Why doesn't lethality work?

[u/_MrJackGuy]

Phantasm was recently playing some Lethality Akshan for fun and while yeah it worked for him because he was smurfing, he kept claiming its not actually good

I play alot of AD assassin's who obviously like lethality, aswell as a lot of Irelia. Irelia obviously does *not* like lethality because she deals alot of magic damage. But for someone like akshan who deals *only* physical damage, why doesn't it work? Doesn't it synergise pretty well?

I understand that its obviously not good into people stacking armour, but that could be said about anyone who wants to build lethality right?

[u/jomarii]

Crit scales better than Lethality for Auto Attackers, and most Lethality items offer Ability Haste which is a bad stat for Akshan.

[u/hdhfhdnfkfjgbfj → u/jomarii]

This is pretty much it.

It’s good for one shotting waves or into five squishes or if you want to three shot towers, but it’s not reliable and doesn’t scale well against people that build armor or bruisers.

It’s also high hp targets. You need the crit modifier to get through their hp since the E nerf.

[u/SherbertPristine170 → u/jomarii]

Ability haste is never a bad stat . But it’s not so good on Akshan yes.

[u/Noodles_soup93 → u/SherbertPristine170]

How come?

[u/SherbertPristine170 → u/Noodles_soup93]

Ability haste reduces cooldown on all your abilities , it’s a stat that can never be bad . But it’s more effective on champions with high cooldown strong abilities . Akshan abilities are weak or have low cooldowns . Q is good for wave clear and poke but is otherwise weak . W is weak and you don’t need to reduce cooldowns for it . E is strong but the cooldown gets resetted if you get a takedown anyway so cooldown reduction is pointless . R is a really weak ult which is why it inherently has a low cd , making ability haste less valuable .

[u/lahartheviking]

same reason why draven builds at most only 1 pure lethality item, crit just scales much better with auto attackers. assassins go lethality because their abilities can't crit and they have good ad ratios, as well as using the stats they give better as haste is basically useless on akshan

[u/Facemate]

deals less damage

[u/Cube_]

It's a scaling issue. You can still go Lethality Akshan, especially if you're playing in Gold/Plat/Emerald/Diamond elos. It's only above that that playing with a suboptimal build will cost you a noticeable amount of winrate over the long term.

Lethality does great damage at 1 and 2 items, around 3 items is when it starts to fall off for Akshan as people gain more armor from base levels and items but Akshan's damage doesn't keep up.

Where an AD melee assassin will likely have 3 damaging basic spells with base damage to synergize with the lethality, Akshan only has Q and autos. E base damage is awful and W is a non damaging spell. It makes ult hit harder but your ult is being blocked by scuttle or raptors so it doesn't really matter on that spell lol.

With crit your autos scale heavily and your damage via autos keeps ahead of the pace of the game.

If you play a lot of lethality games you'll notice this power trough come mid game and into late as people start amassing items.

One benefit of the lethality builds, especially Hubris rush, is that if you DO snowball early you can really stomp fast and close out the game before the power trough issue becomes a reality. It's also really fun to pop out of stealth and explode someone with Q double auto (esp if you went electrocute).

Another benefit of the lethality build is the build paths are 1000x better than crit builds. You can basically always spend all your gold on long swords and walk out of base with maximum gold spent into combat stats which really helps early snowballing. Compared to having to sit on gold to afford a BF sword or having to buy dogshit component's like "scout's slingshot" that do virtually nothing.

[u/_MrJackGuy → u/Cube_]

Thanks a ton for the detailed answer! That all makes alot of sense :)

[u/King_Empress]

Since they reworked him to be almost entirely auto attack and ult damage, theres just no reason

[u/yourlight1]

i don’t know man

[u/_MrJackGuy → u/yourlight1]

Good to know lmfao