be careful of how you pick your laning partner, you want someone who isn't as squishy as you are, someone how can worry about harassment more, in both taking and receiving. the best 'combo' ive seen work with akali is AP sion, with his stun he sets you up nicely and his exploding shield of doom helps keep them at bay while you peacefully farm

you should start off with your assassins mark and you use it to farm. don't ever use your mark to harrass unless you thing with reason and low reprocussion that you can 'activate' the mark by getting the melee auto-attack in to do some damage, other than that the move doesn't do much damage especially early game, you need to go big or go home, which here means, focus more on your last hits than anything else.

at level 2 you should have your shroud which helps your farm because you constantly go in and out of invis right where the creeps clash and you should have an easier time getting those last hits with your mark, also you can use it to harrass your enemy if they are trying to get those last hits and they are melee range, you can fix yourself to hit them with the mark activate it and sink back into your shroud. your focus though should be those last hits, you have a pretty pricey build ahead of you and you need to farm out those last hits. although it makes it a little easier if you have lane control because you popped your mark and did some damage and than again i mean, if you can get them to leave you alone and farm in peace all the better, but if you think you can make that kill i mean thats cool but, roughly 9 minions = the gold of 1 kill, so if you spend all your time trying to harrass and you come out with a 3-1-1 score with 20 minion kills and everyone else has like 60 minion kills, you are still behind even if the team scores are 3-1 and your the only one with a kill. work thoses farms

at level 3 when you get your slash things become a little easier with your last hits, because of the AOE damage you do helps get that 2 or three minions thats all about to die at the same time, you can help them out with that. once again you need those last hits only worry about the other team if you need to but you need your farms, at this point you should be finding minons around one half to one third and killing them off with your mark and finding groups of minions with low health to cresent slash them.

from there on kinda use that same idea but when you get your ult is when you become a little more aggresive but you need both your ult and rylais, rylais and this point in the game makes you a lot less 'squishy' and your able to jump in the middle of things and accomplish something without immediatly being snuffed out. with rylais you get a really nice slow on everything you do, most scary of which is your assassins mark. getting that slow proc almost guarantees that you could 'activate' your mark but with your ult that also slows you can guarantee it. but be aware of how much you can do and don't get too trigger happy to just jump in there, be sure that your #1 goal is still farming out that gold, a kill or two would be nice but mostly its your job right now to chase people down, not yet burst them down. you wait for that until you get your lichbane. of all the akali builds ive seen on this website few of them have lichbane and partly thats because it has mana attached to it. but ignore the mana and look at the passive. whenever you use a ability the next attack you do does 100% of you AP to the target, so in other words we use assassins mark to proc lichbane and we hit for a lot for the mark cause we went pretty much straight AP and then for a lot more for lichbane..... because we pretty much went straight AP do the math, the gold 'wasted' on the mana is more than made up for when you destroy everyone you come across.

heres a video i came across that more or less shows you what do to farm with akali, it shows akali going solo mid which ive done before and it generally works, but you have to have lots of experience with akali to be able to do it, id recommend going down a side lane but here is the vid link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vaOXcp1zjQ&feature=fvst

and lastly for akali, in team fights you are squishy, you also do lots of damage which makes you a priority for getting focused, so in team fights you NEVER ever initiate a team fight, and even after one has started you don't necessary just jump in, wait until some chaos has happened died down, like major AOE ults and what not, than hop on through using your ult and flash to the rear of the enemy formation to get the guys running away or the squishy guys who are on cooldown and no longer have a tank but twilight shroud is your best friend, that next to patience, wait for the right time to jump in. and using a assassin type character be wary of how far you chase, i mean go get the kill but it doesn't help if you end up dieing instead to a gank

thats pretty much it, comment on things that you liked and errors that you found post suggestions and i'll tweak it over all i just wanted to put a lichbane in for akali something that i see much builds here lacking, which i have no idea why, i play AP akali alot and i was just looking for suggestions and ways to play her better. and i was astonished at the lack of Lichbane floating around. in the end akali is a chasing but be wary of how far you go, she can do lots of damage and in team fights focus carrys down, she is a ***** if ever fed so be cautious of the other team trying to stop that. and be mindful that very rarely can you handle more than 1 person at a time when your by yourself, so don't be a leeroy, we all laughed at him when he did it, but we'll just all yell at you