Boards›Gameplay

Anivia Needs Help: Why Season 5 Stealth Nerfs Were Bad For Her

The Mimeoplasm·3/21/2015, 5:28:46 AM·5 votes·2,744 views

I main Anivia and last season I thought she was in a pretty healthy place. Her early game wasn't the best, she ran out of mana really fast, but there was good ways to get around that and farm to your late game.

The best methods included:

  • Farming your jungle wraith and wolf camps in between mid lane minion waves to get a bit of extra CS and exp to push you towards your late game
  • Rushing a basic chalice for the mana regeneration to stay in lane
  • Getting blue buffs

THE PROBLEM: The problem here is pretty obvious. Chalice of Harmony nerfs to both the gold cost and the way the regeneration works hurt Anivia's starting gambit pretty badly. It wasn't totally backbreaking or anything, but you can really feel the need for mana now with the chalice changes. This is compounded with the duration nerf on blue buff means Anivia is making a lot more trips to the summoner platform to get her mana filled back up. This means less time in lane. This means less farm. We need farm to be relevant as mid game approaches, which means that the next step would be to start double dipping wolves and raptors to make up the lost time and money, but we can't do that because

  1. it costs half of our mana pool to kill a minion wave, and we need to kill those because...
  2. jungle money got nerfed, and even when we have blue buff and have the mana to farm the jungle camps...
  3. the spawn timers got increased which means that they wont be up between every minion wave, instead appearing only every two minion waves.

This means that Anivia now has to take drastic measures to stay in lane to keep her farm up to scale into her strong late game. In season 4 I ran teleport on Anivia frequently because it let me abuse her safe farming tactics and reach 200+ cs by 20 minutes in most games that I got blue buff and double dipped wolves and wraiths. I didn't have to run it, and it let me switch to safer summoner spells like heal or barrier to stop zed and fizz from just killing me.

I now find myself forced to run teleport and use it every time I have the chance to hunt down extra farm this means that I no longer have the safety of barrier or heal when I come up against assassins who straight kill me and poke mages who out range me and keep me off my farm.

I only rarely manage 200 cs by 20 now and usually its because I got a couple good ganks from a jungler and proceeded to run rampant all over the map, stealing everyone else's farm on the way, and by then its hardly relevant that I have that CS because I just killed 10 people and got ridiculous amounts of money anyway.

This come across another problem. Anivia is incredibly fragile. She has one of the slowest base movement speeds in the game, she has one of the lowest base health pools in the game, she has very low armor and magic resist early on, and has no escapes built in to her skills. This means that she is a perfect target for all the extremely popular assassins who can just jump on her and 100-0 her in 2 seconds. She can't even get good value out of Zhonya's hourglass because it cancels her ult when she activates it and her cooldowns are too long for her to burst out of zhonyas like Syndra or Orianna can.

To cut a long story short I think that Anivia's early game has been badly damage by a number of stealth nerfs that were not really targeted to hinder her at all. Anivia's fragile early game has been shattered by a combination of factors that had nothing in particular to do with her, since she hasn't seen any real changes in some time aside from some useful quality of life buffs several patches ago dealing with things like her auto attack projectile speed, clarifying the radius of her stun (which is still a bit unclear, but talking about it here risks derailing my discussion into one about "CLARITY") and having her ultimate deal a tick of damage on being canceled.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Since most of the problem is centered on the fact that she is a slow and squishy mage with a poor early game and an emphasis on prolonged sieges and wave clear most of my ides target either improving her ability to reach her mid/late game power, or improving the utility of her abilities early on so that she is more relevant early where she has previously been extremely outmatched.

  • Allow her ultimate to continue through activating Zhonya's Hourglass.
  • Improve her early mana regeneration or the size of her mana pool.
  • Improve the damage output of her ultimate to be more punishing to opponents who might choose to walk through it.
  • Have her ultimate deal bonus damage to minions and monsters, similar to Lucian's ultimate, thus allowing her to spend less mana trying to kill minion waves, dragons, and barons.
  • Have her ultimate's cooldown begin when she places it, not when she cancels it, allowing her to re-position her ultimate better during fights to increase her damage output and allow her to be more relevant in the early stages of the game.
  • Increase the movement and/or attack speed slowing associated with her "chilled" debuff to allow her to have more presence early before she manages to complete some items for more damage, such as increasing it to 25/30/35% movespeed slow as she ranks up her ultimate, leaving it at 20% base for the chilled effect on her Flash Frost before level 6.
  • Increase the duration of the "chilled" debuff so that she can have a larger window to launch her ice lances in and/or allow her Frostbite to increase the duration of the debuff so that she can maintain damage output on a stubborn pursuer (e.g. Irelia, Jax, Blitzcrank)

