[Champion] Nasus

v1.0.0.123 August 2011 Patch
# Attack range increased to 125 from 110
# Soul Eater lifesteal increased at earlier levels to 14/17/20% from 10/15/20%
# Wither

* Cooldown reduced to 15/14/13/12/11 seconds from 15 seconds at all ranks
* Mana cost reduced to 80 from 100
* Wither will now reach its max slow even if its duration is reduced (ie: by tenacity)

# Spirit Fire

* No longer has a 0.5 second delay before taking effect
* Now deals half of its damage initially and the other half over the duration -- initial 55/95/135/175/215 (+0.6 ability power) Magic Damage and 11/19/27/35/43 (+0.12 ability power) Magic Damage each second for the next 5 seconds

Read about them in the wiki, this just gives some explanation on how you use them.


Passive: Soul Eater; 14/17/20% Lifesteal.
Makes his laning phase really solid. You leech off your Q as well, so you get some serious lifesteal when you start to stack Q. Synergy with high resists so favour those. (especially in lane combined with hp pots)


Q: Siphoning Strike:
Your bread and butter spell. Focus on stacking this up as much as possible. CDR becomes your best friend for both stacking it and spamming it later.


W: Wither:
Your main utility. Use it wisely. Aside from obvious situations like escaping ganks or chasing, you sometimes have to choose between using it on someone who is diving or using it to mitigate an AD carries damage.


E: Spirit fire.
Pretty high mana cost so avoid spamming this spell. The armour reduction is great for your Q's, and helps a lot if you have other physical dealers attacking the same target.


R: Fury of the Sands.
Gives a plethora of benefits. AoE %hp magic damage, range increase, health boost, stacking AD boost.
Health boost: Combined with your lifesteal, means resistances become far and away the best stat to stack.
Stacking AD boost: Means if you use this at the right time you are hitting like a truck with no items towards the end of 15 seconds. However its a trap to use it too early when a fight isnt guaranteed.

Boots:

or

get mercs against heavy cc, ninja tabi against heavy AD, when in doubt get whichever is best for laning phase.


Viable if you want to go for some kind of build where you don't get CDR but there are too many good CDR items for these to be worth it.

Damage: .

This is pretty good especally if you're unlikely to be focused but usually getting tankier is better

This is your best super lategame damage item because it means your q still hurts vs armour stackers.

Although I didn't like this originally, it turns out W is too valuable to a cooldown to use it on any target you want to focus and considering this covers both a slow and a sheen, and ghost covers movement speed, it kind of renders trinity obsolete these days. (Trinity still hurts more with autos because of the attack speed + crit that scales hard if your R has stacked up a lot of AD, usually not worth it.)

Tank Items:


Good tank item but doesn't give CDR and is a split resistance item so not great for lane either.

Against something like xerath with tons of spell pen for example or heavy poke teams this is worth it but I'd usually avoid it.

I usually get this after I maxed out my CDR or If im behind and need high EHP.

The mana helps in lane to deal with high mana costs and the constant mana drain of your Q. In an AD lane armour is your best friend because it scales with your lifesteal and health potions. The CDR helps stack your Q. Pretty perfect first item to get vs AD lanes.

If you're retarded tanky and want more damage to duel ADs with lifesteal this might be worth it but most likely thornmail is better.

The healing boost works on your lifesteal so its not a waste and its the easiest way to get mr while maxing your CDR.

Because it helps against lifesteal and it makes ADs cry when they realize you nearly have 300 armour even after they buy LW
Would normally only buy versus either heavy auto attackers who aren't getting LW (maybe aatrox and such) or against very heavy AD teams when its worth it to get combos such as IBG+Randuins+FH+Sunfire+Thornmail so even with LWs armour is still good and thornmail damage gets really high because based on their damage BEFORE it gets reduced and they are unlikely to have much MR

V3.6

Wither: Attack speed slow amount has been halved.

V3.02:

Siphoning Strike:
Fixed a bug where Siphoning Strike critical strikes were dealing more damage than intended.
Mana cost reduced to 20 at all ranks from 20/25/30/35/40.
Fury of the Sands:
Now increases attack range by 50 and cast range by 100 while active.
Mana cost reduced to 100 from 150.

V3.01:

Siphoning Strike:
Permanent damage bonus is now doubled to 6 when killing a champion, large minion or large monster

V1.0.0.123:

Range increased to 125 from 110.
Soul Eater: life steal increased at earlier levels to 14 / 17 / 20% from 10 / 15 / 20%.
Wither:
Cooldown reduced to 15/14/13/12/11 from 15 at all ranks.
Mana cost reduced to 80 from 100.
It will now reach its maximum slow even if its duration is reduced by crowd control reduction effects like Tenacity.
Spirit Fire:
No longer has a 0.5 second delay before appearing. It retains the 0.5 second casting time.
Now deals half damage initially and the other half over the duration instead of it just dealing damage per second:
New: Initial 55/95/135/175/215 (+0.6 per ability power) magic damage and 11/19/27/35/43 (+0.12 per ability power) magic damage each second for the next 5 seconds.
Old: Deals 20/34/48/62/76 (+0.2 per ability power) magic damage each second for the 6 seconds the area lasts.
Fixed a bug where Siphoning Strike sometimes gained extra lifesteal.

