Overview
One of the few champions in League of Legends that has infinite scaling, Nasus is a champion that is extremely happy to sit in his lane forever without a care in the world for what is going on elsewhere on the map. If left to his own devices, he’ll scale into a late game powerhouse that has very few checks, as he can simply walk up to opponents and hit them with his stick for a huge chunk of damage. Click here for the latest data on his best builds, including Runes, Items, Summoner Spells, and more.
Keys to Remember About Nasus
He scales infinitely, so you need to play safe early and do your best to mitigate early losses. Sometimes this means giving up some CS, and sometimes it means patiently waiting for some help from your team. Part of playing Nasus means you have to accept that early game will be rough a lot of times, so make do with what you can.
In late game, you may feel the desire to fish for a 1v5 fight once you are strong, but realistically teams can kite backwards and focus you down. You will draw the most pressure by sitting in a side lane and threatening to take their entire base if they so much as look away from you.
Strengths
His damage and scaling is centered largely around his Siphoning Strike [Q], which means you need to focus on farming with it early in order to gain stacks. With built in omnivamp, a devastating slow, and an ultimate that grants him a lot of stats, he’s the ultimate stat-check champion in that he’s very straightforward to play (and to play against). If he’s stronger than you, then you will die and there’s not very much you can do about it aside from running away (if you can). He’s a very simple champion to play -- you farm early and focus pretty much only on farming, and then you keep farming and keep split pushing.
Weaknesses
He’s very weak early, and because he’s limited in mobility, he’ll struggle against champions that can engage on him and provide a way for their jungler to get into the fight. In general, he’ll struggle against most matchups top lane, which means he’ll have low priority for responding to skirmishes near the top side of the map, and come time to group for the first couple of neutral objectives, he won’t be able to contribute much to the fights for his team. He’s a champion that can watch the game snowball out of his control before he becomes relevant.
Game Plan
Early Game: Farm -- he wants the lane to be pushed into him so he can safely secure as much CS as possible.
Mid Game: He’ll still need to farm at this point in the game, but with enough stacks, he can start to turn fights against champions that were bullying him at earlier phases in the game. He’ll want to focus on split pushing rather than grouping up with his team.
Late Game: At this point, he should be able to draw multiple people to his lane to deal with him, and he should do his best to survive the pressure to let his team secure advantages elsewhere. If enemies vacate the lane against him, he can quickly take down the enemy base.
