Climbing is now the most "abuse the meta" we've ever seen.

The meta was always something that people talked about. Meta is basically the strongest picks you can have in order to win games and like it or not, a meta will ALWAYS exist. It's almost impossible to achieve perfect balance, therefore there will always be strong picks and weak picks, therefore, climbing elo will be more successful when following the strong, meta picks. This was always the case, and this will always be the case.

This time around, though, it seems like we have moved away from the typical meta thing, where you had slightly more chances to win, to a point where there are certain picks that are almost guaranteed free elo, and that's because they have little to no counterplay.

Let's see Talon, for example. Smite mid Talon is one of the most broken things ever. Not because of his damage, he never got buffed recently or anything. It's just how he works right now. He can have insane XP gains, with no counterplay. As a melee champion, he has superior waveclear both in lane and in the jungle to almost in other pick. He can start raptors level 1 and pop into lane level 2 during the first wave, spam his waveclear, then proceed to jungle again for fast levels and gold. This has close to ZERO counterplay. You can even ward his raptors, and it will won't do much, since he can start wolves. The fact that he only pops into lane to push out the wave, and then leaves again makes it so that there is almost zero chance for the enemy laner to try and stop him, especially seeing how his waveclear tools are far superior to almost any other laner.

Similar to Talon are other picks that can utilize Smite in the mid lane, like Ekko, Taliyah, Aatrox etc. You can make cases like "but these champions are bad later in the game, they get outscaled", but it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. I played normal draft games picking Talon for the first time in platinum elo, and I stomped the early game. My team got so many huge advantages that late game was only just a myth.

This makes it so that this tactic is almost free elo. As long as the smite player doesn't fuck up their execution on correctly killing raptors and then pushing lanes and having good back times, it doesn't matter what the enemy does. The smite champion will just hit level 6 before anyone else, then proceed to heavily zone you out of cs in lane and roam the entire map. Almost zero counterplay. Even when warding off ganks, they still apply insane pressure, forcing one champion to be glued into mid lane, while they roam around.

There never was such a thing. Apart from certain cases where champions were indeed broken (Runeglaive Ezreal, 5.18 Darius), we have never seen anything like this. All the other cases were temporary number mistakes, and were hot-fixed pretty soon. The smite thing won't be looked at for a long time, and only after someone hits #1 in China and makes a Reddit post about how he boosted their platinum friend into Masters.

I'm not really complaining about it, I will probably just abuse this to gain free elo. As it stands right now, with all the coinflip matchmaking and stuff, I can only resort into such tactics to gain elo, where I know that my good effort will pay off. The thing is that most people don't enjoy that, and I would also certainly want to get my elo through actual interaction with the enemy as well.