Janna Top with Smite – an unconvential pick in League of Legends is causing havoc in solo queue and it’s got the community talking.
But why is this happening? And what does the UK content creator who helped popularise it, HappyChimeNoises, think of all the chaos? Esports News UK spoke to him to find out.
What is Janna Top? How to play it and why it works
First of all, why Janna is being picked in the top-lane instead of her conventional support role, and how it’s working so well.
Cloud9 coach Veigarv2 first identified this strategy last month, with a tweet highlighting it on January 10th 2022.
But it was HappyChimeNoises who went into greater detail and explained why in his video posted a few weeks ago (which currently has almost half a million views and is titled ‘Why this Master is playing Smite Janna Top’).
He talked about players like HappyHappy2 (whom HappyChimeNoises believes may be a smurf of AP0CALYPSE) and LordBastionIII began playing Janna Top as a roaming smite enchanter pick.
The playstyle for Janna Top is generally to leave the lane right away, be a nuisance around the map, make ganks and steal camps from the enemy jungler. Janna’s passive gives her and her allies bonus movement speed, helping her to roam.
“In my opinion, these strategies do not need to be removed, they are as ‘toxic’ as split pushers which everyone is accepting of.”
HappyChimeNoises
Players can max W to slow enemies too, making them easier for allies to kill.
The Janna Top build tends to be Spellthief’s Edge, Mobility Boots, Shurelya’s Battlesong, Redemption, Deadman’s Plate and lots of control wards.
Sure, while Janna is roaming, the enemy top-laner has freedom in their lane to take farm and towers. But by doing so, this puts Janna behind on cs, giving the enemy top-laner a gold bounty, which Janna’s team can take later on by killing them.
This strategy has put Janna at the top of the win-rate charts on several stat-tracking platforms.
For Master-tier player HappyHappy2 specifically, he has achieved a win-rate of around 70% with Janna Top – on two separate accounts.
HappyChimeNoises wants to make it clear that the two players – HappyHappy2 and LordBastionIII – “are the ones that deserve credit for the invention”.
“Many sites have credited Challenger players who started playing it after my video came out, which is a shame,” he added.
Since more players became aware of Janna top, pro players have also had success with it in solo queue, including the likes of Lourlo, Send0o and Reflect, as pointed out in this InvenGlobal article.
‘Why Janna Top is a good thing’ – UK LoL content creator HappyChimeNoises explains
HappyChimeNoises, who has played League since season 4, shared his views on the chaos his video has caused bringing Janna Top to light, with many players taking it into solo queue now.
Several personalities and players of LoL are talking about it, and some are getting frustrated with it (see the section at the bottom of the article for more).
But HappyChimeNoises thinks the strategy is fine.
“In my opinion Janna top is a good thing, as I believe LoL is best when people can play their favourite champion whenever they want, in whatever role they want,” he told Esports News UK.
“I believe LoL is best when people can play their favourite champion whenever they want, in whatever role they want. Janna needs nerfs but these strategies do not need to be removed.”
HappyChimeNoises
“The worst thing about League is being forced to play a meta pick that you dislike just for the sake of it being OP (overpowered). In terms of nerfs, the first change that is needed is Janna nerfs – she is way, way too strong in support and that is just transferring to top lane to make this even stronger. I would leave it at that and see what happens.
“In my opinion, these strategies do not need to be removed, they are as ‘toxic’ as split pushers which everyone is accepting of.
“Split push requires a strong top laner to match it, if they die four people are punished and can lose a game off it.”
Is Janna top being nerfed by Riot?
Yes. Riot has attempted to remove or discourage some strategies considered unconventional or unfair in the past – for example the Yi and Taric funnel strategy.
First off, on February 4th 2022, Riot announced a nerf to Janna, but not one that explicitly nerfs her in the top-lane position with Smite.
“Janna’s 12.2 changes swept Summoner’s Rift by storm, making her one of the strongest and most popular supports,” Riot said in the Patch 12.3 LoL patch notes. “However, it wasn’t clear just how strong of a nerf she needed last patch due to a Glacial Augment bug that interacted with her Q and R a little too well. Even after the hotfix, Janna remains very strong with Glacial and other runes, so we’re lowering her early roaming power and her enhanced heal and shield window.”
Riot added that these changes are “not intended to address her (and other enchanters’) recent top-lane strategy – we’re working on a separate solution for that and will update as soon as we have an accurate forecast”.
