I believe Annie needs some change.

Having been on the giving and receiving end of mid Annie, I've come to sort of accept that if I'm in mid with her, I'm pretty much guaranteed the lane so long as I don't dive too often, and conversely if I am against her, I pretty much have to accept she's going to zone me out of half the CS or kill me. I enjoy playing her because she gives immense pressure, has a very easy time farming, and has huge kill potential even in situations where the enemy laner could be considered safe. On the other side of the coin, I hate playing against her because I have to accept a huge CS deficit or worse, and hope that my jungler can spare the time to camp her.

So after thinking about it for a while, I've failed to come up with any meaningful windows of weakness that can consistently be exploited.

• She rarely runs out of mana because her Q refunds it's entire mana cost and halves the CD, with a doran's ring it actually gives you mana. This allows her easy farm in lane, and good poke with very little cost.

• Her high burst is almost instant, and even a Q-W from low levels will take a hefty chunk out of most mid laner's health.

• Her stun is fast to charge, and while you are given a indicator of when it's up, it doesn't matter too much. Her stun's presence and threat allows her to just walk at you and zone you out of minions, or face a swift demise.

• Even in a gank, she can quickly trade one for one unless completely CC'd throughout the gank, or simply stun whoever has the most CC and walk away.

• In teamfights her low cooldowns allow her some pretty consistent damage, in large chunks as well. She's often able to just dance around the edge of a fight and still deal plenty damage, or choose to go all in and remove the enemy backline(hopefully at the cost of her own life).

So ends my list of complaints about her, slightly condensed, which I would love to actually discuss rather than just proclaim from my soap box and pretend they're all perfectly right. I don't want to just complain about the problem though, I do have a few ideas for a solution as well.

Since her passive allows her a huge amount of the power to just zone out the enemy laner and make it a uncontested lane, I decided I'd rather take a in depth look at that. I'll post the description just to have it on hand:

After casting four abilities, Annie's next offensive ability stuns all enemies it damages for 1.25 / 1.5 / 1.75 seconds.

Rather than directly nerfing the passive, it would be better to make it a more timed window of strength, rather than one that can be kept up for a extended period of time. This would hopefully increase counterplay against her, whilst not removing her ability to compete. My idea of a change would be this:

Annie gains a stack of Pyrophilia for each ability cast(decaying at one stack every ~7-10 seconds), at four stacks, Annie gains Pyromania for 2.5/3/3.5 seconds. Any offensive ability cast while Pyromania is active stuns any enemies hit by the ability for .5-1.25/.75-1.5/1-1.75 seconds, scaling up to full stun time over 1.5 seconds. After Pyromania is consumed or lost through timing out, Annie cannot gain stacks of Pyrophilia for 2 seconds.

I think this would help address her overwhelming presence and pressure in lane, whilst not removing the things that make Annie fun(high burst). A small +AP% damage might even be something that could be added on to the passive's effects, but I think that would end up being too much extra power added for the decrease in power.

I'm willing and open to debate and discussion on this, as maybe I'm just unable to see what her actual windows of vulnerability are, or maybe my ideas of change take things too far, or not far enough even.