My thoughts on support Annie

There’s been quite a bit of hype for some time around some of the Asian teams (most notably China’s Royal Club) picking support Annie in their games or having it banned against them, and while I’m nowhere near the skill level of these players I wanted to try it out for myself to see what I thought about it.

First though, some quick stats: in the Chinese LoL Pro League (LPL, China’s version of the LCS) Annie was either picked or banned in every single Royal Club game. This kind of statistic is pretty incredible when you consider the amount of popular champions in any competitive scene.
Alongside this is the 78% win rate for Royal Club’s support Annie pick. As you can see it really was used successfully by them.

I used my standard support runes for this which were Armor, MR and Gold per 10s as well as normal 0/9/21 masteries.

The first thing I noticed was how long the auto attack range is - 625 to be exact - which is just 25 units below Caitlyn’s range. It’s definitely the highest range amongst supports as anyone with more than 625 range is an AD carry.
This allows really. really great harassment early on. I’d definitely think about picking up something like hybrid penetration runes to give both your massive auto attacks more damage as well as your abilities.

Her passive is the next thing that makes her great. Being able to stun every 5th spell cast is just incredibly powerful against most lanes, especially being able to have this up at level one. If you take W you can charge it up for invading or camping the lane brush and hoping for the enemy to stroll in, lay down the stun and hopefully grab the kill or at least force someone out of lane for a little bit.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the stun is the longest one for any support available at level one. This can swing the lane in your favor very easily. One stun could be all it takes to finish off a champ and get a kill.

I can immediately see why support Annie is so highly regarded, her ability to control and zone your enemies is pretty insane as well as the early poke and stuns and the idea of an Annie - Caitlyn zone completely terrifies me and it’s this sort of lane with the long range poke and high damage that is needed to snowball Annie through the early game as she can drop off mid-late.

However I do think that Annie support really requires a lot of time to learning everything and getting it right as well as generally more skill than I have - I can make it work well enough but I’m just not skilled enough to be able to pull some of the incredible ganks and plays that I’ve seen much more skilled players do with Annie.

Given the time to practice her along with skill, she’s definitely a very strong support, it quickly became clear to me why Royal Club were loving her down in the bot lane and I hope these off beat and niche supports are a trend that carries on into Season 4. It’s very entertaining and reveals unique supports that work perfectly like this.