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golem has a 5 minute respawn and with spec lasts 4 minutes

Carrying with the Frozen Chicken
Written by TwinsenDude, aka orb

Introduction

Anivia is my current main and I have a ton of fun playing her. My current stats with her are 921 Kills, 436 Deaths, and just under 1000 Assists. This of course includes the times when I first started with Anivia and is a mix of premades and solo queuing. What makes Anivia so much fun is her versatility. She's not just a killing machine, she's also a lifesaver. Countless times I have saved both my own and others lives with anivia. The amount of crowd control she has extends far beyond a simple stun. If you like a champion that will just dish out the damage and faceroll people's health bars, Anivia is not for you. If, however, you like a champion that puts its power at the mercy of the player's skill and has a lot of options for a lot of different situations, you should give her a try.

Ability Overview

Passive: Rebirth - This passive is what makes you powerful earlygame. On a cooldown of 4 minutes (not affected by cooldown reduction), when you die you will instead turn into an egg with full HP and altered armor/resistances. At level 1 you will lose 50 armor/magic res in egg form, but each time you upgrage your ultimate this will improve until at your ult's max rank you will . After an agonizing 6 seconds of watching the light of your soul drop into the egg you will be gloriously reborn with the same percentage of health your egg had. It is important to note: if you start a summoner ability before you get Egged, it will not be interrupted. This is really only noteworthy for teleport. If you spec into teleport with your masteries so you do not get interrupted by damage and start a teleport cast before you get egged you will continue teleporting in egg form. This can save your life!

Q: Flash Frost - This starts out as your utility spell early game and ends up a nuke lategame. Early game you will use this skill shot to chill your opponents which will allow your frostbite to do double damage. You can press Q again to stop the skill shot short. If you include both the damage from passing through an enemy and the damage from the explosion, this ability scales with AP at a 1:1 ratio which is why it is such a powerful nuke lategame. Once you've amassed up 350+ ability power and have maxed out the rank of this ability you will be shocked at how much it will decimate enemies. Like many skill shots, this ability actually has a longer range than the casting radius circle shows (especially when you consider the albeit short range of the AoE explosion). For this reason you should always click inside the circle rather than outside when aiming the ability. If you click outside Anivia will fly until she is more than in range and shoot the ability. It is important to note: What many Anivia players I see don't seem to realize is that this ability has two seperate damagers that you have to be careful with in order to deal both. When the ability passes through a unit it deals damage, and the explosion as well deals damage. In order for both of these to hit your enemy you need to have it pass through the enemy and detonate it on the other side (can be only slightly on the other side of the enemy or a little farther so that it's barely touching -- as long as it's still in range for the explosion). Make sure you utilize this. I see way too many anivias detonating their Flash Frosts too early and only getting half the damage.

W: Crystallize - This is Anivia's wall and it is EXTREMELY underrated. Whenever someone else on my team takes Anivia and refuses to get this ability until they are essentially forced to because everything else is maxed, I rage. Hard. Anyone that knows me knows I'm a pro rager. This ability is the unique CC Anivia has that (when used properly) will prevent a death, get you that kill, or completely turn the tide of a team fight. I don't care how good your personal K/D Ratio is, if you're avoiding this skill you're playing Anivia wrong. This is ESPECIALLY essential when laning with a partner instead of soloing mid, although believe me it is still extremely powerful when soloing mid. Once you get to level 18 and have this max ranked you can cut part of their team off during team fights turning a 5v5 into a 5vX. This can single handedly help a disadvantaged team (whether due to lack of CC or being out-itemed, etc) win versus a stronger enemy. It is important to note: this is a very glitchy ability. Often enemies will "wiggle" through the wall which, if you're like me, will make you rage extremely hard and complain in /all chat about the game being bad. There are ways to avoid this, however. The problem usually lies in placing the wall basically on top of an enemy. If you're in a run-away situation in which the enemy is NOT right on top of you, try placing the wall a little farther from them as opposed to right in front of them. They won't be delayed as long due to the pathfinding immediately causing them to run diagonally to the side, but this can help prevent annoying glitch-caused deaths. Also important to note: You can seperate yourself from a melee champion by placing this right between the two of you, but be aware that melee classes have a melee "range" and will be able to smack your frozen arse around through the thick sheet of ice in front of them, so immediately seperate yourself from this wall.

E: Frostbite - This is your main nuke mostly due to its short cooldown. By default I believe it has a 5 second cooldown, although with some cooldown reduction masteries/runes it'll be closer to 4 seconds, and if you get CD capped it will be down to a 3 second CD. This nuke does double damage to chilled targets, and this is evaluated on impact as opposed to when you cast the ability. This synergizes extremely well both with your Flash Frost and with your ultimate. Make sure whenever using this ability that you have chilled your opponent to get the most bang out of your mana buck. Early game this will make your opponents soil themselves, especially if they don't take health quints. Often I will see a Teemo/etc with ~400 hp get dropped to sub-50% hp from a single Flash Frost/Frostbite combo and immediately be forced to either play passive and get no last hits or get owned and die.

