At IEM NY a french team's top laner played Nasus every game he could, and they ended up in third place with some truly awesome showings of their Nasus (player was Skyyart, iirc) just being insanely dominant.


Nasus's passive gives him insane sustainability, and going philo stone->glacial->sheen gives him early game hardiness, the mana to use your q on cd, the cdr to use his q more, and the sheen damage bonus because, you know, hitting q is casting a spell >.>


I'm also a big fan of nasus, but to be a truly good nasus you need to be able to last hit with your q for basically the first 15-20 minutes of the game up in top, and then afterwards whenever you are not directly in combat you need to keep that Q rolling.

 

A friend of mine once solo topped as Nasus against another Nasus. 15 minutes of straight farming. Not even harassing, because they were both so intent on getting farm. when my friend accidentally hit the opposing Nasus, he actually felt guilty for ruining the awesome farming session the two had going.

Anyway, Nasus is hilarious.

 

A mate did something similar with Veigar. Farmed mid for a fair while, then they one shotted each other their first fight.

 

Why Nasus is bad:
-He is slow and ungainly with no hard CCs.
-He requires a solo lane to be truly effective.
-While he requires this solo lane, he is not that great at escaping ganks, making him an easy target.
-His solo lane is strong, but he can definitely be pushed out by stronger laners.
-By choosing nasus, you are leaving your team open to some huge weaknesses, namely that early game team fights will most likely not go in your favor and also force you to lose out on farm to participate or abandon your team to death while you continue to farm.
Why Nasus is Good:
-With uninterrupted farm, Nasus can solo teams. With proper management of Q, he gains more benefit from farm than anyone else except perhaps Irelia.
-Because of the nature of his Q, Nasus can build straight tank and be a force to be reckoned with. For this reason, he is one of the strongest bruisers.
-Wither, while not a hard CC, has great range and is the most effective slow in the game while also being the #1 way to shut down an enemy AD carry outside of exhaust, but has 1/10th the cd and twice the duration.

Nasus is a great character who was actually left untouched since the release of open beta until (iirc) 3 patches ago. He was the perfectly balanced champion, and his changes a few patches ago were mostly quality-of-life things. There are two ways to build Nasus: Triforce and CDR.

Triforce is great, but leaves you relatively weak if focused. This build has great burst and gives some movement speed as well while being rounded in a lot of areas. Triforce costs 4k however, so your items following it need to be armor/mr.

CDR is great, and makes you rather tanky while focused. Your damage with a CDR build will not be equal a triforce build until you have ~70 extra creep kills using Q. The damage of this build is a lot weaker early game, but getting to use your ult, wither, and Q 40% more makes you a larger utility to your team while still dealing out massive damage.

Either way, a good start on Nasus is philo stone-->hog. Your character is about farm, and those items give you gp5 to compliment your farming while providing some sustainability in lane and extra HP to survive burst in ganks. Despite his strong passive, lots of characters shit all over Nasus when played properly, including Singed, Akali, Irelia, Udyr, Garen, ~Talon, and a few AP carries which you rarely see top. You can counter these characters by building armor/mr respectively or rushing sheen-->triforce and trying to outdamage them. I don't recommend the second option. Good items to consider for armor/mr are glacial shroud and spirit visage. I recently had a game where I grabbed both and eventually upgraded my philo to a shurelyas. With the max cdr, I could last hit every creep using Q. By 40 minutes, my Q had +550 damage from stacking.

To truly solo top effectively, you should get some HP/5 quintessences and start with a regen pendant so that you can regen health like Garen. HP/5 quints are a great investment for nearly any solo top bruiser.

 

Something to consider: When watching tournament play/high level scrims, the top laner almost NEVER leaves his lane unless something ridiculous happens until partway through midgame. The jungle may decide to camp up there and help gank the other toplaner, but the top laner himself almost never leaves.


This isn't unique to Nasus. Unless you're top laning Nocturne or someone else that has a lot of mobility, you just don't leave top lane.

Else you leave it open for your opponent top laner to pull a hotshotgg/Wickd and just outfarm your entire team.



Personally, I prefer philo stone->boots->glacial->sheen, then either finish the triforce or getting some situation specific tanky item next.

 

A lot of top laners take teleport, HSGG/Wickd included, so that they can TP into dragon fights if necessary. If nasus does this, he isn't that much help compared to say Irelia/Galio/Singed. If nasus doesn't do this, the other top laner is free to dominate his team. HSGG/Wickd are good because they can accurately judge when they will make a difference and when they should just stay and nunubot it.

