I forgot Smite.

It was downright terrifying. I'm lucky the enemy invaded minimally, but even so, my early damage to monsters was terrible, and leveling was just sad. For a rundown:

1. Started Gromp on Elise, Amplifying Tome and Pot to start, got loads of help, and a nearly perfect secure. Blue buff next. Big mistake. Despite killing mini golems first (1 mini golem got you to level 2 before, despite not having jungle item), I tried to rough up big golem, ultimately having to back, never hitting level 2.

2. Rushed Hunter's Potion (thank goodness it exists). Still had abhorrent clear rate, and therefore minimal benefit early on, but at least that item kept on giving. Barely cleared blue side before back.

3. Hopped to Red side to find that chickens and Red buff were cleared. Thanked my stars for mini golems, though I'm still level 2.

4. Finished Aether Wisp; It saved my butt a few times on enemy jg Malz, since he lacked CC outside ulti. Noticed I'm level 3 while top is level 5. Did as much of a full farm of jungle as possible to catch up, as I still lacked CC until 4.

5. Didn't finish farm wave; Mini Golems killed me. Proceeded to grab 2 daggers en route to Nashor's Tooth, which may have been the best decision of my life.

6. Farmed yet another wave because I was behind. This time, Malz met me in Red side. I proceeded to bait Malz (about the only thing I could possibly do). He was level 6. I was still level 4. Somehow, with allied help, I survived his ultimate before he shriveled and died. And I'm still behind.

7. I got my hands a little dirty, and decided to help in a skirmish in the river. On top of cleanly winning the fight, we finished it off with a dragon kill (enemies did kill one earlier). Feeling good. Ish.

8. Game continued a good while, and I'm still not confident to actually hit a lane. I finally got Nashor's Tooth soon after, and was gaining confidence in my level 7 self. That is, until I peeked over and saw my allies at level 10 and 11 pushing a tower.

9. Luckily, after this point, my team and I must not have botched a single thing, because the game started to go smoothly from here on. My farming was much smoother with Nashor's, and my baiting tactics successfully took the pressure off of my 2 carries, Cait and Kayle. Zed was fuming (another fun add-on to forgetting Smite), and doing his own thing mostly, but that didn't matter with how the enemy team was getting lit. We won a fairly convincing victory (sorry if you wanted a sulky ending).

Anyways, my point is this. Despite having a generally successful jungle build with a high success rate as of late (and some where I forgot Smite yet again), a simple missed summoner spell derails the build into possibly the most terrifying experience I have had in this game. I would really like it if instead of tying the role to a spell, we made a realistic consequence to jungling Smiteless. Like gold. Sure, less gold hurts, but when the jungling role is so highly tied to experience gain and base stats, you get a scenario where if you slightly play ball another way, you get punished very harshly for it. However, the jungle has always been worthwhile to lanes for the gold, not so much the experience.

I don't know what spurred the great EXP struggle of Seasons 5&6, but I feel it needs to stop. It's crippling junglers in ways that are still profitable to laners, and in a resource that's exactly zero if you can't clear the jungle. Of course lanes are going to tap the jungle harder, the gold is still there, and they don't need the experience; they get plenty from sitting through waves of minions.

And real quick, I'm not saying traditional jungling is as horrid an experience as I've laid out. However, having items that basically say, "Here, now you can level," might be turning the game into a struggle if you mess up, but that's mostly because of patches like this last one that are trying to gate jungle invasions from laners some with a resource they never needed (EXP). Please fix this.