Glacial Storm - This ultimate is one of the reasons I love playing Anivia. Unlike many other ultimates, Anivia's has a very short cooldown. This ultimate will immediately chill all units in its AoE (as well as do damage over time). The actual damage from this ability is not all that fantastic. Unless your opponent is very low and your abilities are on CD so you need the little extra damage to finish them off it's usually not worth just leaving on to damage the enemy over time. Instead this ability is fantastic to use as an alternative method of setting up a double damage Frostbite to Flash Frosting. Since Frostbite has a much quicker cooldown than Flash Frost, your general damage rotation will end up being Flash Frost > Frostbite, Glacial Storm > Frostbite, repeat. This ability's short cooldown and large radius makes Anivia one of the best minion farmers in the entire game. With the mana regen from Golem you can basically spam this on every creep wave and get the last-hit money from every one. This can make you ridiculously rich and allow you to assert a huge advantage with your items. Also keep in mind that since this ability slows your opponents it is one of the abilities you should be using when chasing/running away.

Skill Build

You need to max out your frostbite ASAP to be putting out as much damage with your chilled combos as possible. However, you need Flash Frost before this because a stun is much more important than the small amount of damage rank 1 Frostbite does without a chilled target. Many Anivias get a second rank of Flash Frost at level 4 instead of Crystallize. IF YOU DO THAT YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. A second rank of Flash Frost will get you only 1 second off the cooldown and a small increase in damage. Believe me when I say that laying down a wall will be more useful than the tiny amount of extra damage or the tiny reduction in cooldown.

1: Q - Flash Frost
2: E - Frostbite
3: E - Frostbite
4: W - Crystallize
5: E - Frostbite
6: R - Glacial Storm
7: E - Frostbite
8: Q - Flash Frost
9: E - Frostbite
10: W - Crystallize
11: R - Glacial Storm
12: Q - Flash Frost
13: W - Crystallize
14: Q - Flash Frost
15: W - Crystallize
16: R - Glacial Storm
17: Q - Flash Frost
18: W - Crystallize

I like to evenly level Flash Frost and Crystallize once Frostbite is maxed because the extra size of your wall can make a huge difference. The wider the wall, the longer it will delay your enemies assuming you place it properly. Once it's wide enough, it can completely block off paths in jungles. At max rank it can almost completely block off a lane.

Masteries

The common caster 9-0-21 build is currently the best for Anivia. Currently in League Of Legends the Offense tree is much more geared towards physical DPS champions than it is for caster champions, and thus the increased mana regeneration and the cooldown reduction in the Utility tree are your best options.

Here are the actual masteries I take:

Offense
3/3 Archmage's Savvy
1/3 Deadliness
4/4 Sorcery
1/1 Archaic Knowledge

Utility
1/1 Spatial Accuracy
3/3 Perseverence
4/4 Awareness
3/3 Meditation
2/2 Utility Mastery
3/3 Quickness
1/1 Blink of an Eye
3/3 Intelligence
1/1 Presence of the Master

The Mastery "Utility Mastery" is fantastic, as it will increase the duration of the golem buff from 3 minutes to 4 minutes. Golem has a 5 minute respawn timer and thus you will only have 1 minute of waiting between golem respawns that you can easily fill by grabbing the enemy's golem.

Runes

Marks: Greater Mark of Insight
Seals: Greater Seal of Clarity
Glyphs: Greater Glyph of Celerity
Quintessences: Greater Quintessence of Fortitude

There are many other options for glyphs; these are simply what I use. I like the flat HP quints because they give me even more lane dominance early-game. Glyphs could easily be replaced with mp5 glyphs, and seals could easily be replaced with dodge seals. Both options are good. The magic penetration marks, however, are necessary and should not be replaced. Magic Penetration is invaluable because it does not get scaled down by abilities and therefore is one of your biggest ways to increase the damage you deal. Magic Pen is also harder to get from items than AP. These two reasons should be enough to convince you to not take Ability Power marks.

Summoner Abilities

I always use Teleport and Flash. As I've repeated, Anivia is the slowest champion in the game (even though she is a flying bird... great thinking Riot!). Teleport thus helps you keep map control and keep lane presence when you need to recall.

I've seen some Anivias take Ghost over Flash, but I really don't agree with this. Flash works in many more situations (such as the jungle scenario in which you can flash through a wall). Also, if you are about to get egged and are out of range of a tower, it's invaluable to be able to flash in range of the tower so that enemies will have to get hit by the tower to hit your egg. This has saved my life/killed my opponents many times.

Item Build(s)

There are many ways to build Anivia. I like to build for lategame as you will become an unstoppable killing machine if you play it right. Other people like to start with Doran's Ring, but while this gives you a strong early game I find it gives you a weaker mid-game. Others build mana items such as Tear of the Goddess or Chalice of Harmony, but personally I'd prefer to just get golem for mana than to waste gold on it when that gold could be going towards ability power.

Starting Items: Amplifying Tome, Health Potion. If the enemy team is heavy on tanky champions and you don't think you will be able to get a lot of ganks, you can start with a sapphire crystal and build Catalyst first and rush this into your Rod of Ages after your boots.

