Playing Janna
Can anyone offer tips how to play this support? I feel pretty clueless using everything other than her shield, so how should her other abilities be used?
16 Comments
Here are what I learned from playing her a fair amount of times:
1- Most of the time, you dont want to charge you q, unless you know enemies are coming from a certain path and you are sure you will hit them. Otherwise, use it to interput dashes or enemies moving towards you/your adc.
2- Your ult has 4 uses:
It is effective in fights. If you are losing a trade in lane this can change the battle in your favor.
It can be used to disengage teamfights, when the enemy team is jumping on yours and you are losing the fight
It can be used quickly to just knockback the enemies on a long distance to save your life or your ADC's
It can be used to insec enemies into your team, if you see your jungler coming and you are close to an enemy, dont be scared to flash behind him and use your ult to push him towards your allies, it's pretty much a free kill. You can also do this in teamfights by flashing in their team and ulting when the fight is going on, it's pretty unpredictable and it will dispatch their team making easier to focus down a target,
3- if you are ahead in your lane, don't be scared to get a mejai. Janna is fairly safe, all of her spells can be used to peel for either her or her adc and the more you stack it, the safer you are because you shield and passive movement speed on W scales of AP. Also, it's very easy to get assists with janna since any kill a champion you shielded will give you an assist, even if the shield didn't soak up any damage and there is a small amount of time after the shield wears off that still counts as you assisting the champion.
4- W has 2 uses: chasing or fleeing. If you are chasing an enemy, the passive movement speed will help you get the active off more easily and you can then use your Q for even more chase potential. If you are running from someone, the slow can be used to save an ally, but it's more profitable for you to keep your movement speed and use your Q to peel for yourself if you are the one in danger.
5- When taking down tower, using your shield on you ADC is most of the time the best option, but if you are laning with a 
or a 
, you might want to use the shield on yourself since you can use your basic attacks more often and thus proc the bonus AD more then they do. Also, if you have an ally that has a higher attack speed than your adc (
for example), using the shield on him to take down towers will be more effective.
6- Since Janna is really safe, sometime you might end up having a decent score while your ADC keeps dying. If you see that your ADC is doing bad and is not really usefull in any way, don't be scared to support an ally that is in a better position in team fights. For example, My adc was not doing good in a ranked game I played. However, our Gnar was doing very well and was dealing way more damage than our ADC. In that situation, it's more usefull to put your shield on the person who is carrying to give them more AD and to use your CC on enemies he is fighting, even if that means leaving your ADC alone. This is totaly up to you to judge if your ADC is worth protecting or not. Sometime it might even be more profitable to protect a fed AP carry even if your shield gives AD.
7- If you have an AD assassin on your team and you see them about to jump in, your shield will be very usefull for them, soaking up damage and making all of their ability scale better. This pretty much secures a kill on a squishy target and gives you an assist.
Janna is 100% a force multiplier; probably the purest one in the game. That means if your team knows what the buttons do you're going to feel like you're cheating; if they're all houseplants than you aren't going to do a single thing other than die trying to save idiots.
W can be used for poke if you've got lots of mana and can do it safely but its primary function is to catch runners. You lose a chunk of your cruising speed when it's on cooldown.
Q will drain your mana if you spam it and it'll take lots of practice to learn where enemies are going to be in 3 seconds. It's best to save it for disengages as your adc is most vulnerable when it is down, but if you hit the enemy adc with it while your adc is paying attention you can drop a ton of free damage on them. When the enemy jungler is coming in point it where he's going; when you get this down you basically become ungankable.
Ult can be used for nearly anything (you can shove enemies through walls if they're close enough) but it's -best- used for disengage. (But if your whole team is standing around baron at half health feel free to call a team meeting.) It's not something you just throw out in teamfights, make sure you have a clear goal. And yes, you will probably save an enemy a few times with it. That's fine, as long as you did what you meant to do with it (save someone else, throw someone out of position, knockback an engage, heal up). Also remember Yasuo can ult off your ult as well as Q.
FQC is what you want these days (rip spooky ghosts) unless your lane is super high range (Trist + Lux or something ridiculous like that) and then you want coin first. "Do I feel safe consistently autoattacking the enemy support and occasionally adc?" Yes -> Spellthief, No -> Coin. If you want to switch that's fine; FQC is for catching out/scouting dark areas and Talisman is for chasing as a group and/or escaping.