9th November, 2013. Fixed a lot of the images and such but I won't mess around too much until season 4 comes around.
1st July, 2013: Rehashed whole guide should be up to date.

Nasus, The Curator of the Sands.
http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Nasus_the_Curator_of_the_Sands

+ Show Spoiler [Patch Notes] +

Introduction

Nasus is a 'Tanky DPS' (AKA Bruiser) champion who specializes as an anti tank/bruiser because he has insane damage without having to build damage (bruisers generally can't get away with building a lot of crit or armour pen, the main counters to armour) and a huge movement/attack speed slow along with % based hp damage. (nice counter to warmogs atmas bruisers). He is well known as a very passive laner as in order to be strong in mid and lategame he has to spend the early game constantly using his Q to kill creeps meaning he can't use it to trade in lane without losing mid/lategame strength. He is the highest damage champion without any damage items in the game.

Things that Nasus is good at countering:
-Heavy Bruiser or melee comps, especially without an AD Carry, or one that is constantly under pressure from a champion like Annie or Akali.
-Laners that want to sit top all game and farm. Nasus benefits more from farm and becomes impossible to push out of the lane once he gets high level and some CDR. Low cooldown Q that can 1 shot creeps with high passive lifesteal makes him almost like lanewick. A lot of champions that try to farm for 20 minutes suddenly get pushed out of lane when Nasus has +400 damage on Q from farm and sheen.
-Assassins. Champions that are burst based and can't kill tanks very well. They get killed in a few Q's by Nasus and the slow hurts them.

Nasus can basically 1v5 a team with champions like master yi, pantheon, shen ,akali,katarina, renekton, providing they are not already fed.

Things that counter Nasus:
-Laners that shut him down and stop him farming, or at least make him use his Q to trade to stop himself getting zoned.
-Kiting or CC based teams with a strong AD carry. Brand and TF are great against him. Nunu and amumu are good also as tanks against him. AD carries like tristana or vayne can stop him from getting close and melt him with good farm. However, Nasus does have his whither and can build tankier than other bruisers but he has no instant gap closer, hard cc or large burst damage compared to say, a nocturne with ghostblade or irelia with trinity that can lock him down and force him to use his skills to get away from you before doing any damage, or risk getting focused by the whole team.



+ Show Spoiler [Skills] +

Skill order:
QWQE
Q>W>E>R.
You have the option of going E>W when you think you will be in situations with static 1v1. Jarvan with or against your team might be a good reason to max it since you will get the damage and armour reduction for the full duration when he casts his ultimate. Also; if they have someone who is going to dive your carry placing spirit fire on them helps the both of you DPS him.

Summoner Skills:
+



is great, but I don't like it anymore, flash is too good.
Teleport can be replaced with exhaust or ignite, teleport is just generally great for Nasus as you want to maximize your potential to farm while not being out of position for teamfights.

Masteries:
http://thefwcentral.com/lol/#&trees=0-3-0-1-0-4-0-0-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1-3-0-4-3-0-1-0-0-0-3-3-2-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
With the new mastery tree, I have a hard time justifying anything but 21 defense. He has the qualities of other tanks, wanting CDR, CC reduction and movement speed. You can switch around the masteries a bit depending on the lane opponent. For example obviously you get 3/3 magic resist against a magic damage lane. The health regen is optional and you can get indomitable, or max honour guard, or that evasion thing against AoE comps, etc. The 9 offense again is optional the magic pen is good for 1 point and the 4% cdr is very good on Nasus, but you can get the movement speed or mana regen in utility or just more in defense if you want.



Runes:
Quints: These are especially flexible. Good options include ArP, Armour, Health, Magic resist, Cooldown Reduction and Movement speed, flat or per level. My standard is getting armour against physical laners and magic resist against magical laners, since the laning phase is the most important for Nasus.
Marks: ArP. Very little other choice here.
Seals: Flat armour. Dodge is sometimes good but it's going to be removed anyway.
Glyphs: Flat magic resist, or magic resist per level. If they don't have threatening magic damage get CDR/Level if you decide your build needs it. The thing is normally if they don't have a lot of magic damage frozen heart is really good and that gives so much CDR that it's maxed with that, shurelyas, and masteries easily.

