8.10 Jungle Changes - Iteration and Additional Context

Heyas there,

Thanks everyone for your feedback last week. We have a new iteration on our jungle changes for 8.10, and we've reevaluated some of our goals and tactics and we are testing some new changes as a result.

For reference our goals for the 8.10 changes were included in our first context post here: https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/MQob4lFt-upcoming-jungle-changes-for-810:

** Goals we are still targeting for 8.10: **

• Reduce early lane pressure from junglers
• Reduce mana restraints as a hard blocker for champions that want to jungle

Additional context on reducing early lane pressure: The lane phase is one of the most important points in the game for creating and building a lead against your opponent. Currently, we’re seeing junglers being the deciding factor in who wins or loses a lane more often than feels appropriate. We've had a steady creep of jungler pressure towards early lane influence that we want to combat. Laners should more often have the opportunity to outplay their opponents and showcase their skills without being thwarted by jungle presence. To be clear, we still want junglers to primarily influence the game through ganks, but we want to push back the earliest of these ganks, and generally increase the cost a jungler pays for them.

** Goals we are de-emphasizing for 8.10: **

• Increased early Jungle vs Jungle interaction
• Encourage variation in optimal pathing

We're going to put substantially less emphasis on the goal of encouraging variation in optimal pathing. In particular, we're attempting to iterate away from pathing changes that feel mandated in the early game, or overly-influenced by random elements.

Next, we recognize that our tactics to encourage early jungle vs. jungle interactions were received as too heavy-handed and that there'd be too much of an emphasis on powerful early junglers and laners who can establish early dominance/wave pressure. We think this is still a promising space to open up at some point, but likely not using the tactics you saw in the last set of changes.

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High level changes and context from the previously stated iteration:

• Rift Scuttler spawn logic :: Randomly determined location at all points >>> Now at game start, there are crabs on both sides of the river. When both are killed, only one will respawn, in a randomly determined location

• Context: We want to lower the pressure that RNG has on the early game decision making of the jungler and their laners. We like the dynamic the randomness and scarcity creates as the game progresses, but forcing it so early turned out to be too dramatic.

• Rift Scuttler experience :: 170 >>> 115-230 (scales from levels 1-9)

• Context: This makes the early Rift Scuttler not as pivotal in terms of early fights and there is no more forced incentive to take it as it won't grant a quicker path to level 3 than other routes. As the game progresses, Scuttler importance will climb such that it's still a point of conflict.

• Rift Scuttler gold :: 100 >>> 70-140 (scales as above)

• Context: Same as previous section. Pushing the reward into later in the game.

• Camp Respawn timers :: 2:30 >>> 2:15

• Context: Very tentatively testing lower respawn timers. Your camps having downtime is great for encouraging PvP through ganks, but we can also see a world where camps being available more leads to wider decision making, not fewer. Our hypothesis is this will bring back some gains encouraging more counter-jungling as a response to ganks, and thus higher cost and probably less ganks early on. Moreover, efficient pathing becomes a more important skill test. As mentioned, these are tentative because the changes have downsides: this encourages a heavier PvE playstyle and makes the fastest junglers have an easy and noninteractive path to a lead. Gold value of camps is also down 10% so economy is not flat-out increased, though further tuning will be required here.

As usual, changes on PBE are subject to change and planned for pretty significant iteration. These changes potentially more so than most, as we recognize we're working with a delicate system that currently supports a good number of playstyles and skill tests. Thanks as always for your passionate feedback and please do let us know how these changes feel on PBE.

Also small extra note: we have version of Runic Echoes on PBE that we'll be pulling in favor of a different iteration that was receiving more positive internal feedback. The shape of that item looks more like the following:

https://i.imgur.com/CCGMHGW.png