Talk:Akali/Strategy/@comment-95.87.50.201-20130327121640/@comment-24010081-20140113153213

The biggest problem with Akali jungle is that she wants really badly to snowball. Mid lane is her best option. She gets enough XP to outscale most junglers and botlane giving her 3 potentially easy targets to focus and burst early game as well as being equal to mid/top, allowing her to have a fair shake at out-dueling those two lanes 1v1. She can rush Gunblade and gets to take ignite driving up her chase/kill potential even further and putting her in a position to snowball out of control. It's my opinion that Gunblade is by far her best item b/c of the synergy with her passive. It just multiplies itself so hard and the spell vamp allows her to win 1v1 duels very hard.

If instead she goes jungle, her clear times are such that she is going to wind up at roughly equal level to botlane and below mid/top. She has to pick between ignite and flash and can't take both further reducing her kill potential. Also she has less gold, making Gunblade rush more difficult. She can go Spectral Wraith but the damage boost from it is not nearly as high. Overall less gold and less XP in the early game leaves her in a rough spot when transitioning into the mid-game.

Basically, after many many games of testing her in the jungle with all sorts of builds/runes I've come to the conclusion that it just slows her down too much and lowers her impact on the game. And while it can be successful and you can carry with it, it is much easier to do so in mid or even top lane.

The best build I found was flat AP blues, flat AD quints, flat ad reds, and flat armor yellows. Full 30 points in offense tree. This is b/c first clear damage is mostly auto attacks so fastest clear times can be achieved by a lot of AD. It also increases her spell Vamp thanks to her passive letting her sustain a little better. I eventually started taking ignite/smite just to up my kill potential, and still rushing gunblade first, then spectral wraith, just b/c gunblade is such a power spike on her.