Situational: If you are versus a HARD AD LANE you should have
-Armour quints OR hp regen quints. (Use your own judgement)
-Get ninja tabi
-Get either cloth+5 or health regen+1 into philo.
-Get fast Glacial shroud for the CDR and armour and mana. (All very useful for Nasus in lane, without flat mana you generally can't afford to use W E and R in an engage without being totally oom for using Q for farming or killing them, or you won't have enough mana to ulti if you were farming for a long time.

Situational: If you are versus a HARD AP LANE you should have
-MR blues flat
-HP Regen quints flat or MR flat quints
-Start boots against a skillshot reliant ap, or health regen against others. Health regen is generally better than MR because they don't want to kill you with burst but harass over a long time which is where health regen shines.
Fast spirit visage is good here for your CDR core. SV+Shurelyas pretty much maxes your CDR at level 18 with masteries.
-Don't worry about getting zoned and farming at tower, they probably won't be able to get all the CS if they harass hadr.
Build:

Starting items:
+ Standard.

You can also open:
+ 5x

+3x

+2x


Cloth+5 is the only one you will probably feel like is better, and only for against early game sustainability against heavy physical harassers. It delays your philo stone though so do it only if you think you will be in trouble before your first back.


Item building strategy: Essentially you want be as hard to kill as possible while having a decent amount of damage. The way I go about it is to get the most efficient stats for damage while building mostly tank. CDR is the best stat for damage because it works on your Q and also gives great damage reduction from higher uptime on wither. Armour and magic resist are the best stats for staying alive since you get passive lifesteal and increased health from your ultimate, although sometimes its a more practical to get some health items since most of the armour and magic resist items scale off into regen or max mana past the chain mail and negatron components.

In essence:
-Get 40% CDR or very close.
-Build tank items
-Get trinity force when you aren't in danger of dying fast.
-If they are all really tanky you can get a LW on top of trinity, 3 end game tank items still makes you very very tanky.
+ Show Spoiler [Item Building] +

Sample build path I would typically take on Nasus games.
Health regen+1 pot-->Philo stone-->Boots 1 -->Glacial shroud-->Mercs-->Kindlegem-->Frozen Heart-->Shurelyas-->Sheen/Phage-->Negatron-->Trinity--->GA/FoN

Skyyart popularized this style of build, shurelyas/frozen heart core into trinity into fon.
-Get HoG If you intend on getting randuins later. If you need health usually kindlegem amounts to a higher gold value because of extra Q farm.

If you don't intend on getting frozen heart. (You can get randuins, shurelyas, maybe a spirit visage or just don't get totally maxed CDR) you might want to get a sheen for lane because not having any mana items kinda sucks on nasus.
Against bruisers in lane you can get phage, sheen, or zeal, or even the whole trinity fast, because all 3 items are good for bullying other bruisers; sheen for huge harass with Q, zeal for chasing and auto attacking them with ulti up draining AD, phage for chasing them when your wither is down and the hp helps you 1v1/survive ganks.
This kind of build path would be:
Health regen+1 pot-->Philo-->Sheen-->Phage-->Trinity-->Guardian Angel-->Shurelyas-->FoN
Trinity rush is strong but your team needs high damage to make sure you can't get focused and also watch your postioning. I've played as and against Nasus' who just slow someone and run in first instead of waiting for the team to get in range and we just instantly kill him and clean up. If you slow someone your team can damage them for free if they don't comitt to fighting. Your damage as a bruiser is much less than the carries so you DO NOT need to run into 5 people and basically trade the slowed guy for yourself if you're lucky.

Play style:
Solo top. Almost no exceptions.
Mid lane is the reserve case if top lane is unfarmable. (aka unwinnable if you are playing nasus, examples include Garen and Renekton 1-5, however with armour stack runes and cloth+5 start you can still farm.)
Duo bottom lane is bad because you get harassed so much that its very hard to farm like you can in a solo lane. Even vs a ranged AD top cloth+5 pots and the ability to W him and go kill him without a support to save him means you can kind of farm decently and if he attacks you too much he pushes his lane and makes your jungler able to gakn.

"Winning a lane" as Nasus basically means you were able to farm without having to worry about the other dude so much. Once I found myself constantly Qing a Chogath to counter his own harass until a realized he can sustain it while we I am losing Q farm which is bad. Qing the enemy is actually a way to make it more risky for him to attack you instead of it being an attempt to push him off lane.

