PROS
Moving onto the pros and cons, Annies strengths are in her laning, utility, and her ability to enable carrys. With her long ranged autos, shields and her point click stun, she is able to hard bully laners and usually get an advantage after laning phase. Her utility allows her to engage and catch out enemies very reliably as Annie can instant flas h r or flash q to guarantee a stun. Once she engages, she also provides a lot of crowd control and debuffs as the support build I will cover makes tibbers a nightmare to deal with. With the same build and buffs to her shield, you are also able to enable your carrys to pop off. Because you will have a lot of ability haste and the CDR on shield is very low, you can constantly give buffs to a carry on your team. The movement speed with the mix of your stuns and slows, allows annie to set up team fights very well.

CONS
Annies weakness is that you have to play around her passive and your cooldowns are a bit long in the early game. Once you blow your all your spells, you have to cycle them which takes a while. Also, because you are trying to get your passive back up, you run into mana issues. Another big problem Anne has is that her spell ranges are relatively short ranged so in the mid/late game you will rely heavily around your flash. When flash is unavailable, you have to hover and basically become a shield bot, until you can find an angle in.

There are two keystones that work the best with Annie. The first one which I prefer and use all the time is aery. Aery works very well with Annies kit because your shield is super low cooldown so you can trigger aery a lot.It basically adds more stats to your damage and shield itself. For the rest of the runes in the sorcery tree, I like taking manaflow band to help with Annie’s mana issues, transcendence for the ability haste, and scorch for the extra damage in lane. You can switch out transcendence for celerity because annie utilizes the extra move speed a lot with shurlyas but its just preference. For secondary, I like taking biscuits and then cosmic insight. Cosmic insight making your flash go from 300 seconds to 210 seconds is huge as Annie’s play making potential relies heavily on flash. And then for these runes, I like going double adaptive and then either mr or armor depending on the match up bot

The second keystone that people take on Annie is Glacial Augment. You would only be able to proc this when you have stun up, but it provides more utility than overall stats compared to aery due to the slow. For the runes in this tree, I would take stop watch, biscuits and cosmic insight. I think in this part of the t ree, you could probably switch out perfect timing for hex flash but everything else is best in slot for solo queue. I tested out hex flash but found that I dont really use too often throughout the game. For the secondary tree, I like going sorcery and taking mana flow band and transcendence. You could probably take resolve secondary or something in domination as well when you run glacial, but i think when you have aery the best secondary is inspiration because of cosmic insight.

Moving onto the items now, support Annie’s core build is shurlyas, rylias and oblivion orb depending on if the enemy team has a lot of healing. Shurlyas is the best mythic because there is no other item that will spike you as hard for as cheap. Your kill pressure significantly increases as you not only gain another tool to catch out enemies, but you can also bring your team to them. You can also trigger shurelya's passive of granting you and your ally movement speed often because of how low cooldown molten sheild is. When you have maxed out shield, ionian boots and your support mythic, shield cool down is 5 seconds while the active is 3 seconds. So in a fight, shields will only be down every 2 seconds. The contant movement speed makes it really easy to roam around the map. On a side note, for all enchanters, I always priortize my mythic over tier 2 boots. Support mythics are very very strong for how cheap they are, and the sooner you get them, the faster you will become a problem.

After I build shurliyas I will usually build oblivion orb if the enemy has a lot of healing. If I end up building oblivion, I skip upgrading the item and go straight to rylias because of the changes in healing reduction for morello and chemtech putrifier in 13.1b. Riot not only took away the increased healing reduction in the upgraded items, but they also buffed oblivion orb so that it gives the same amount of heal cut of 40%. To add on, chemtech putrifier no longer applies the healing reduction to allys shielded, so now the healing reduction is only triggered by magic damage. This combined with rylias, works very well with Annie because of Tibbers and his aura that does magic damage to enemies near him. Basically after tibbers is used as a stun, in team fights tibbers is going to permanently make the enemy slow and have healing reduction.

So typically my build order in drafts where I would need heal cut would be buying tier 1 boots, shurlyas,upgrading tier 2 boots, oblivion orb, rylias, and then 3rd item, I would upgrade my oblivion orb to Chemtech putrifier. It worth upgrading 3rd item because games will typically finish before you usually build another full 3rd item. After that you can get any forbidden idol item, just anything that would work well with your team. In the end your build should look something like this with these bing your core, and flexing any of these items.

In the laning phase you should be looking to hit level 2 in most match ups because of annie’s auto attack range. You out range most of the meta ADCs and supports so getting lane priority is not a problem. Always look to hit the enemy or the minions at the start of lane. Throughout the laning phase, you should constantly try to auto the enemies and punish mis spacing with ur stun. Always throw out an auto if you do stun them. You can safely auto for the duration of the stun and not get punished. Be mindful of getting minion agro when you do auto the enemy, you can drop agro if you walk into a bush. When the enemy laner trades abilities with you or your ally, shield yourself or them to win the trade. A big reason why annie is so strong right now is because you win out on most trades because of your E. Not only do you shield yourself but the enemy takes damage as well. You proc Aery, Mana flow band, and the trade with your shield counts as a spell thief stack which is one of the main reasons why annie is so strong in lane. If you play aggressively while taking good trades, which is super easy when all of your abilities are up, you stack your mana flow band and spell theifs very fast which accelerates you to scale.
Annies laning phase is super easy to get ahead in because of how broken molten shield is.

Your kill pressure is already high in lane, but once you hit 6 it becomes even higher. You should look for opportunities to all in your enemy with tibbers and stun. You will get a lot of kill angles if you wait in bushes. Even with kindlegem and bandleglass mirror, you still do a lot of damage. Heres a clip of me soloing a jinx thats a level up from me. We trade out kills but this showcases just how much damage you can do.

Team fighting as annie is going to be relatively simple. You’ll always want to look to flash R a carry or a lot of people, but if thats not possible, you will be looking to perma shield a carrand speed up your team up with shurlyas while throwing out stuns whenever its available. You want to hover in the back and wait for your cooldowns and then dip back into team fights when they are available. Keep in mind, annie’s range is super short, so you want to find that sweet spot where you are far enough to be safe but not too far so that you can’t get back into the fight. Shurlyas passive helps a lot with this because of the movementspeed.