i dont completely remember support champion pick over the past few months so correct me if im wrong but iirc it was something like janna is strong, janna gets nerfed, soraka is strong, support players say soraka is the best support, global ults get nerfed and around this time sona gets a huge buff to her global cooldowns, sona is by far the best with koreans also playing lulu as second best, sona nerfed, and sona and lulu are about even in strength with lulu probably edging sona out. somewhere in there blitz was picked up as a good support and ali fell off due to nerfs. i think its easy for someone to look at something like this and say well janna got nerfed so people stopped playing her, but janna's lack of usage, or her lack of resurgence after the soraka nerfs, is probably more related to the dominance of ezreal. cant disengage poke.
Well, that's quite a few months, but, yeah, that's pretty accurate, except you entirely forgot Zyra. I agree with you about Ezreal being a huge reason why Janna wasn't picked. The other reason, I believe, is Nunu, actually, although that might sound like a strange thing to say.
I guess the fact Ezreal is still being picked frequently at tournaments is a factor.
you say lulu and janna play differently in lane but the truth is janna doesnt play in lane. she cant, not in the current state of bot lane. ezreal and caitlyn are too much for her in a 2v2 and she is probably the weakest or 2nd weakest (shout outs to soraka) 2v1 support.
Well... that's pretty much the same thing, although I don't agree she can't play in lane. In any case that's the meta and I don't think buffing her will fix that the current bot lane meta is unconducive to her unless you want to make her OP again, but maybe you have a suggested change that will make her able to deal with Ezreal, Cait, etc. Janna is hardly the only champion to fall out of sight because of the meta and not all of them are bad either.
i really dislike the argument about how good of a disengager she is, because to me it sounds like the same kind of argument of how great of pushers hiemerdinger and mordekaiser are. you dont need to be the god of disengaging when being a good disengager does the same thing.
when i made the janna/lulu comparison i wasnt saying lulu was a better disengager/protecter than janna. i was making the comparison of how lulu provides the same tools as janna without the faults janna brings. regardless of whether lulu is better or worse at these tools (protecting and disengaging), the utility of them is still there, and the popular opinion is that she provides enough of this utility (not to mention other kinds) to warrant her picking over janna.
I agree with you on one thing that is implied here -- all-around champs are generally better than min-maxed champs, especially utility ones. And that's why Lulu is ridiculous, among other things. Janna's kit is versatile, but it largely does the same thing.
I don't think Janna buffs will change how Janna is fundamentally designed. I think her kit is still really good, but you're right in that it's not really suited for bot lane. Even if I could play her, I wouldn't. But I don't think this is purely due to overnerfs. One reason I gave to pick Janna is because of her ult, which is very strong vs. AoE aggression comps. However, in S2 Worlds, we saw teams like CLG.EU making use of Jayce as a dis/engager and fundamental part on poke comps, and so forth. So, yeah, I do think Janna's niche matters less -- although isn't that what I called it, a niche? When she was super duper OP, like all other super duper OP supports, she was picked because she shit on things outside of her niche too (although Janna is definitely more minmaxed than other supports like Sona and Lulu). I don't think she is a bad champion, although you are definitely right in that the meta is really unfriendly to her in lane (which is a shame, because, as I said, she still does what she does before in teamfights, which were always her strength, and she fucks up most of the popular strategies by doing so). I don't want to see Janna dominant again. I think Janna lanes are boring as hell to play in. Maybe Riot agrees with me, the same way they think about Soraka; I have no way of gauging.
I don't play Janna so I can't answer this as well as everyone else, but I think with maybe the more self-sufficient lane ADs, Janna could definitely still be played with her steroid. But this goes back to what I say about Nunu (who is fucking mindnumbing, by the way), and in any case I think I'd just pick one of the more aggressive supports. Janna can still do all the things she did before, just less so in lane, where she's not supposed to be strong anyway; the main thing is that she doesn't fit in with the lanes in its current state. She could probably be buffed some to make her more viable in lane, never said she didn't need buffs of some sort iirc though.
I brought up Nami because other people were talking about her in relation to this. She is definitely better than Janna in... everything. That will make it harder to find Janna a place where she belongs for regular usage.
This post is probably fragmented and incoherent because I just got out of bed, or close enough to it.