Level 1: You should have Q. You are strong level 1 because of 10% lifesteal and hit+Q combo. If you expect him to harass you early levels your level 1 auto hit+Q does a lot of damage and you should try to get it off if he is taking you lightly and just running past you to hit creeps.
Levels 2-5: You should stop harassing him after level 1 and 2, the top laner probably has his sustain spell now so it's useless anyway, but he should stop overextending and trying to boss you out of lane once you show him you are equal to his harass. If he tries to commit to a fight with burst you can follow it up with a wither, possibly an E and since he can't fight you with wither up even if he bursts you to 75% you can easily do that again to him while the 5 seconds of wither is up. If he just harasses you and doesn't commit to a fight just rely on your regen and lifesteal to keep you alive. If you can't respond to him attacking you just let him push the lane and farm at tower
Levels 6-9: You should have you philo, boots, more pots and a ward, so you are pretty safe. Use the health boost on R to survive ganks, the damage boost on R to help gank. (Wither is great for helping ganks, just try to chain it and not stack it on top of something like nunu snowball), and both of them to win any 1v1 fights they try to commit to.
Levels 9+: You should have philo+hog+cdr boots and just Qing every single creep and they shouldn't be able to harass you with your insane lifesteal off each Q. You can easily push their tower either 1 Q at a time or just spam Q on it if he leaves the lane. If you have been farming your Q well you can knock any melee out of lane here, even warwick possibly not udyr though.
Look out for any opportunities to teleport to turn the tides of a fight.
Guideline for Q farm:
At 20-25 minutes which is around when you have to start actually teamfighting you should have:
+200 if your laning has been difficult.
+300 if your laning has been manageable
+400 if your laning has basically let you free farm.
You ideally want +300 before you start fighting teamfights, its perfectly acceptable to try to split push or generally afk farm for a bit longer when you have your CDR items and want to catch up on farm. Farm two fold increases your effectiveness since it increases both your damage (q damage) and tankyness (items).

The worse your Q farm is the faster you should get sheen/trinity, since the % increase is higher.

Ideally you don't want to have to fight your lane opponent but if he does, the later the better. Lanewicks who think they are strong try to fight me and just get owned when my Q gets over 200 and I have sheen and ultimate, even if they are ahead on kills you are deceptively powerful. Once you notice you have an insane farm on your Q you can start to just Q harass people out of lane.
Lane match ups:

There are 2 types of lanes you worry about
HARD AD Lanes. (Lanes which will own you with high physical damage normally)
Use the rune/mastery/build set up and just ignore the guy and farm. Garen and Renek are cooldown based so try not to let them spam you every CD but don't bother trying to fight they HAVE to push their lane if they want to damage you. (Spin, Renek's Q/E). People like Irelia can't win a fight with high armour and wither on your side.
HARD AP Lanes (Lanes which own you with high magic damage normally)
Just avoid unnecessary damage and heal so much they run oom. Rumble is an exception but he HAS to push with Q to damage you. You can also fight him if he wastes his spells but no reason to risk it.
Not hard lanes: (Any tank, lane wick or something/0
FARMFARMFARMFARMFARM. You can rune/mastery as you please.

I forgot a couple actually:
Akali - Don't let her hit her Q's on your every time the mark is on, you might get zoned a bit but do your best
-Mordekaizer - run mass MR and just farm farm farm under tower and get your jungler to gank him.

Teamfights:

You initiate by Withering somebody but don't just go and dive in ahead of your team because you will take a lot of free damage. Even if its a tanky guy you slowed your carries can still poke them down and force a flash if they don't want to fight

If they initiate on your team you have to be aware of a few things:
-If they have someone like nocturne who just ulted onto your AD carry you want to just go for him ASAP, slowing him if his shield isn't on. You can use your next slow onto their AD if he's doing too much damage.
-If they have somebody like amumu who's job is to just CC your team, just try to avoid incidental AoE damage and if they try to run past your to go for the squishies you can go for theirs since amumu or amumu+their solo top will have to turn on you because they are relying on carries to do damage.

Also: The tankier your are the more you should go for carries because the point of being tanky is that you want to survive focus fire so you can easily let your carries do damage and kill everyone if they focus you but if they don't you still 4 shot their carries with a farmed Q. Even if you have a theoreticaly situation where both bruisers dive both carries you end up winning because Nasus rapes every bruiser in 1v1 if their carries die.
If you build more like a bruiser say trinity force and most of a GA then you have to stay back a bit until your whole team is in the fight so that you can't get focused fired before you go onto their squishies. If their bruisers overextend make sure to focus them fast though. (Overextend means attacking people that their carries are more than 2-3 seconds out of range to attack themselves. in general).

People say Nasus is weak to kiting but you just need to use your slow smartly and let your carries get in range instead of mindless diving in every time. Technically Nasus gets kited less than someone like Irelia because you slow for your team instead of having to commit with a hard gap closer. (Although irelia still has a solid slow and has the passive to get away if needed, so she's still a fantastic tank)
In teamfights its extremely hard to individually kite Nasus because his W is almost up constantly since the buff to him and assuming you are close to CDR capped. Obviously this is assuming the target doesn't have merc treads.

+ Show Spoiler [Old Patch Notes] +

+ Show Spoiler [Changelog] +