Akali is one of League of Legends’ swiftest champions in the game. She can take over games easily in season 10 with a small lead. Her core items are quite cheap and her early game is great as well, even though she is melee and doesn’t have a lot of options to farm safely. While her range can be exploited by enemies during the laning phase, the combination of runes and items below should help you get past that point.
Runes
Precision
Fleet Footwork: As a melee champion, you’re going to be punished a lot in the early game, especially since most popular champions in the mid lane are ranged. As a result, you need to double down and take all sustain possible through items and runes.
Presence of Mind: This rune is going to resolve all your energy issues, especially during a hectic teamfight which may take some time. With a small assist or kill you’ll regain a big chunk of your energy pool, allowing you to use your abilities once again to get another kill.
Legend: Tenacity This is a pretty basic rune to make you less susceptible to crowd control.
Coup de Grace: This rune acts as a finisher. It allows you to deliver even more damage to low-health targets, ensuring you execute them with your combo and get your energy back with Presence of Mind.
Domination
Taste of Blood: Taste of Blood is a simple sustain rune. It gives you some health back during short trades during the laning phase. You want all the sustain you can get to survive the early game.
Ravenous Hunter: As one of the most powerful healing runes in the game, Ravenous Hunter allows you to heal back up based on damage dealt from spells. While in the early game the impact might not be that high compared to other runes, once the match gets to the later points of the game, you’ll heal back up from 10 percent to 100 percent in a matter of seconds, which is crucial if you want to win teamfights and be as slippery as possible.
Bonuses: +9 adaptive force, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor
Starting items
Doran’s Shield
Having early durability is important for Akali since she’s a melee assassin who will take a lot of poke damage during the laning phase. Doran’s Shield will help by granting the mid laner 80 bonus health, extra health regeneration, and bonus damage to minions to ensure that you can easily last-hit.
Health Potion
During the farming phase, you are most likely going to take damage from enemy champions. Health potions heal back 150 health over 15 seconds and will give you extra time before having to base.
Core items
Hextech Gunblade
Hextech Gunblade is one of the best items in the game, granting you everything you need to be able to execute your enemies while also regaining health. It has an active movement speed slow effect with a small damage bonus and a great stat line with attack damage and ability power.
Sorcerer’s Shoes
Sorcerer’s Shoes are a straightforward choice for boots with magic penetration to increase your damage potential. The item should be purchased after Hextech Gunblade to increase your burst damage output as soon as possible.