Patch 13.22

Small buff for her auto attacks to make them much smoother.

Annie suffers from her limited range and she's very squishy in most AP builds. As a Tank Annie, your job is deliver a lot of CCs downrange and protect high priority allies. Because your basic abilities so comes up so fast, you can proc 2, even 3 stuns in a single fight and your tank build will help you buy time for your skills.

+ Easy to play, easy to master and flexible build

+ Borderline oppressive early game given the right matchup

+ Less Flash dependant, much more forgiving in positioning

+ She can do burst, peel, harass, chase or engage depends on the situation

+ You can bait cocky people into thinking you are squishy but you are definitely not

================================================================

- Weak early game, short harassing range compare to other mage supports

- Susceptible to pokes and long range champions

- Requires a strong laning partner to survive laning phase

- This guide is written by a Silver

- Doesn't translate well into higher elo, as people gets smarter and has better positionings

Passive - Pyromania

This is among one of the best passive for mid laners, maybe one of the best in the game. This will be your main tool of delivering instant AoE crowd control. Your stacks will be displayed to all players by a bar on your head, you lose the element of surprise but this might help to pressure the enemy by staying away from you.

Q - Disintergrate

Your main harassing tool in lane. 625 range, magic damage, point-and-click. Yes I am SUCK at skillshots as much as the next guy. The reset cooldown will not go to waste however - you can reset your Q in a pinch by last hitting a minion, stacking up a stun a bit faster.

W - Incinerate

600 range, 50 degree cone, magic damage. It's tad bit shorter than Q and your auto range so you will want to walk up a tiny bit more to hit your W. This will be your main tool of AoE crowd control as it is by far the most reliable and predictable from your own perspective.

E - Molten Shield

Temporary Thornmail plus HP shield. Pop it on your ADC before they lose their HP and they will thank you. Unlike Q and W, leveling up this ability also reduces cooldown so that's why you will put your points into this ability first. It's a tiny bit weaker than Lulu's base shield but the movement speed will save lives.
One thing you could already guess is if the enemy attacks anyone with your E on them, Spellthief will proc.

R- Summon: Tibbers

Sadly your ult is the least powerful thing in your kit. Tibbers can help your clear waves, smash turrets and has a passive Sunfire Cape that deals a lot of damage if the enemy isn't paying attention. Stunning people with Tibbers is okay, not as reliable as W but you can reach a bit further. The best thing about on-demand pet summons can eat skillshots for you, something like blocking a Pyke's Q would be crucial if he is about to hit one of your high priority allies.
Unlike AP Annie, you do not smash R to stun people if you are going to 1v1. You smash R when you don't have stun ready, your Q or W will do the stunning part. The reaosn behind this is Tibbers enrages when you stun people and upon summoned, you are getting two enraged Tibbers within the fight duration like that.
Before you wonder, Tibbers will not attack Nexus or Inhibitors. He still can smack towers, although the damage is about equal or even less than half a cannon minion.

In lane, depends on your matchup you will want to step up and harass as much as possible or sit back with a Relic Shield. If you can harass, stand as close to melee minions as possible and press Q whenever their ADC tries to farm in peace. Your stun will always force an escape ability, a spell shield, sometimes even a Flash or Cleanse. Bonus about your stun gauge is your ADC knows when to engage as well.

If you got something like Fortune + Vel'Koz, get a Relic Shield, stand behind your ADC and E them whenever they're about to take damage. You will not blow your stun and you will hold your lane until the jungler helps relieve that lane. Upon recall, get a Corruption Potion as it immensely helps for the late laning phase. It's 300G but you'd rather waste it on yourself rather than giving that to your enemy.

Before teamfight eventually breaks out, stack up a stun and walk forward. In theory you will die within 5 seconds because you aren't that super tanky but because this is solo queue, they're more likely going to be "no you go first". You will have the upper hand to pressure the enemy and you will be more likely to stun whoever you want to stun first.

If your team has some squishy guy and enemy team has one very fed guy that can murder your ADC in matter of seconds, you have the option to stick to your ADC and stun the guy coming after you. Annie's kit isn't top-notch when it comes to peeling but much like Lulu's W, you have a gurranteed point-and-click C and sometimes that's enough.

You must always have Exhaust even if your ADC duo is smurfing. Even after the nerf, Exhaust has always been the perfect counterplay to high burst champions and this will save you and your team from a very fed Irelia. As you have zero kill pressure in early game, Ignite won't be that important and only if enemy team has none can potentially murder your ADC, you grab Heal while the ADC can take something else.

You have two options of AoE stuns: W and R. W is more consistent as you're ramming your face against the enemy and it's a lot more consistent because you can roughly estimate how big your cone would be. R has better range and while Tibbers appear big, the hitbox of her R is deceivingly small, it's even smaller than Corki's Q and you only get to use it every ~1 minute. The bonus with with using R is you appear to be much more damaging but in reality, you only scrape 1/5th of the ADC's HP.

Ward denying. When you don't want the enemy to murder your Control Ward, you place another one. If you notice your ward is getting murdered in bot lane tribush, you place one at river, denying them 30 gold and generally wasting their time. It's not worth it denying them while you are in fountain though because wards like that will not give vision score. That's why you always walk through your jungle when you are moving to lane, both to scout for deep wards and deny wards like that.

Annie has always been at the scraping bottom of the meta due to her outdated kit and well, being a mid laner. Riot has been ramping up her numbers and pray that people would pay attention to her but ehhh... All they see is a 600 range burst mage that has a big red bar indicate when she is going to slap you, which is BAD because a lot of other champions can do the same thing with ease and far safer with potential surprise element. Annie's kit is one of the strongest a mid laner can have, only if she can consistently pull off against other players.

In patch 10.22, Riot gives Annie a mini rework(?) in her E. Now instead of doing nothing, it gives an HP shield, a little movement speed and a temporary Thornmail. Since then people have been opting for Annie support, while keeping her AP build intact. Luden, Horizon, etc. It's okay if you have good position and what not, thing is, you're likely gonna die afterward due to the fact you are a very short ranged burst mage.

I just happen to came across a discussion about Annie and while she could use a rework, it doesn't have to. She is one of the very few champions that has her kit mostly the same since release and while she does have gameplay issues, it is rewarding in its own way. After a long convo, I decided to try out one game with Annie to "feel" the champion. Then I realized, I have Frostfire Annie skin.