If you’re a League of Legends Annie main, I suggest you look away now. The MOBA‘s adorable yet deadly mid lane mage is set to get some nerfs in future patches, as the balance team still thinks she’s a little too powerful.
Annie is the perfect League of Legends champion for beginners – in fact, many believe that if you can master the terrifying tyke and her fluffy best friend, Tibbers, you can play any mage in the game. Unfortunately, my Syndra still sucks.
At the moment, Annie’s boasting a pretty impressive 55.44% win rate in the midlane at high ELO, and has also wormed her way into the support role, where her win rate sits comfortably at 56.19%. As expected, Rylai’s Crystal Septer remains at the core of both builds, with Liandry’s as first item in mid, and Shurelya’s Battlesong for support.
Having spotted these stats (obtained via LoLalytics), Riot has confirmed that it’s working on knocking the flame-wielding mid laner down a few pegs, with gameplay analyst Ray ‘RayYonggi’ Williams writing that, while League of Legends patch 13.3 did hit her with some nerfs, she hasn’t fallen off quite as intended.
“She was hotfixed during the 13.3 patch which brought her down from ~56% to ~54%,” they state, going on to clarify “this is likely still out of line but we wanted to be confident she wouldn’t fall back into ‘strong but not OP’ range naturally, as she fell from 58%-56% from patch start to before the micropatch.
“With that said, my guess is we nerf next opportunity,” Williams writes. “We intend for her to be good, but she’s clearly over the line at the moment. A reasonable resting win-rate for Annie, a simple champion with limited mobility and range, is likely in the 52% area, considering how many champions sit <48% to account for opposite pattern.
“We are a little slow in this case due to the micropatch hitting a little lighter than expected and the weird circumstances of the patch (support and mid meta being in flux).”
52% is rather different from 55% and 56% respectively, but at least Riot is on the case. Given her current win rates, though, I hope it’ll be relatively soon – Annie support is driving me just as mad as Ashe support is.
Whether or not she’ll take a tumble down the League of Legends tier list as a result remains unseen, but either way, she’ll till remain the multiplayer game‘s most beloved mascot – when she’s not causing you to spontaneously combust.