Glacial Shroud is your primary armor purchase in lane. Also providing you with mana and CDR, it is the perfectly early purchase for Nasus. However, when fighting a magical damage laner, you will want to get Spectre's Cowl and Kindlegem instead. Warden's Mail and Glacial Shroud both build into Frozen Heart and will let you ignore most physical damage.


Frozen Heart will be your heavy defensive item against AD's. The CDR, Mana and armor go a long way towards your goal of farming as much as possible, and it helps to passively gimp AD champions trying to fight you. Spirit Visage gives you very healthy servings of CDR and increases all healing effects on you. In other words, it makes your lifesteal even more epic. It's basically the perfect defensive item on Nasus. Spirit Visage can be rushed instead of Frozen Heart against a magical damage laner, or against a mainly AP team. Mercury's Treads can be built as needed during mid game.


Trinity Force is your main damage item and it is built because every part of the item synergizes with Nasus's kit. Particularly, the movement speed boost from the Phage and the Sheen effect are the main selling points. This helps you to stick to targets and hit them even harder with Siphoning Strike. Randuin's Omen is a complementary armor item that has an amazing active and passive to abuse. The active can be used to protect allies, or slow people between your Wither cooldown. Finally, Banshee's Veil is largely a filler health item with a free spell shield to abuse. It's great for blocking Nidalee spears and annoying CC engages like Glacial Prison.


As an alternative to both Frozen Heart and Trinity Force, Iceborn Gauntlet is a cost effective mid game item that is both offensively and defensively good. It also provides a slowing field on your Q's to help you stick to people. I often get this item if I feel like I will not be able to finish my Trinity Force in a timely manner. Thornmail is an amazing purchase against teams with multiple auto attacker threats like Tryndamere or Yasuo along with Marksman champions. You'll make them kill themselves by attacking you. Talisman of ascension is a very niche purchase. Think back to the golden days of Philosopher Stone. Shurelya's Reverie used to be core for Nasus. I still like the items active on him, and I like to buy it if my team is all doing well and my support doesn't have one already. Use it to rally your team to engage or retreat.


Locket of the Iron Solari is another supporty pick for Nasus, and is very useful against heavy AP compositions with it's MR aura and active shield. Warmog's Armor gives to a big chunk of health and health regeneration. This health regeneration combines nicely with Spirit Visage and your various other healing sources to make you even more sustained in a fight, and even more of a pain to try and kill. Guardian Angel is even better when you are fed because a fed Nasus is threatening in general, but a fed Nasus you have to kill twice? Terrifying.

Farming Mindgames

As Nasus' main goal is to farm his Q, you can often use this to your advantage because many players have a very predictable approach to trying to stop you. They will try to attack you with abilities for going to CS, so walk up like you're going to CS earlier than intended, then back away when they try to attack you. Once their abilities are on cooldown, feel free to farm. Note that the buff for Siphoning Strike lasts for a considerable amount of time, so doing this with Q active won't hinder you in any way.

Baiting

As previously stated, Nasus generally has to bait people into poor situations to win trades. He can use this ability to get kills as well. At level 6 people often still hold the misconception that Nasus is incredibly weak at this point and often will try to dive him anyway, or even have their jungler help them dive. Wither the person taking turret shots and use Fury of the Sands and Spirit Fire and beat them as hard as you can with Siphoning Strike. This can usually get you a kill or even a double. If you succeed at this, they will never attempt to dive you again.

Siphoning Strike

Farming Siphoning Strike should always be your top priority. My general rule of thumb is that if you're at least 10 bonus damage per minute (IE; 200 bonus damage at 20 minutes) you're doing "ok". You aren't a liability to your team if you keep that up. ideally you should be using Q to last hit every chance, and the possibilities of numbers for this can be much higher at 20 minutes.

Vanquisher of Objectives

Nasus' ultimate can be used to easily secure objectives early on. It deals %Health damage meaning he can help to melt Dragon or Baron quickly. This can be useful for a sneaky steal when the enemy has no wards on these. Additionally, he can use to bonus health to simply tank towers and destroy them himself later on. Nasus is a very frightening splitpusher due to his Q and ultimate.