Akali

Akali is a hybrid-scaling assassin who plays mid lane and draws her power from the smoke of Twilight Shroud. Releasing the shroud renders her invisible and immune to targeting by enemy spells and attacks, and she can slip in and out of it to restart a fight whenever she likes. Very few champions can dive a backline, disappear, and come back in quite the same way.

Her damage rotation opens with Five Point Strike, which throws a spread of five kunai that deal damage and slow. Those hits feed her passive, Assassin’s Mark: each spell that deals damage draws an energy ring around the target, and crossing out of that ring powers her next attack with extra range and damage. Strong Akali players keep weaving across the ring’s edge, threading empowered auto attacks between spells so each rotation hits noticeably harder than the ability numbers alone would suggest.

Mobility as a weapon

Shuriken Flip sends her backward while launching a shuriken that tags the first enemy or smoke cloud it touches, and recasting it dashes her to that tag. That means her own shroud can serve as a place to travel to. Perfect Execution adds two more dashes on top of that, and its second cast executes enemies it hits who are below a health threshold. Because she uses energy instead of mana, she won’t run out of resources in lane, though her short cooldowns mean every input has to be timed carefully.

Akali suits aggressive, mechanically sharp players who prefer long skirmishes to quick one-shot combos. Her drawbacks come straight from the kit: attacking or casting exposes her inside the shroud for a moment, and with just 125 attack range she has to commit deep to do damage, so badly timed engages get punished hard.