Changes to Teleport have also changed the meta with this Janna playstyle
Playing a viable support champion, such as Janna or Karma, and then choosing out of interacting with your lane opponent after only a few levels is the new Smite top style. The support uses smite and plans to ambush the opponent jungler’s camp or steal their buff.
After then, the support champion lanes will remain active until they have gained a few levels, at which point they will leave their lane and roam across the map. They ensure a gold disadvantage by leaving the opponent’s top laner alone, allowing their side to gain benefits in objectives elsewhere on the map. They plan to snowball the remainder of the map and collect on bounties put up by the loss of the top lane by roaming with the jungler and ganking other lanes.
Taking Smite into the top lane is the newest technique to deceive League’s rebound systems into granting teams more gold.
Objective bounties, which were added recently, provide additional gold rewards to objectives for losing teams. Smite top lane on champions who never farm and can still be useful such as supports like Janna turns out to be a gold mine for teams who aren’t truly losing.
It’s a dangerous strategy, but inducing a fake loss by manipulating the objective bounty system isn’t a good one to establish in terms of playability. In its most recent episode, the LCS podcast “The Dive” even talked about the topic, as well as the rising trend of roaming strategy.
An example of earlier gold system abuses in League of Legends stands out as being comparable to this recent issue. There was also a time in the professional play when lane bully top laners would take support items and just harass their lane opponent in order to rack up a hefty bounty on them while keeping even an effective amount of gold.
Riot has already slammed these abusing strategies, and if Janna, or any support champions, brings smite top lane becomes popular, it will most certainly be shut down as well.