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Devourer and Runeglaive are proof: Jungle items are inherently unworkable

McNaulty··12 votes·1,327 views

Jungle items were created in S3 for a somewhat noble purpose: giving junglers a leg up in clearing jungle camps. However, in practice, they have never achieved Riot's primary goals for the jungle (S2 Worlds had greater jungle diversity than any subsequent SEASON of League), and have created additional balance problems.

Just recently we had Skimishers Warwick, OP Warriors, OP Cinderhulk, Runeglaive Ezreal, and now hated Devourer. But this isn't an isolated incident, the jungle meta since S3 has always been overwhelmingly constrained by which is the best jungle items, and whenever a jungle item was good enough to elevate junglers it was abused by laners: Elder Lizard (Ezreal), Spirit Golem (Tops), Wraith (Vlad/Anivia), all happened in S3 as well.

This is not unexpected, and is entirely fixable: Remove Jungle items from the game entirely, and balance the jungle (and junglers) based on normal items. Isn't 3 seasons of stubbornness enough when it comes to this issue?

11 Comments

Reaper Review3 votes

Hunter's Machete

Cost: 345 Resale Value: 242

Unique Passive - Poacher: Gain an additional 12 + (1 x Level) gold for large monster or scuttle crab takedowns, increased by 25% if the target was in the enemy jungle. Additionally, whenever you earn gold from monster kills, this item gains charges equal to half the gold earned. When selling this item, the charges are expended and granted to you as additional gold.

_Unique Passive - Jungler: Basic attacks and spells against monsters deal an additional 15 + (5 x Level) Magic Damage to them over 2 seconds, and you regenerate 7 + (1 x Level) Health and 3 + (0.5 x Level) Mana per second while in combat with aggressive monsters. _

Unique Passive - Ascetic: If you gain 4 levels with this item in your inventory, the Jungler passive is converted into a buff on your champion. The buff remains a unique named passive, however, and as such doesn't stack more than once should you buy another Hunter's Machete.

Something like this, maybe? Make the Machete itself scale with level and also provide a means for it to help you get whatever big-ticket non-jungle item your jungler of choice wants. No mucking around with upgrades that risk destabilizing the equilibrium. The numbers are just kinda guesstimated because number balance is hard.

The Ascetic passive, kinda harkening back to Eleisa's Miracle, allows you to keep your machete's benefits even after you sell it. (Or that could just be made an innate effect on Smite itself.)

The only thing is that then the +25% Bonus HP passive from Cinderhulk no longer has a home. Maybe lower the flat HP granted by Warmog's and put it there, since it's the "giant Health sponge" item anyway.

But this is all just me thinking out loud. It's probably a bad idea, but the only thing worse than a bad idea is an unspoken one (in most cases).

Dragonlord71372 votes

Well really all Riot needs to do is make jungle items have a lot of effects that don't work on minions or simply deal incredibly small amounts of damage to lane minions while dealing tons of damage to the jungle and dealing the same damage to champions as if you had bought your average core item this way taking smite would just lead to a weak early game with small all game benefits. Also I do agree that the season 3 changes to the jungle are what has killed diversity and was probably the cause of many unbalanced jungle items being used outside of the jungle.

McNaulty3 votes

{quoted}

Well really all Riot needs to do is make jungle items have a lot of effects that don't work on minions or simply deal incredibly small amounts of damage to lane minions while dealing tons of damage to the jungle and dealing the same damage to champions as if you had bought your average core item this way taking smite would just lead to a weak early game with small all game benefits. Also I do agree that the season 3 changes to the jungle are what has killed diversity and was probably the cause of many unbalanced jungle items being used outside of the jungle.

But why do all of that when: A) There is no evidence (historically) that they can balance something like that; B) Simply deleting jungle items is easy and proven solution; and C) A huge % of the "Season 2 Problems" that that jungle items were supposed to fix were the result of (the now removed) oracles elixer, and the (mostly removed by trinkets and sighstone) huge warding gold burden on junglers.

The Yetii Rider1 votes

{quoted}

But why do all of that when: A) There is no evidence (historically) that they can balance something like that; B) Simply deleting jungle items is easy and proven solution; and C) A huge % of the "Season 2 Problems" that that jungle items were supposed to fix were the result of (the now removed) oracles elixer, and the (mostly removed by trinkets and sighstone) huge warding gold burden on junglers.

Sure, that's all well and good, but the jungle items make Smite customizable and interesting. And they also give us more gold for farming in the jungle, so that we can have a reasonable amount of gold from monsters while our laners don't get as much for poaching.

How else could we have all these nice things than with a sweet set of items?

McNaulty1 votes

Lol. Jungle Items remain, smite customization gone. Checkmate everyone.

The Yetii Rider1 votes

Smite customization isn't gone. You have Chilling Smite and Challenging Smite.

Dragonlord71371 votes

Well If they did remove all the smite customization then a lot of players will be quite angry. Also I have one other suggestion to improving the jungle. when you buy item 1039 it has say 20 stacks and you can't enchant it until you kill 20 monsters say but you can still upgrade it to item 3715, item 3706, item 3713 or item 3711. Or when you purchase your enchant you need to kill 10 jungle monsters to allow it to damage champions. And yes I do agree that whatever change Riot makes someone will find a way to exploit jungle items in unintentional ways.

Profirix1 votes

Ultimately, they just need to find a way to make it impossible to get ANY benefit from these items as a laner. When they made it so various jungle items could be used on champions, it changed the way that jungle items worked. Now a laner gets a significant advantage for choosing skirmishing smite or chilling smite on top of whatever enchantment suits the user.

360D3GR3SS1 votes

Simple solution. Runeglaive does not work on minions. Devourer stacks cannot be obtained through monster assists.

Akali is SO HOT1 votes

Jungle items for hard farmers that provide some stupidly good on hit effect like devourer can never be allowed to be strong. Runeglaive was just stupid because so many champions could abuse that weren't supposed to be using it to begin with. Jungle items are a good concept. Just some of the ones Riot has released have been stupidly broken. Tbh Season 3 had the best jungle items and I wouldn't mind seeing those replace the current ones.

z63XnLCMwX1 votes

holy fucks sake that necro

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