gank check

To ambush an enemy player — usually in a lane, usually as a jungler coming out of fog. A well-timed gank is the backbone of a MOBA early game.

In MOBA games: a surprise attack, often by multiple players against a lone enemy. "Gank top lane" = surprise the top-lane player.

A gank fail is the deeply humiliating sequence of events in which a jungler tries to execute an ambush and everything falls apart — the target flashes, the laner freezes and doesn't follow up, the enemy support is somehow there already, or the gank cod simply shows up three seconds late having taken a scenic route through the wrong camps. Gank fails are often clipped, uploaded, and captioned with things like 'this is why I have trust issues.' The worse the setup, the funnier the fail.

Gank mode is the mental and strategic state a jungler enters when they decide that farming camps is for cowards and the real fun is in terrorizing every lane on the map. In gank mode, the minimap becomes a hunt, every enemy out of position becomes a target, and the jungle player pings their movement so frequently the team starts to feel like they're being coached by a very enthusiastic predator. Gank mode can be called on demand or activated involuntarily after an enemy taunts in chat.

A gank god is a player — usually a jungler — whose ambushes are so perfectly timed, so surgically executed, and so psychologically devastating that the enemy team starts making questionable life choices just to avoid them. The gank god doesn't just kill you; they kill you in a way that makes you question your decision to load up the game at all. Associated with legendary junglers who seem to teleport across the map and arrive exactly when you've just used your escape ability.