Either way, outside of 1700+ elo, if you stay top lane all day your team will win/lose the game before you ever leave. Most likely lose if the enemy doesn't stay with you. As Nasus especially, you aren't going to do significant pushing without getting caught, because you can't run away like singed.

 

I'd suggest you not jungle till you have runesets for it. Just lane for now unless you're jungling with warwick(jungle's doable with bad runes for him). The t1 runes are kinda useful, t2 runes are a tarp.

Nasus is awesome. First off, dat voice actor is awesome. For item builds...
Philostone -> HoG works well if they're letting you get your farm on. However, if they're doing a lot of work as a team and you're actually needed for earlier teamfights, Philostone -> Sheen -> Aegis -> triforce can work too.

Don't forget your Q resets your autoattack, so you do a normal attack, then quickly Q for a second hit faster. I can't tell you how many times, I see bad nasus's not use the E for team fights. Please remember that though the damage on it is pretty crap and it eats up manas... It also reduces enemy armor significantly which make your Q's hurt even more.

 

True. I will disagree that Nasus isn't as useful as Galio at low levels, because Nasus ult is just as amazing in a team fight as Galio's at that level, just in a different way. Either way I agree that Nasus IS the most farm dependant top laner, especially as he needs to be last hitting with Q and can't just aoe shit down the way galio or singed can, making him slower at it. But the reward from having a 250+ Q cs Nasus at late game is pretty awesome >.>

 

Nasus' q is like crack. Hitting a squishie for 800 and knowing you can do it again in 2.5 seconds is the best feeling in the world.

But yeah Nasus is really dependent on your team absolutely not needing you to leave lane for about the first 20 minutes. Though Its not like Nasus is useless in an mid game (8-15) game fight. His w is 5 seconds of ad carry shut down, his e is a nice little bit of AoE damage and q still hurts with minimum farm ( the 1.0 ad ratio is nice)

Also, his ult is just sexy.

 

I started playing about a week ago, and just hit 14. It seems fun, but its taken a while to get used to some of the features after playing DotA for so many years. Remembering to use the summoner spells took a while.

I've taken to playing Twisted Fate. Anyone else use him very often?

 

I used to play it a lot back when I was on Lol everyday. If you learn to play it well you should be able to dish out a crapton of kills against other beginners. Stopped playing with him after my enemies started to get better and kill me left and right.

Edit: Played a bit of the new mode a couple weeks ago and I loved it. I was getting tired of the usual game mode Lol/Hon/Dota had.

 

Since the nerf to his ult I don't play TF often anymore. He is a mid-tier character that can work well as an AD carry or AP ganker/assassin.
Once again, I do have quite a bit of experience with him so feel free to ask if you have any questions.

 

ZEAL92, you can add me and play with me. I play Kassadin, Twitch, Teemo, and Skarn (though I have to buy him yet) mainly.

 

Not really - tournament level play is a completely different story. Teamfights just can't happen anywhere outside of a dragon contest, baron contest or sometime tower pushing because those players have extraordinary communication and map awareness; they don't do teamfights just for the sake of teamfights because it's a waste of time and risks without rewards... and come to think of, I'm surprised at how little people understand that.

It's actually cringe-worthy when you get push a lane and are at inhibitor towers and get yelled "you are never there in teamfights" because they fought over... nothing, not the drake and not the baron.

Great post from Churchey about Nasus, by the way. Thumbs up from me.

 

And trying to explain the concept of split pushing gets you yelled at, too >.>

 

I agree Jon, I hate when that happens.

Everyone knows Morde es #1. Always shield never die hueheuehue

 

I would, but I hate ranked with a passion. I will not do duo or solo queue but if you get together a 3s/5s team sure I'm in.

I just played a 1:14 minute game as Nasus. My Q damage was at +760 something and I had max CDR. It would've ended earlier but our vayne was some sort of stupid, our shaco was full AP and therefore useless after 55 minutes, our Nidalee was full AP and did nothing but see how high her spear damage could get (she one-shot anivia 100% to egg with on spear hit), and our blitzcrank DCd.

 

Anyone new to League, two tips:

1) ANYONE without crowd control skills or exhaust will be useless.
2) Nidalee is and always will be shit.