New in 2016: Jungle

Pro players and teams have been scrambling since the preseason to break down the new metagame and find advantages to exploit. In this 'New in 2016' series, we're looking at how the changes from the preseason and Patch 6.1, the first patch of the 2016 competitive LCS season, could impact the pro scene. We've looked over the changes to top lane, and now we're heading into the jungle. 

The preseason brought plenty of changes to every role, but junglers in particular were affected by revamps to some of the most fundamental characteristics of the game. With the changes to visions, Masteries and items, the jungle has become a much darker and scarier place.

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Vision

"Before, junglers could buy wards and protect their lanes pretty well," said Renegades jungler Crumbz. "But now, with the removal of green [Sight] wards from the shop, junglers have a hard time protecting lanes." While that may sound like a detriment to the role, it's actually to junglers' benefit -- rather than playing defensively, junglers are now more encouraged to look for kills.

"In some respects, it's just easier to get ganks off and kill people, because there's not as much vision on the map," said Liquid's IWDominate. "The jungle has two different options. You have the vision priority style, where you can go Tracker's Knife and still kind of play as the vision control of the team. But you can also not buy many wards and go carry style, which is viable in 2016."

To assist junglers pulling off their ganks, Patch 6.1 has made it even harder to track the jungler -- and it was already pretty hard to do so in the preseason. According to Crumbz, one of the only consistent ways to track the enemy jungler now is to have your own player place wards into enemy territory with Tracker's Knife. Alternatively, the AD carry and mid laner can drop Farsight Alteration totems (blue wards) -- and recently, it's been common for teams to run four of them to help track the jungler as well.

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But Farsight's early game cooldown's taken a massive blow in 6.1: while you can still cast it from great distance (hence the name), the increased 92 second rest time between casts (up from 76 when bought as soon as possible) makes it much harder to simply blanket the enemy jungle with vision from relative safety.

Runic Echoes

The lack of map-wide scrutiny has made it much easier for assassins like Rengar to be relevant again, and junglers are pretty satisfied with the current meta game’s expanded options. "We have champions like Kindred, who sort of clears slow in the beginning, but then does an insane amount of damage," said Echo Fox's jungler Hard. "We have champions that are still good, like Lee Sin, Elise and Gragas. There's so many champions you can play this time -- before, it was like three, and now it's seven."

Seven is a huge improvement over three, but if Player Relations Specialist Patrick "Scarizard" Scarborough had his way, seven isn't where it'd stop. "We had a bunch of bad mage junglers -- that was just kind of the case," he admitted. "Runeglaive was basically saying 'let's shrink the pool, but make [champions that can use Runeglaive] all really good.' Runic Echoes [coming out in Patch 6.1] is saying 'we're opening that back up again with an item that's useful for more characters.'"

He knows of players attracted to off-junglers like Karthus, Brand and Cassiopeia -- none of which are particularly synergistic with Runeglaive's Sheen-based autoattack modifier. The new Runic Echoes, however, works more like Luden's Echo, triggering off spell effects instead for bonus damage.

But, to Scarizard, it isn't necessarily the spell proc damage that deserves attention. "If we're going to see any new junglers as a result of this, it'll be because of the extra 10% movement speed. 10% plus Boots of Swiftness is a lot of speed. When used on Elise, you go into Spider form, and you basically don't have to land Cocoon."

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Masteries

Junglers gotta go fast to sneak past wards and get onto targets, but Runic Echoes isn't the only new tools given to them to do so. The new mastery system has greatly expanded options for how players customize their champion’s play style -- especially exemplified by keystone mastery Thunderlord’s Decree, currently popular in every role for the bolt of extra damage it piles onto enemy champions. But while most players might default to Thunderlord's Decree, Scarizard thinks that the updated Stormraider's Surge deserves a new look on Patch 6.1.

Stormraider's Surge, found in the Cunning tree, now grants a huge 75% slow resistance when it's triggered, along with 40% movement speed -- and triggering it is a lot easier. "The damage window being moved up by half a second is actually pretty big," claimed Scarizard. He gave examples of champions that would particularly benefit from being able to stick onto their targets with Stormraider’s movement speed bonuses: "Olaf is somebody people are already building this on. Vi is another; Vault Breaker, autoattack, and Denting Blows is a lot of damage. The 2.5 second window is often enough for an extra auto-attack or proc on an ability to get insane movement speed."

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"I think teams will still value Thunderlord's Decree very highly if you're going for early-game battles," said Scarizard. "But I do think the Stormraider's Surge buff is significant."

He agreed that Diana might be a particularly brutal beneficiary: the combination of Stormraider, Runic Echoes, and fewer wards to spot her approach means a lot of squishy champions are going to be saying a very premature "goodnight."

With the changes in Patch 6.1, junglers are eagerly sharpening claws and blades for a brand new hunting season. Let us know what you think of jungle in 2016, and stay tuned for more in the New in 2016 series coming this week, where we'll go over all the changes coming to every lane.