League of Legends’ “Support Smite Sololane” might be getting out of hand as more champions succeed Janna in the exploit

After Janna, it seems more League of Legends supports are having a great time picking Smite and going over to the top lane to exploit the game’s new bounty system.

For some weeks now, Janna has risen in popularity amongst top laners, where players were making use of the new bounty system to create a strategy that allowed the support to funnel gold into the carries of the team.

However, it would seem that Janna was not the only support who was making the most of the exploit. As the above Reddit post points out, even professional players got on the support-solo lane bandwagon, and both the PCS (Pacific Championship Series) as well as the LJL (League of Legends Japan League) saw supports other than Janna take Smite to mid and top.

While the PCS saw DGC take Smite-Bard into the midline, the LJL witnessed a Poppy top with the summoner spell.

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Riot Games will look to address the Smite Support strategy in League of Legends patch 12.4

The top lane support exploit has been taking over the League of Legends meta in a very unhealthy way. It boosted the popularity and success of a lot of enchanter supports to the point where Janna was sitting close to a perfect 60% win rate in the higher competitive ranks of the game.

She was picked so much in the top lane that even stat websites started attributing her as a top laner instead of a bot lane support.

However, she is not the only enchanter being used for the exploit; picks like Bard, Karma, Poppy, and Lulu have also been quite notorious with a Smite in the solo lane.

Fortunately, Riot games are aware of the meta complications that this exploit has been bringing to the new season, and they highlighted a few fixes coming its way in patch 12.4, which is set to go live in a couple of days.

Riot Phlox mentioned some of the adjustments that the developers would like to introduce to the support items. Some of the tentative changes that he highlighted are:

• Minion Farming Penalty: 4 minions per minute >>> 2 per minute until 5m, 4 per minute rest of game CS Bounties now adjust based on the number of income items on each team
• Objective Bounty gold leads are halved when you have two or more support items on a team
• Objective Bounty Linger: 15s >>> 5s
• Farming Penalty is more severe early

While these changes are indeed something that will look to tone down the effectiveness of the exploit, the community is not entirely sure if this will outright stop the funnel strategy or not in the highest levels of the game.