Can we talk about Mid lane Annie
To start, I was a Season 3 Plat V Annie main, and had gotten absolutely terrifying on her. I watched with absolute horror as she began to be played bot lane, not just because it denied me my strongest mid lane pick, but also because it drew the attention of the nerf bat.
First, its exceedingly hard to figure out exactly how well mid Annie is doing these days because support Annie is far more popular afaik, and they're impossible to tell apart on lolking. Riot, it'd be wonderful if someone can give an accurate pulse on how she's currently handling mid-lane and if any plans are currently lined-up to help her if she's doing poorly.
Second, I personally feel that Mid Annie took too hard a hit in the last wave of changes. The reason I feel this way is because even in mid, Annie relies on having a strong early game presence in order to 'earn' her farm. Without that strength early, she lacks the mechanics to safely waveclear midgame. Combined, these factors lead her into an underfarmed late-game that can't properly utilize the superior scaling she was given to 'compensate' for the hits to her early game.
Before I go into ideas I have to help her out, a quick reminder of what changed this season:
Pyromania Stun duration changed to 1.25 / 1.5 / 1.75 from 1.75 at all levels.
Disintegrate Now reduces cooldown by half on all kills (champion or minion) Base damage lowered to 80/115/150/185/220 from 85/125/165/205/245 Ability power ratio increased to 0.8 from 0.7
Incinerate Base damage lowered to 70/115/160/205/250 from 80/130/180/230/280 Ability power ratio raised to 0.85 from 0.75
Summon Tibbers Base damage lowered to 175/300/425 from 200/325/450 Ability power ration raised to 0.8 from 0.7 Cooldown lowered to 120 / 100 / 80 from 120 seconds.
And now to the brass tacks. We can't just hand Annie more ungated power, as it'll just feed into support Annie, which is counterproductive. A CS-based gating would ensure any buffs were localized to an Annie that is at least farming. To this end, I have two suggested paths, both involve adding functionality to her Q's on-kill bonus:
1.Sustain - currently, Annie has zero in-kit sustain, which makes her trading power heavily reliant on the strength of individual trades. Making Q give additional mana or health on kill(ex: refunding 65/70/75/80/85 mana and giving 5 HP on Q-kill) allows mid Annie some more flexibility in her trading early game without that power being easily accessible to support Annie. This path would require her to trade more frequently than S3 Annie in order to get the same effect, which would hopefully result in her being a more interesting laner overall.
2.Ramping damage buff - Basically, the idea here is to give Annie her "base damage" back, but in a way that support Annie can't use. Example being "If Disintegrate kills a target, Annie's spells deal 1/2/3/4/5 additional damage, stacking up to 5 times. This lasts for 10s".
