Players are always looking for ways to re-invent the meta inLeague of Legends. Piloting an unconventional pick or build before everyone else catches on and figures out how to counter it can be a temporary yet effective way to climb.
A champion who’s always lent herself well to unconventional strategies is Janna, the Storm’s Fury. This is primarily because of her high base movement speed, allowing her to zip around the map and disrupt other lanes with little need for farm. Last season, we saw Janna top with smite become quite popular.
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Janna was recently changed, with Riot shifting her kit’s power around. The most important adjustment for the sake of this build is the changes to her passive Tailwind. Rather than giving allies movement speed towards Janna, her passive now gives her bonus magic damage to auto attacks based on her movement speed.
This was always going to turn Janna into more of a lane bully, but players have now discovered that she can be the lane’s carry if you run Hail of Blades. As you can imagine, the standard combo is walking forward, using W (Zephyr) on your opponent and then unloading on them with Hail of Blades auto attacks.
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Hail of Blades tends to be combined with Cheap Shot, Zombie Ward, Relentless Hunter and then Celerity and Scorch from the sorcery tree. Janna can easily win early-game trades with this build, giving her lane priority and allowing her to use her movement speed and early damage to roam and influence the map.
Most people appear to be continuing with the regular Janna build even when taking Hail of Blades, but others, like in the video below fromRainbow Flavor, are leaning into the strategy. Zilean is the perfect partner for Janna because of his E (Time Warp) which gives movement speed, giving Janna even more auto-attack damage.
While they may have built a Stormrazor, the most optimal version of this build will probably have a normal item build as all the power from Hail of Blades is in the early game. The Zilean and Janna lane does look fun, though.
Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison has revealedRiot’s patch preview for 13.14, and there are no Janna nerfs in sight.
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