How do you counter a team with 3x Smite + 3x Jungle Items + Chogath?

5 Dollar Holler·1/2/2020, 12:00:00 AM·1 votes·2,288 views

Not sure if this was a fluke, but what the heck just happened to me. Our opposing team just picked 3 smites and all three built jungle items (in addition to a chogath) and the massacred us. We couldn't come anywhere near contesting dragons or either rift herald, they snowballed all of these new, more powerful (and easier to defeat) objectives with smite stacking. We lost in 20 minutes.

Of course, it didn't help that 2 of our 3 lanes were just bad, but at load screen I thought this was going to be a troll comp and we got smashed by it.

Is this a thing now?

4 Comments

Cind3rkick1/2/2020, 12:09:20 AM1 votes

Beat them early where their lack of summs screws them over. Then just don't let them near objectves.

It just abuses uncoordinated teams.

Illabethe1/2/2020, 12:23:03 AM1 votes

There's not enough information in this tread to suggest whether or not your team was just bad, or if this is a new meta, given the new Drake properties.

The game is about turret objectives more than anything. If their entire goal is to take drakes, take turrets. This will force them back to their side of the map to defend.

I'm willing to bet it went something like this:

Jungler 1 took his own jungle. Jungler/Top 2 took half of the Blue side bot jungle. Jungler/Mid 3 invaded with their team, and mooched the remainder of bot jungle (red) after you had to wwithdraw/gave up 1-2 kills.

Your jungler had no farm to use, so fell massively behind.

In between clears, they went back to their lanes to clear some, but didn't put an emphasis on it and kept roaming, because they didn't want to incur a lane minion gold penalty from overfarming jungle/lane.

While your laners tried to adapt to the jungle needs and failed, the jungler just got boxed out. You established poor lane control/farm rates due to the confusion, and they managed to probably have 90% visibility around drake pits.

The general answer: The game when played correctly always expects the unexpected. Advanced play is never just linear/push/pull combat/gentlemane structure. Unpredictability that is planned and deviant is common to play psychological games with the other team. Expect it. Play with friends who appreciate that fact (eventually once you've made them). Communicate. Check their profiles and see if it's a common thing they do. Go into the game expecting it.

If they are going to invaded based on their histories, insist your team 5 man the leash and set your players up in a flank formation instead of a huddle. Let the invade happen, 2 people bait, and then the other 3 people join in to prevent escape. Show them better teamwork, and they are likely to get frazzled.

Expect 3 smites to invade the first ~8-10 minutes of jungle, so be ready to leave lanes and gank the 1-2 who are in the wrong positions, and make them regret it.

If you're successful at that, they will be forced back to lanes, starved for XP, and down a summoner in 5v5's. Make the rest of the game about 5v5s and your XP/Farm advantages will result in your correct summoners, better incomes and XP carrying you.

If you let them separate you, you will lose.

Beerstein1/2/2020, 12:30:33 AM1 votes

Odds are they won more because they screwed your jungler than they did well, (basically they just made your guy do even worse than them) so it'd come down to supporting your jungler better, which means winning lanes with the advantage of not having smite.

It's just a curveball that can be hard to adapt to IMO. I see the 3 smites as a real headache, and again, damaging to your JG, but I'm really confident that 3 jungle items is not smart.

That said, I've been doing Ivern Support with smite and I did really well at first but I'm still making a lot of adjustments and have had a few trolly teams (says the ivern support lol) but the concept is essentially the same, not me doing well, but me making their jungler do even worse than I'm doing and just throwing them off. It's difficult without a Duo ADC that can handle the mental of a roaming support (Even Bard designed that way and expected to play that way struggles with that problem)

I'm still convinced it's a pretty solid play without getting too high ranked, at higher ranks people will do what I said above and adapt to support their Jungler better.

My contingencies on winning are 1. Screw over enemy JG really hard and 2. Get to later game when Ivern really shines by controlling fights.

What really screws me over is when the enemy mid/jg/bot are really in sync and won't let me get an inch without trying to (or successfully) ambushing me, which relegates me to a slightly underperforming support when compared to others.

Anyway, I still won't play it in ranked as it's really sensitive in HOW I balance roam vs supporting my ADC (especially with random ADCs that react differently, and sometimes really poorly to it) so finding that way to really balance it out where I'm not all up in the enemy JGs crap so much that I'm neglecting my ADC as well as not doing the opposite of that is a real challenge. It's also a matter of knowing how to adapt to my ADCs reactions where I don't negate the entire point of doing it when an ADC is especially needy.

That said, with the right duo it'd probably be fairly devastating, but this kinda highlights that doing things like this have serious drawbacks an there's a reason they're not meta. Kindred kinda suffers from the same problem which is why you see a lot of unhappy Kindred mains right now. Navigating the enemy JG, especially when they KNOW you want to is really really difficult unless your team is already winning for other reasons.

ROYALR3IGN1/4/2020, 6:14:56 PM1 votes

Kill them in lane. No seriously, it means they're going to be down a summoner spell to fight you until they get the 1300g jg item to smite you with, and they can't teleport back to lane so if you kill they're really screwed. Call your Jg to gank early and often, he won't be getting many camps with that many smites on the table so after you kill your laner, keep killing them and let your jgler tax the lane so they don't fall to far behind