On the hunt: How to use camp timers
Us junglers rule with math. Sure, the math to track when our jungle camps will respawn is fairly simple, but it's very easy to forget to do amidst the excitement of a League match.
That's where our secret weapon comes in handy: the automagic jungle camp timers in-game! Ready your wards, save your Smite cooldown, and let's look at some big LCS plays, and the players who made them, to learn how we can help our team secure victory by taking advantage of jungle camp timers.
Knowledge is Power!
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First off, let's take a look at how jungle camp timers work. At any point during a match, you can hit the TAB key to bring up the list of jungle camp timers at the top of your screen.
The order should be pretty obvious, thanks to the straightforward color-coded icons that represent the buff camps on each side of the jungle, Dragon, and the big bad Baron.
If you see an icon there, that means it was alive the last time that you saw it. A timer means that you saw it die, and have a helpful little reminder of when it will remerge (only to be immediately killed again -- jungle minions have pretty horrible lives).
The worst thing to see in that little timer box is a hyphen -- that's a public brand of shame on any jungler that means the camp was empty the last time you checked, and you had failed to ward it beforehand, so you have no clue when it's coming back.
When that happens (and, don't worry, it happens to the best of us!), you have to track it mentally, based on the standard time it takes that camp to respawn. The easiest way to track this is to type your estimate for when the camp will respawn into your team chat, so that you and your allies can reference it later.
When trying to do the quick calculations on these less-certain jungle camps, use this list for reference:
- Small camps respawn 100 seconds after death.
- Scuttler respawns 3 minutes after death.
- Buff camps respawn 5 minutes after death.
- Dragon respawns 6 minutes after death.
- Baron respawns 7 minutes after death.
How To Train Your Dragon
Never trust Dragon -- you must keep an eye on it at all times! It's a frequently contested, high-value jungle camp that you must make it a priority to secure.
Learn from H2K's mistake against SK Gaming in Week 3 (in the video above), when they gave up four Dragons in a row before suddenly realizing they absolutely had to fight for the fifth. And definitely don't repeat Origen's mistake in their eventual defeat to ROCCAT that same week -- they just ignored Dragon entirely.
ROCCAT stole the first Dragon without giving the timer to Origen, and without even have to clear Origen's Wards in the pit to do it! Origen just never put a seeing stick there -- notice how even OG's lone river ward dies of natural causes just before Dragon dies.
After that, ROCCAT used their knowledge of the timer to steal the next two Dragons in a row without Origen even showing up to defend them! For the cost of a single Ward, Origen could've avoided giving away all of that free gold and power.
In Week 4, Team Liquid and Team Solomid put heavy emphasis on Dragon in their big showdown. Both teams tracked the timer, and spent the few minutes before its respawn setting up wards all over the area, clearing out enemy wards, trying to land poke damage onto high-priority targets, and even buying long-term inefficient items just to secure success at the Dragon pit.
We enlisted the help of Team Liquid's jungler, Christian "IWillDominate" Rivera, to share his insight into that match, and help explain why it's important to track Dragon timers.
"Dragon pit is a really good place to force team fights," IWillDominate explains. "Dragon, in general, isn't the biggest objective on the map. But if you have a good team-fighting team, controlling the Dragon is a really good thing to do. It forces the enemy team to give it up, or come fight you. If they do come, that just gives you the team fights you're looking for."
"The biggest tip I have for tracking Dragon timer," IWillDominate continues, "is that, if you're in range of another champion, you'll see an animation and hear a sound effect that goes off when the dragon's taken by the enemy team. You can use that to mentally time the respawn (6 minutes) even if you didn't see it die."
Behind Enemy Lines
One of the most powerful things you can do with jungle camps timers is use them to steal buff camps in the enemy jungle -- a dirty, hilarious tactic called counterjungling.
Personally, I follow a cheesy infomercial motto when figuring out what's worth counter-jungling: No camp is too small! The constant loss of XP, gold, and Smite buffs to the enemy team adds up!
As his team's jungler, IWillDominate has spent plenty of time behind enemy lines, stealing enemy buffs and securing vision. And while forcing team fights around enemy buff camps can also be effective, he warns against focusing too much on counterjungling the little camps.
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"The only two jungle camps that it's important to keep a timer on are both of the enemy buffs," IWillDominate explains. "Those spawn every five minutes, so normally you want to time when you see the mid laner show up back mid. When you see him coming from the blue buff area, you know that it has just died. You can time the respawn of the jungle camp roughly five minutes from that point."
The best way to get those respawn timers is to keep wards within line-of-sight of those buff camps, though. Watch any LCS game, and you'll see supports and junglers warding enemy camps constantly to help with this.
We also asked IWillDominate to weigh in on the longtime jungler debate: Should you leave one small monster at an enemy camp, to delay/deny the enemy jungler a full respawn?
"I personally like just taking the entire camp," IWillDominate says. "Chances are, they're going to clear the small monster pretty soon -- within a minute. It's better to kill the whole camp, so that you definitely get the timer and will be able to control it. That's better than leaving one monster up and denying their Blue for an extra minute."
Til the Next Hunt
Thanks for joining us on this hunt, junglers! I hope you learned something new along the way and were reminded of the importance of tracking those jungle camp timers. It's just another small way that you can help secure a win for your team.
Be sure to keep an eye out for the incredible jungle camp timer control and manipulation the pros do in the LCS every week!
Josh Augustine's favorite champion to jet ski with is Rek'Sai, he's never enjoyed a Darius, and he will always go for the kill, even when he knows he shouldn't. He currently works as a game designer on EverQuest Next at Daybreak Games. He’d love to talk with you on Twitter.
when I get counterjungled ... their will be blood shed.
