User blog comment:KarasuGamma/Ahri's Nonexistent Role/@comment-6301771-20130410053909

Ahri's a highly mobile, spammy mage. Look at her cooldowns, especially at max rank. 7 seconds, 5 seconds, 12 seconds, and an 80 second ult. Not too shabby, especially with very managable mana costs. All these things add up to a mage with a lot more utility through itemization than one would expect.

She needs a higher damage team to really thrive, but she makes up for it by being able to hold lane remarkably well and transitions to teamfights by utilizing her unique perk: An ability with a 5 second cooldown that applies Rylai's slow on multiple targets.

She needs a different team composotion than most to really thrive, but if teamed up with a lot of other high damage characters, she offers an amazing degree of utility. Combine that with Lich Bane to get her some decent damage and tanky AP items to keep her alive while leaping through teamfights, damaging everyone she can, slowing down the entire team, and dodging gracefully while thrashing enemies.

I do agree her scalings and base damages are outright ridiculous. I mean, good god. Her max burst to a single target is 1235 (+266% AP). That's pretty abysmal, especially seeing how much utility she really has to build to get much use out of her unique kit.