Depending on whether you get a kill early on and how well you are last hitting, you should get up to around 800+ gold soon after hitting level 6. What I usually like to do is blow all my mana farming with my ult at level 6 and recall as soon as I hit level 7 (and have at least 875 gold) for the extra frostbite damage. At this point you will:

Build your Amplifying Tome into a Mejai's Soulstealer, purchase a health and mana potion. At this point you will go straight to your golem and down that bad boy. I usually just pop my ult on him, frostbite, and cancel the ultimate as soon as possible to conserve mana. I pop my health and mana potions and repeat my ult-frostbite combo until golem is dead. If I waited until level 7 this is no problem and I can usually then go back to my lane with ~50% hp, or if I was greedy and did it at level 6 I usually then have to recall with barely any HP and run back to my lane after healing up at the fountain.

Next, you're going to want Either Sorcerer's Shoes or Mercury Treads. If you're a good player you'll already know which to buy when, but in case you don't know, against any CC heavy team you're going to want Merc Treads. If their team is Alistar, Ryze, Twisted Fate, Poppy, and Taric, I'm obviously going to get Mercury Treads. If, however, their team is Master Yi, Karthus, Singed, Tristana, and Kayle, I'm going to get Sorcerer's Shoes (and laugh for the easy win while I'm at it). Just look at their team at the start of the game or the loading screen and count out how many stuns/slows/fears/etc they have. Make a judgement call: 20 Spell pen will get you a nice little boost of damage, but the 40% reduction in CC will save your life versus a CC-heavy team. Be ready to get Mercury Treads probably about 90% of the time, as most teams aren't stupid enough to take barely any CC when CC+AoE are the two most important things in this game.

After the boots, you're going to need to make another judgement call. Build either Banshee's Veil or Rod of Ages. This is entirely dependant on what kinds of abilities your opponents have. If there's 2 or more of the following on the enemy team, you're probably going to want a Banshee's Veil: Blitzcrank, Karthus, Ashe, Annie, Anivia, Fiddlesticks, Morgana, Ryze, Zilean, Veigar. Note that Twisted Fate is not on this list becuase in the current build of LoL both his gold card and his ultimate use up your Banshee's Veil passive cooldown and go right through (aka they'll still stun/slow/reveal you but you'll lose your Banshee's shield anyways). If the enemy team doesn't have a lot of these kinds of champions with abilities you want to block, you can go ahead and build a Rod of Ages.

After the Banshee's or first Rod, Build a Rod of Ages (another if you already built one). This will help give you a lot of survivability with the HP while also giving you more damage. In matches where I'm not forced to build Banshee's and I get to the point where I have two Rods, I usually never die from then on. You have enough health to give you time to make an easy escape with all your control and walls.

After this Rod, the game is usually either over or essentially over even if one team doesn't want to admit it. At this point, you can build Lich Bane.

After that if for some reason the game is still going on you can build up a Zhonya's Ring to fill up your last slot and drastically increase your AP.

Final end-game item build:
1: Mejai's Soulstealer
2: Mercury's Treads or Sorcerer's Shoes
3: Banshee's Veil or Rod of Ages
4: Rod of Ages
5: Lich Bane
6: Zhonya's Ring

Where to play Anivia

Anivia is one of the best mid solos in the game. I usually claim mid unless we have a Sivir on our team. Your egg will give you the freedom to be extremely aggressive right off the bat which can very often earn you a first blood. The extra money from first blood when playing mid can give you an advantage that's only yours to lose.

There are, however, some champions that you really don't want to play against and should therefore consider avoiding if you find them soloing against you mid:

Fiddlesticks - Everything about this guy will make you mad. The silence will both stop your ult short as well as not let you detonate your already mid-air flash frost. A good fiddlesticks will use this to his advantage and not let you ever stun him. His drain makes him extremely resilient so that even if you do get chilled frostbites off he will simply heal it all back immediately while your abilities are on cooldown.

Kassadin - Not as bad as fiddlesticks and definitely can be manageable, but the silence can be devastating (see above with Fiddles)

Sivir - Sivir is really not that bad, but she's not ideal either. A good sivir can own you pretty hard with boomerangs since Anivia is the slowest champion in the game, and her spell shield can get really, REALLY annoying. Other than that she's not so bad.

Cho'Gath - I haven't had to solo vs Cho many times, and it all depends on his build. If the Cho builds straight for his silence, this can own the hell out of you as at max rank it silences for FOUR SECONDS (which isn't mitigated by merc treads for some reason I can't comprehend). Since again you are the slowest champion in the entire game, you will have more trouble than usual dodging his ruptures, and he regens health/mana on every unit he last-hits. Most Chos are easily manageable, but good ones that build to counter you by going straight for their silence will hurt if you let them get in range by getting hit by a rupture.

Morgana - Similar to your chilled frostbite combo, her snare+pool combo can immediately snap off half your HP at early levels. This wouldn't be a big deal except that her spell shield basically counters everything you do. You can't stun her, you can't chill her, and you can't do any damage to her. Bad Morganas are a joke, but good ones will laugh while they out-control you all game.