Mandatory Smite in Champ Select
Riot, I know you're dealing with some big stuff right now. New client, balancing for upcoming events, improving Dynamic Queue while dealing with all the hate, at least two reworks currently in the pipeline, and so much more that hasn't been shared. But I was wondering if you could do one thing that might not be a whole lot of work, but a big help nonetheless.
When someone gets queued up in the jungle role for Champion Select, make it so that the game automatically makes them take
Smite as one of their Summoner Spells. They can change the other one to be whatever they want and they can apply it to whatever button they want, but if you're queued up for the jungle role you are outright forced to take smite.
Fact of the matter is with recent jungle changes, Smite is already mandatory in all but actually making it so. The jungle items are necessary to get bonus experience and keep up with the champions that are laning, and those very same jungle items are restricted from purchase unless you've taken the Smite summoner spell. If someone forgets to take it, then the team is pretty much screwed.
Case in point? I just had a ranked game where our "jungler" forgot to take smite, and went jungling anyways. Nevermind my horrible performance against midlane Poppy as Fizz, by the time we finally surrendered our "jungle" Volibear was level 9 while the enemy team was about level 13 to 15. The average level difference was enough that the enemy minions had 20% bonus damage against ours. Nevermind their complete inability to really gank or even be relevant.
Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly approve of the changes Riot made to the jungle experience gain recently. I especially love it because I don't have to worry about my leash accidentally soaking up experience even though I killed the monsters. But because of the changes Riot had to enforce, something as simple as forgetting Smite can absolutely ruin the game for both the jungler and the rest of their team. With making jungle items give the experience necessary for junglers to keep up and those same jungle items being forbidden from purchase without Smite, I see no justifiable reason to not have the game forcibly make sure the jungler is taking Smite. Non-Smite jungle builds just are not viable anymore, so there's no feasible reason for Riot to support or encourage them.
I'm no computer major or tech wizard, so I don't know what would be required to make this happen. To me it seems like a relatively small change, but I can understand that the coding required for auto-changing someone's Summoner Spells has the potential to make a lot go wrong. All the same I really do think this is a change Riot needs to make. When I'm queuing up in a role other than jungle, I shouldn't have to check to make sure my jungler takes the spell they need to be relevant to the game. And when I'm queuing up as jungle, it would grant some peace of mind that even if I do forget to change my summoner spells, the worst that could happen is that I end up not having Flash.
So please Riot, would you at least consider this? I realize it might be complicated or take a while, but I really think it would be worthwhile and ease a lot of frustrations.