Then, on February 8th 2022, game designer Riot Phlox confirmed initial lane-specific solo support champion nerfs in order to “pull down the support item top meta,” with more to follow. These changes for patch 12.4 include minion farming nerfs and changes to objective bounties, with gold leads halved if you have two or more support items on a single team.
We’ll await to see how else Riot may react to the Janna Smite Top meta, but in the meantime…
How can Janna top be countered?
HappyChimeNoises says: “Janna top requires the enemy jungler, mid and bot laners to not overextend and give up kills while their top laner gets incredibly far ahead. They can lose a game if bot side messes up. So it’s just top laners complaining that they have to rely on others rather than being 1v9.
“I personally do not want to play against many champs, and something like support top laners shouldn’t be removed just because people don’t want to play against it – or all of the champs from the past three years would be removed.
“Objective bounties, however, need to be adjusted to fix the 2x support style – if one side is incredibly far ahead but top lane has got plates and two towers – Janna’s team is actually very far ahead, but her team still gets bounties. Stopping her taking Smite does nothing, as in many games Ignite is actually better.”
There’s the argument that Janna top will fall off late-game, but the trick for the opposing team is getting to late game without Janna top wrecking havoc across the rift.
The idea of a jungler teaming up more closely with their top-laner to track an enemy Janna top across the map may help too, but don’t forget about the possibility of being counter-ganked by Janna’s jungler.
UK LEC caster and streamer Caedrel also added that top-laners that “scale really well or can take towers fast” should be able to counter a roaming Janna top-laner pretty well.
Janna top in pro play: Superliga, LCS and LCK,
FlyQuest won a match in the LCS versus CLG with Kumo taking Janna Smite Top. Janna Top was picked in LCK Challengers.
And before that, Barcelona picked Janna top in the Spanish Superliga recently. Czech Republic top-laner Dreedy, who has previously played with UK organisation Barrage (which was acquired by Resolve last year), made the pick in the Superliga against Giants.
There were also a couple of UK players in the match – Barcelona ADC Deadly and Giants jungler Maxlore.
Barcelona went on to beat Giants using Janna top and Caedrel analysed the Barcelona Janna Top match in this video.
So will we see this pick made in the LEC? Vitality’s UK top-laner, Alphari, hopes not.
“I really, really, really hope not,” Alphari told InvenGlobal on Janna Smite Top. “I don’t want to play this. I’ve told my coaching staff already that I’m not going to play it until a good team plays it and I get forced to play it out of an obligation to my team. But I think it’s immoral to play Janna top. It’s not what I stand for. I think that it’s just totally unfun and against the game.”
What does the LoL community have to say about Janna top?
League of Legends players of all elos are talking about Janna Top right now, on social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Discord and more.
There are several posts on Reddit discussing Janna Top, including this one from a few days ago, asking about what it is.
Other LoL content creators, like the UK’s RossBoomsocks, have done some videos on it themselves. Ross has produced videos like ‘spectating the most chad Janna’ here and ‘I ruin peoples lives for 14 minutes as smite top Janna’.
UK caster and streamer Caedrel seems to be dead against this playstyle, as seen below.
We’ve included a selection of tweets:
One player – Yuumi Top OhTeeP – said they were unfairly banned for two weeks by Riot for using the strategy in the top-lane, with a mix of champs like Yuumi and Maokai.
The player told Esports News UK: “This is the guy that reported me, which resulted in the ban. He says in French, “in this other game it worked… hmmm,” and then he looks at the damage charts and is surprised. You can see the game from his perspective in this stream. I was positive from the start, you can see in champ select that I was hyped to play the game, but it we lost the invade hard and from that point on it was hard to do anything.
“You can see that I ran to drake, but because he full muted everyone he didn’t see that I was telling him that I was placing saps for the drake and he didn’t see my pings or chat and full cleared, which makes my play look really troll.”
UK LoL inventiveness – what next?
For us at Esports News UK, it’s been good to see UK players and content creators popularising some crazy top-lane strategies and builds.
For example, UK streamer and top-laner No Arm Whatley – who one-tricks Tahm Kench in League of Legends – reached Master tier without using a single ward.
UK streamer RossBoomsocks helped to popularise the Mathematically Correct Sett build, and pro player Kerberos came up with some interesting and different builds back in the day.
Now we have Janna Top, which was help made popular through UK content creator HappyChimeNoises. What next, we wonder…
Further reading: LoL Pre-Season 2022 announcement and changes
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
