Is there any easy way to determine Annie's combo can kill an enemy champion or not?

Question

When I play Annie, I always try to kill an enemy champion in a second by R-W-Q combo, but sometimes the enemy survive my combo with little HP...

So, is there any easy way to determine my combo can kill an enemy or not?

Answer 1

I made a spreadsheet that calculates Annie's burst damage. You can download the spreadsheet as an Excel file or copy to another Google spreadsheet if you have Google Drive. You will have to use Paste Special when pasting across spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is pretty self explanatory and easy to update while playing as you go back to buy items. All of the values to plug in are in the two sections Enemy Stats and Your Stats at the top of the spreadsheet. You can plug in your opponent's Max HP, MR, as well as your AP and your Magic Resist reduction stats. The burst damage is highlighted in a box, and there is a further breakdown of the damage below.

For example, with the end-game build that Domenik provided, against an opponent with 120 MR and 3000 HP you deal 2987.63 burst damage after resistances - their entire life total. Wow that hurts.

Some assumptions:

• Masteries are not taken into account, so if your opponent has bonus damage reduction or you have bonus damage, you will have to judge things by the situation. In all cases overestimate how tough your opponent is if you're looking for a clean kill.

• This assumes you level R > Q > W > E, which is very practical for most Annie games albeit not the most damage (W outscales Q, but Q is necessary for farming). It's possible for you to update the spreadsheet and adjust the skill order if you want to. Note I don't consider E at all, because your target should be stunned during your combo and will not be attacking you.

• This assumes you execute a perfect 4 second DFG-R-Q-W-Q combo. Because Q is on a 4 second cooldown, with a little cooldown reduction you can cast it twice before the damage boost from DFG wears off. Even if your opponent flashes you should be in range for a second Q given some good positioning.

• This also assumes that you can get 3 ticks of Tibber's passive damage, which is very reasonable. You might lose some damage here if your target flashes away from Tibbers. This also assumes that Tibbers does not auto attack your opponent, since in practice it is difficult to both combo and direct Tibbers unless you are in a 1v1 situation. You can safely estimate auto-attack damage at 100-200 damage for the burst duration at any point in the game. Since natural armor gain roughly scales with Tibber's auto damage and Tibbers attacks pretty slow you can't expect much more from auto attack damage. I'll add Tibbers' auto damage to the spreadsheet if people request it.

Answer 2

Other than adding the total damage then checking your opponents HP and Magic resist yourself, no there isn't. This post ended up being overly detailed but if you just want the equation and no explanation, it's bolded near the end.

Let's take a level 18 full build Annie that I just came up with. Your total damage would come to 2819.7 or 3383.64 + 15% of the target's max HP with Deathfire Grasp (DFG). You could even go so far as to add in the 2% damage mastery and 5% damage for execution and the total damage would end up being around 3500. With the 15% HP damage this would kill anyone below nearly 4150 HP, the only thing is, that's assuming 0 magic resistance (With this build though the target can have up to 25 magic resist and you could get it down to 0).

Now let's calculate the damage against an actual enemy with a set amount of HP and magic resist. For this I choose Zilean who has pretty low HP and MR at level 18, and Nunu who has the most HP and MR at level 18. Zilean's 30 MR would be reduced to 4 with your MPen, Which basically means your doing nearly full damage and he's toast. That would be 3603 damage to his 1653 HP, killing him twice over in a matter of how fast you can hit 4 buttons. Now for Nunu. His 52.5 MR would be reduced to 24.75. Quite a bit more than Zilean had but let's see if you still manage to kill him. 24.75 MR reduces your damage to 3106 which still manages to kill him by over 700.

In the end with a full build, Annie would be able to nuke anyone in the game, so long as they don't buy too much additional HP or MR.

Unfortunately the real calculation has to take a bit into consideration than I'm showing here but let's simplify it a bit.. To do a basic calculation in game, simply add up your damage listed in the tooltips of all your spells, then look at your opponents MR and see how much damage reduction they have. It would look like this:

(Total Spell Damage) * ((100 - Enemy Magic Damage Reduction) / 100) or with DFG it would be ((Opponent's HP * 0.15) + (Total Spell Damage * 1.2)) * ((100 - Enemy Magic damage reduction) / 100). Notice that the damage of DFG is also reduced by their Magic Resist because DFG deals magic damage. If that resulting number comes out to be higher than your opponents HP then you can kill them with your combo.

Just for proof this equation is correct let's go back to the Zilean example, it would look like this. (2819.7) * ((100-4)/100) = 2706.91 damage OR with DFG, ((1653 * .15) + (2819.7 *1.2)) * ((100 - 4) / 100) = ((247.95) + (3383.64)) * (96 / 100) = 3486 damage. (Remember this is without the 2% bonus and 5% execution bonus damage which is why it is lower here)

This Equation will work for anyone, not just Annie, remember that.

Answer 3

You have to calculate the amount of "burst" damage you can potentially do yourself for each character. Then if you look at the health bar, each section of it represents hundred life. Later in the game with heroes of 2000+ life this gets hard to read but you should be good early to mid.

Damage multiplier = 100 / (100 + MR) if MR ≥ 0
Damage multiplier = 2 − 100 / (100 − MR) if MR ≤ 0