Counter Guide

How to Beat Janna

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Janna cancels the fight, gives everybody their health back, and asks whether you'd like to try again in thirty seconds.

She's built almost entirely out of the word no. No, your engage doesn't land. No, that dive isn't happening. No, your marksman doesn't get to finish the kill. What she doesn't have is a way to make anything happen herself, and that's the crack the matchup lives in. A lane where both teams are waiting to be given an opening is a lane she wins by default. A lane where somebody just keeps walking forward is much harder for her, because she has one shield, it's small, and it has a cooldown.

Matchup Snapshot Janna, the Storm's Fury

Where You Meet Her Bot lane

Damage Type Very little, and that's not the problem

Why She Is Frustrating Every good moment you create gets deleted

Mobility Fast, slippery, hard to pin down

Biggest Threat Monsoon [R]

Hardest Counter Soraka

What a Counter Needs

Damage that outpaces a shield rather than testing it
Range, so the disengage arrives after the damage has landed
A way to catch her, because catching her ends the fight

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Janna on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Janna

Soraka811 games55.1%
Braum726 games53.0%
Brand582 games52.6%
Thresh2,485 games51.8%
Lulu1,847 games51.5%

Picks Janna Beats

Bard803 games44.1%
Pyke1,112 games45.6%
Tahm Kench525 games45.9%
Karma1,041 games47.4%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Janna. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 34,618 Janna games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Janna Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She turns off engage entirely. The knockback works as a reset button, and a team that built its whole plan around one big engage has built it on sand.
The shield arrives before the damage does. A good Janna is shielding on the wind-up rather than on the hit, so burst combos land into a target that was never as squishy as the health bar suggested.
She's very hard to actually kill. Between the movement speed, the slow and the knockup she's usually the last person left standing after a fight her team lost.
Her tempo is free. She roams, she covers, and she gets back, because moving quickly is something she does passively rather than something she spends a cooldown on.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She can't start anything. Nothing in her kit creates a kill. If neither team engages, the lane is a farm fest. That suits her fine, and it's also all she gets.
The shield is one shield. It covers a moment. Sustained pressure from two people at once simply runs past it, because there's only one of it and it isn't back for a while.
Getting caught is fatal and final. She has no health, barely any armor, and the tools that save her teammates mostly can't be aimed at herself in time.
Poke goes straight through her. A shield doesn't heal. Chip damage taken over a minute is damage that stays taken, and the lane leaks health in a way she has no answer for.
Her ultimate (Monsoon [R]) can be walked out of. It's a channel with an obvious animation. A team that spreads out and keeps attacking gets much less pushed around than one that panics.

Countering Janna

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Janna comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Poke rather than commit. Her whole kit answers a moment. It has nothing at all to say about a lane that's been taking twenty percent of her health every wave since level 2 (five waves of that is a full health bar).
Have two threats. One big engage is exactly what she's built for. Two separate sources of damage arriving from different directions is what she isn't.
Kill her before the carry she's protecting. It feels wrong and it's usually right. Nothing she owns survives being focused, and the rest of the fight is easy once she's gone.
Save your dash for after the knockback. Spending mobility to reach her before she's used the tornado is how most dives die. Wait one beat and the same play works.

If you're already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Janna Matchup

Take the lane at a level where her shield is small. She scales into her job and she doesn't start there, so the early wave states matter more against her than against most supports.

Treat a used tornado as spent. Once it's gone she's a walking speed boost for the next several seconds, and that's the window to do everything you were planning to do.

Stop trying to get value out of your engage tool and start getting value out of your damage. A fight that's decided before she has to react is a fight she doesn't get to be in.

Best Janna Counters

You out range her, you out damage her shield, or you take her out of the fight before the fight starts.

Caitlyn Out Ranges Her

The whole lane happens at a distance where Janna has nothing to do except watch her marksman lose health, and the shield doesn't refill anything.

Traps make the ground itself hostile, and a support whose main job is repositioning people is oddly bad at the specific problem of ground that shouldn't be stood on.

Brand Out Damages The Shield

The shield is sized for a trade, so damage that arrives all at once (a burst chain) tends to spend it and keep going.

There's also nothing she can do about being stunned, and the fight where she's stunned is the fight where none of her teammates get shielded either.

Thresh Takes Her Out Of It

Janna's kit is all reaction: a knock-up, a shield and a blast that shoves people away. None of it helps once she's the one on the end of the hook. Death Sentence [Q] stuns her from 1100 units and pulls her toward him, and Dark Passage [W] lets a teammate dash straight to Thresh to join him.

He keeps working later too. Monsoon [R] clears everyone off her carry once, and his hook comes back a lot sooner than her ultimate does.

Itemizing Against Janna

The first two are aimed straight at what she does; the last two are for the fight that follows:

Serpent's Fang is the obvious one, and for some reason it's usually undervalued, because the shield is most of her kit and cutting it changes what her team is allowed to do. Executioner's Calling matters more than it looks like it should, since the healing at the end of her ultimate is the part that turns a fight she lost into a fight that never resolved. Mercury's Treads is for the knockups (her damage was never the problem), and it belongs on whoever is trying to reach her carry. A Control Ward is here because most of the value she generates comes from being somewhere your team hasn't looked, and the cheapest way to stop a roaming support is to see her leave.