After that I've been going Sightstone, Censor, Mejai's (if you're dying enough to make this not worth it you're losing anyway), and am currently deciding on what to do to get 45% CDR. Been playing with Frozen Heart and Frozen Fist. I go swifties (been doing it since long before it was cool) because Janna needs to be in three places at once a bunch so mobility is great. You'll find that you're "conducting" a teamfight, ghosts here, slow there, shield that moron, knockup the diver.
Coming up on 140k Janna points with dozens of S ranks (including 12 S+'s) so it's always pleasant when you get a vegetable team yelling at you because you didn't do anything. 0 * 1000000 is still 0, sadly. :p The good teams will make you feel invincible, though. 0 deaths is typically quite attainable. I'm finding I get either S or low B depending on what I have to work with (though getting S- for a losing game is... the best?).
Janna offers high safety but not a whole lot of kill potential in skirmishes (full blown teamfights are usually better). Make sure Soraka is always banned. :p She can work great with any adc but the auto-reliant ones are probably the best. (I find Janna makes a poor Kalista partner in solo q but if you've got them on mic then it should be okay.) If you can protect him well enough, Janna+Draven lanes are silly :p
At a basic level, use your slow to stop people from running away at low HP. Use your ult to heal your team when they're low, to disengage a fight by pushing the enemy team away, to save your carry by pushing an assassin off of them, or to separate an enemy from their team and catch them out. Your tornado is a risk-reward system. The longer you charge it, the more damage it does and the longer the enemy gets CC'd. Sometimes it's more worth it to take the time to charge it up, sometimes it isn't. You'll really only figure that out with time.
Q can interrupt dashes use your ult more for disengage than for actual healing. Stay at the farest backline of the fight; majais is viable on her; ardent censer is always a great choice on an AA reliant adc; dont use you w too much go captain mobi boots. etc pp
http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/iuvE1orf-janna-main-janna-mechanics
I have a decent amount of experience playing her http://www.lolking.net/summoner/na/41337515#ranked-stats
First off, you have to know how the game will commence. To do that, you have to understand all the champ's abilities and how they will want to hurt/kill you and your adc. Say for instance you are laning against Sona. She is going to want to poke you and your adc. You do not want to spam your shield in this instance. You want to save it for when she uses her q in order to protect your adc. In instances where you may be pushing the lane you want to use your shield when the adc pokes the opposing team. Janna takes great timing, synergy, and hand-eye coordination to master (I am not saying I have mastered her).
Her tornado is another ability that is difficult to use well. You can use it to counter gap closers (e.g. Leona's E, Wukong's E, Lee Sin's Q, and Thresh's Q when he decides to go in just to name a few). To block these, however, takes quite a bit of practice.
Her W is good for escapes and for cc-ing. Do not, I REPEAT DO NOT, use your W when running away. The animation takes time away from running and you lose your passive movement speed. It is alright to use this mildly as a poke item in the early laning phase. Just be careful when you do as it takes away your bonus speed. A good combo to use when chasing/setting up ganks is W+Q. The W slows them so that your Q is easy to land. You do not need to charge your Q just let if fly. A bad use of your Q is letting it go from the bushes. It is easy to dodge, wastes mana, puts the ability on cooldown, and may cause unwanted damage to minions if your adc is freezing the lane.
The ultimate is one of the best disengage tools in the game. Use it wisely as it can really hurt your team when not properly utilized. A flash+Ult can be a good combo to knock back an opponent into a turret or your teammates, but be careful because Janna is squishy and you want to position well.
For Runes you should take scaling health/flat armor seals, flat AP quints, scaling ap/flat ap/mr glyphs, and hybrid pen/flat mr marks. These depend on the support whom you are laning against. For tanks, I take heavy AP runes, and for heavy, ap poke supps I take mr runes. There are some good strategies on lolking as well. Hope this helps and keep your carries alive.
Edit: In looking at your lolking page, I noticed you are taking Mobas. I would take CDR boots instead as you really want to focus on reaching that 45% CDR (assuming you have the right masteries). I saw in a game you went 3/3/0. If you started out with 3 kills you might want to consider taking Mejia's as it gives you bonus AP based upon kills and assists, but if you are dying a lot don't take it because you lose stacks upon death. Make sure to build AP as it increases the strength of your shield and gives some extra oomph to your abilities. 
These are some good AP/CDR items and if you have a lot of gold, go with 
as it will really give your carries a boost when you put your shield on them. Choosing the right items can really make a difference.