Top Lane Janna With Smite Spotted In League of Legends’ Spanish League Superliga

The top lane Janna pick with summoner spell Smite has been ruling the roost for quite some time now in League of Legends. The champion, originally meant to be played as a support in the bot lane, has taken to the top, thanks to the Teleport nerf and the objective bounties. Janna as a top-laner is currently sitting on a win rate of 54.55% in Platinum and higher tiers of Solo Queue. But things took an interesting turn as the champion appeared in pro play when Barça eSports top-laner Jakub "Dreedy" Viceník locked her in against team Giants in the LVP (League of Videogames Professionals) Superliga.

Janna top earns player MVP award

Though Barça esports had a tough start to the game, its jungler Dimitar "LeBron" Kostadinov who was playing Kayn soon managed to turn the game around. The cheese strategy helped the team secure an impressive win in 32 minutes.

With a KDA of 0/0/10 on Janna, Dreedy also went on to win the title of most valuable player (MVP) for the game.

Barça’s attack damage carry (ADC) Matthew "Deadly" Smith joked at the situation and commented on Twitter, “Cool, gets mvp for pressing e on me.”

One Reddit user pointed out the highlights of the match on a thread, and stated that the Janna pick could have been countered better.

How the pick works

The strategy not only works on Janna but also works perfectly well with other enchanter supports like Lulu, Karma, and Zilean. The idea of the pick is to take advantage of Objective Bounties, a new mechanic that was introduced in the preseason. When one team lags behind the other in terms of gold, the objective bounties will kick in, helping the losing team get more gold off of objectives like structures and monsters.

So as a support on top, when the player leaves the lane and roams along with the jungler to gank other lanes, the objective bounties will stack for the team. Having Smite as a summoner spell also allows the team to dominate fights around objectives, steal away enemy camps and secure neutral monsters.

Given the changes to summoner spell Teleport, players cannot punish the Janna top-lane since Unleashed Teleport only unlocks at the 14-minute mark.

Riot Games looks for solutions

After a sea of complaints on social media sites including Twitter and Reddit, Riot Games developers finally acknowledged the cheese pick and are planning nerfs for it.

Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, the design lead of Summers’ Rift team, shared on Twitter that they have been prioritizing the efforts to fix the enchanter top meta.

He wrote, “We're aware that players are disappointed to not see a fix for roaming enchanter tops for the patch. :( It's something we've been prioritizing trying to solve. IF we're able to gain confidence in a solution, then our priority will be to try to get it out, but no plans as of yet.”

When one user suggested that each team could be limited to purchasing only one support item, Phroxzon said, “Players will just buy support items to troll/hold the actual support hostage.”

Until Riot comes up with a solution, these enchanter top-laners will continue to be dominant on the rift. With pros picking these champions in the League of Legends esports scene, we can be certain that the players will also continue to abuse the meta.

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