Anivia has always been a champion that I view as a safety pick. Her power to draw out a game and siege with her ultimate is what defines her. This was balanced out by the fact that she is extremely fragile and requires protection and proper positioning in order to survive and dominate fights. This is why I think that the proper course would be to encourage this sort of behavior in Anivia players by choosing to increase her ultimate's damage against minions and monsters and letting her have Zhonya's without deactivating her ultimate. This would increase her ability to farm in the early game and provide her with some kind of safety against champions like fizz and zed who can dive turrets and delete her before her ultimate can do anything to create any sort of meaningful trade in damage.

Edit: There seems to be some confusion in replies. I'm not saying Anivia has a weak late game. What I am targeting with my discussion is how current nerfs to mana regeneration and the jungle has pushed back Anivia's purchases by a good 5 minutes. Her income during the first 20 minutes of the game is MUCH lower now than is was during season 4. The things that I mention as potential solutions are targeted at improving how she plays during the first 20 minutes of the game, or allowing her to function at a higher level during the latter half of the game to make up for how fragile her early game is.

16 Comments

thinking man3/21/2015, 5:41:26 AM3 votes

She doesn't need buffs.

Her zone control and waveclear are already ridiculous.

Dark Nephthys3/21/2015, 7:10:03 AM1 votes

Honestly the weak ultimate early game really doesn't hurt her that much because it's mainly there to slow/zone them and to get your double damage on your E. Anivia has always had a some what weaker early game but her Mid-Late game is honestly imo one of the best for mages.

Also her early game isn't even weak, it's just her pre-6 is extremely annoying to farm with and your trades are reliant on you hitting your Q on them at a close area since your E has such a shorter range from you.

Personally, she doesn't need much or any buffs. The only thing I feel that she really needs would be to not have her ult be stopped by CC, and possibly to be able to destroy her wall (like how Jarvan can). Sure I would love her to get other stuff like reduce her mana cost, or increase the range of her E, or have enemies chilled for longer (So you can make sure you can get in range for her E) but honestly she's fine.

RazorTS3/21/2015, 11:09:46 AM1 votes

what a bulshit post OP, your solutions will break more things that it will fix

GLWuffie3/21/2015, 8:55:29 PM1 votes

Everything about Anivia is balanced. As much as she looks like she needs a buff, anything like that could potentially break her, make her a constant ban pick, and ultimately they might overnerf her afterwards.

The ONLY thing that I think that I would change is her passive... her scaling Armor/MR bonus. I would remove it completely. Early levels you LOSE the bonus Armor/MR you have so you're already squishy (for the 1v1s), while late-game/levels you do GAIN some, but by that time there's a lot of Armor and Magic Pen it doesn't even matter (also team fights and such which 2+ whaling on you still makes the bonus null).

But onto why she's balanced otherwise:

Low health = passive, low movement speed = high CC, mana problems = huge burst, slow attack speed = long ranged.

Anivia effectively teaches you mana conservation at it's purest form. Don't focus on waves until level 6+, try not to attack your opponent with your abilities until at least level 4 (3 is acceptable, but extra dmg on that E is needed). Once 6, try to engage with a quick R+E combo instead of Q+E if possible. This will allow you to hit hard, and possibly Q/W afterwards to keep them in your R longer.

All of your "solutions" are just there to make her potentially broken. Anivia just takes patience and practice, and once you got it down you'll have little trouble with most matchups (not all, AD mids are still a pain... and Nidalee).

Final tips, don't try and rely on blue buff, you can go through whole games without mana regen like chalice (you'll be recalling a lot, but you'll be doing it when something major has happened like a kill or a huge wave clear... which you should actually rush RoA, and therefore get Catalyst to recover mana/hp on level up). If you DO get the buff though, you are the best to utilize it so make sure it goes through no waste. Also if a Fizz (lol Fizz Mid) or Zed or someone tries to tower dive, you should hopefully be able to quick double cast Q to stun them under turret... and while stunned hit with E and turret and they should be hurting... if not dead.

~GL

The Mimeoplasm3/25/2015, 6:07:19 AM1 votes

In the wake of patch 5.6 I felt I needed to note something. Riot stated that they know mana regeneration is weaker now than it was. Pulling from the Ziggs buff notes I quote

Thanks to the season's changes making mana regeneration weaker...

So Riot knows that mana regeneration is not what it was. So if they are buffing Ziggs based on mana regeneration issues, why can't they give Anivia, one of the most mana intensive champions in the game, a bit of attention with her mana problems?