Solution to Summoner Specialist rune and Smite on Laners

Monkey Pants·Sep 28, 2017·8 votes·836 views

I came up with a pretty easy solution to prevent laners from picking the Summoner's Specialist rune, starting with smite, getting a super efficient jungle item, and then switching to Heal, Teleport, or another summoner. Not sure if Riot came up with a solution but I think this one is pretty elegant—change Buying Smite won't grant access to Smite items to:

Smite cannot be swapped out while an item upgrading Smite is in your inventory or Upgraded Smite cannot be swapped out.

Now you have to sell the jungler item in order to lose smite. No one lanes with smite now, so I don't see a reason for it to change.

5 Comments

koshkyraSep 29, 20171 votes

Why would laners buy jungle items

40% of the stats on jungle items are for jungle clears

Laustin SpaceSep 29, 20171 votes

Imagine being a top laner and starting out with a camp for an exp lead. Then never get harassed to get a cannon minion during laning phase or cheese and steal enemy camps between waves for even more exp. Followed by building a cost efficient upgrade(most likely cinderhulk) with a poachers knife to have extra wards for the rest of the game. Swap it out for TP to have one of the most solid split pushing builds possible along side a free exp lead to make sure you are winning the split.

edit: It can get even more stupid if you start smite/ignite and either kill your laner or push your laner out of lane with lvl2advantage/ignite.

KAAAAAAAYN DOSep 30, 20171 votes

Smite/ignite laners for the early cheese potential to win lane can then swap to flash and tp after buying cinderhulk for the insane scaling of the hp passive. If you push a lane and are low on mana you could just step out of lane for free mana regen. CH is 750 gold cheaper than sunfire for 65 less health (169 gold worth of stats) and 60 less armor (1200 worth of stats) however because of the 20% bonus hp passive on CH if you buy an average of about 870 health your total effective health (how much damage you can take when you convert the % of damage reduced from armor and mr to hp) will be better than if you had the armor from sunfire. In addition you have the utility of CH turning off in combat allowing you to do things like set up a dive without drawing aggro before you have to, not aggroing baron/dragon when clearing a ward or aggroing jungle camps or stealing a camp from a laner who may need the buff. Now I am NOT saying that it will be a go to strategy, as most top laners will have much more beneficial keystones than summoner specialist. I am however pointing out that mathematically there is a niche for it, whether or not it gets abused it TBD