Nasus early game
I feel like early game nasus is actually not that weak at all. Now, when you play ranked games, you can obviously pick a champ that counters nasus, but when just playing normals, any melee champ or ad champ in general is pretty much guaranteed to fail at scaring him off. With tp, flask and pots or cloth 5, the whole risk reward style of nasus seems to disappear. Now, as someone who plays tryndamere and jax a lot, my opinion might a little biased, but i too play nasus occasionally and have noticed that even champs like teemo or riven won't be too succesful at poking you down. As nasus, you just go up for last hits, tank the expected damage with your flask, pots, and passive, and when it seems like their damage is putting you too low, back, buy some armor or mr (depending on the situation), and tp back. At this point, you will be approaching level 6, and have enough lifesteal to get your precious stacks relatively unharmed. Unless if their jungler is camping the hell out of you, you are normally free to farm at this point and approach your terrifying late game. Only a skilled riven or zed will be able to kill you at level 6, assuming you decide to leave the safety of your turret. Even when i play vlad and q the guy every chance i get and hit him with my fully stacked e, a simple negatron cloak suddenly makes my damage neglectable, considering a few stacks on his q and his passive heal him back a solid percentage of health. I honestly feel like the new goal when facing nasus is helping other lanes and praying they carry hard enough to ignore the cane. If other lanes end up going even or just barely ahead, then a smart nasus will win a majority of the time. Not trying to whine about nasus (i enjoy playing him), I just feel his early game weakness is not actually that weak, unless if exploited by a direct counter (with a player who actually knows how to play this counter). Look at jax, he has a weak early game that is later traded in for a very strong late game. Nasus on the other hand (a champ who should have just as weak, if not weaker, of an early game) literally can bully jax even during the first few levels, and goes on to have an even stronger late game. Even garen, a champ that is a huge bully early game, sometimes fails to kick nasus out of lane.
I don't think nasus needs any drastic changes, but i'm just curious what you guys think about his supposedly weak early game.
. Mundo is really good at bullying Nasus when he tries to CS early game without pushing the wave (Q and E-Auto him), deals a lot of mixed damage (so Nasus can't just stack either resistance), and can fight Nasus as any stage of the game. Mundo scales just as well as Nasus while being a stronger early-game bully (I killed the last few Nasus players I've gone against at level 2 without assistance), can splitpush against him at any point, is very difficult for Nasus to kill (unless he gets Last Whisper, but that leaves Nasus pretty squishy), and can help kite Nasus around using cleavers in teamfights. Even if you do push Nasus under his tower, you can harass him with Q or heal any damage dealt by tower shots.
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's early game is objectively a lot weaker than that of your average top laner, as he can't really trade or go aggressive or whatnot, but the problem with him is that he doesn't need to. His natural sustain and Q scaling encourage him to completely ignore the enemy top laner and farm as passively as possible, and when he does so it's extremely difficult to dislodge him. From experience, I think a lot of the frustration that comes from laning against Nasus is how passive he can play as you try to harass and poke him, and how he can still survive everything you throw at him almost as if you weren't there. I think he could afford to have a stronger early game if he were encouraged to interact with his lane opponent, rather than hard-farm until the mid/late game.
