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Riot Fearless on the Jungle Changes (+ some feedback)

Necro Warrior87·5/18/2018, 8:10:54 PM·16 votes·8,593 views

"I won’t comment too much on 8.10 directly, as we’re very early and I’m not overly involved in monitoring those changes right now. I will say that it’s rather expected that junglers will not enjoy changes that did target reducing their early influence on lanes. We’re asking players to relearn timings and strategies that feed directly into their window of greatest power. Delaying that window, changing the power dynamics, and requiring players to experiment and learn new things are all painful for a lot of players.

I can say that we did anticipate this. No one working on these changes was new to changing the jungle, or did these changes without quite a bit of testing. Sometimes, we have to fix large enough problems that we have to be comfortable with these sorts of costs. I would ask,to anyone unhappy about these changes, be constructive. We want to understand the impacts more than anyone, and despite all our internal testing, we can never compete with the information we get in our first day of live, not to mention the actual patch week. We’re scrambling to take in as much as we can, to read player reactions wherever we can find them, because we want to make this game as good as we can make it. The personal attacks can be really draining, the circle jerking uninformative, and the down voting points of disagreement just means that we get even less value from some communities where we’d really like to engage.

I know this is mostly shouting into the void, but better than being quiet, I guess. "

Here's some feedback from me, personally: You had three goals: 1: increase Jungler interactivity. 2: increase Jungle diversity. 3: Decrease Early Jungler Power as to not affect lanes as much.

The way you went about trying to achieve Goal 1 hurt Goal 2 (And 3 to a lesser extent). Making early dueling for scuttle crab meta made it so that only good early Jungler's have a huge advantage, therefore hurting more mid game to late game focused Jungler's (Farming Junglers like Yi and Shyv got hurt a lot). Also, Jungle paths got more predictable, meaning that assassin/invaders got buffed as they can now pull of more successful invades. The more abusive Jungler's and early Jungler's are now at the top. This isn't good due to the fact this makes games snowball more often and end earlier in a lot of cases. If you try to avoid scuttle altogether You're at a severe disadvantage now that the enemy jungle has a gold and experience lead on you. Also laner's are now participating in jungle v jungle fights over scuttle crab, I'm not sure if you wanted this to happen but it can be rather frustrating at times. All in all, I preferred the previous meta. And to commenters, please keep the discussion simple and constructive.

10 Comments

heroikc5/18/2018, 8:49:01 PM13 votes

I sort of gave up on expecting Riot to know what they are doing after the Warwick "early game nerfs".

Hügö5/18/2018, 8:53:30 PM7 votes

The way they reduced early power completly fucked jungle. Being permanent behind in levels when you have your jungle for yourself is bad on it's own but everyone knows the time comes when your teammates take your camps too.

RekSai CoffeeCo5/19/2018, 12:14:04 AM4 votes

Here's some feedback from me, personally: You had three goals: 1: increase Jungler interactivity. 2: increase Jungle diversity. 3: Decrease Early Jungler Power as to not affect lanes as much.

Actually 1 and 3 totally killed 2 badly.

T4underbolt5/19/2018, 6:50:07 AM2 votes

Hahaha. "Despite our internal testing we can't compete with info we get from live". Like why do they lie? They never listen to test team. Test team says something is broken. Pbe also confirms it. They ignore it and put it live anyway. It happened so many times it's impossible to count.

ValyrianBlade5/19/2018, 1:41:18 PM2 votes

I disagree entirely.

Junglers that are weaker early need to focus on being unpredictable. Take the scuttle farthest from your opponent's expected location at 2 minutes.

Junglers can ask laners for help. Sometimes laners will roam to make a 2v2 or 3v3 fight at the scuttle crab early - that's improved value on game knowledge about who should win that skirmish. If only one team's Lane roams, they're rewarded for map awareness. If the jungler backs off of the roam, he rewards his Laner with free Lane priority.

My 3 games on hecarim, one of the weakest junglers at levels 2 and 3 combined with low clear speed: Game one, I went red-raptors-scuttle which completely avoided Xin, then blue for 4.

Game two, I did the same start (except top side since I was red that game) and I guess they figured out I started red since aatrox got to Lane late. Camille came to ward top scuttle so I backed off AND kindred stole my blue and got bot scuttle. Except that left Camille's Lane in a terrible position, gave aatrox level 2 way before her, she died 1v1 shortly after, then I circled back and ganked her on teleport to kill her again. Aatrox easily carried the game, even though Camille had Lane pressure before she went to ward so deep.

Game 3 I started blue bot side, to wolves then scuttle. Ran into shyvanna there with red buff, and enemy mid had priority. I toyed with her for a bit to bait their mid out of Lane and let scuttle reset, then went to my red and top scuttle. Traded one for one, wasted time on her red buff, and alleviated pressure on my mid Lane.

Three games, as a jungle secondary playing against primaries, with a jungler that should be the weakest due to these changes - and 3 wins.

These changes reward macro play and getting in your opponent's head. That's a HUGE improvement in my opinion. That's what jungling SHOULD be about, not ganking at 3 minutes with a level and health advantage plus double buffs.

JoeMG5/18/2018, 10:23:44 PM1 votes

It's sad because I feel like jungler diversity has been drastically improved since last season/preseason, especially with new items helping AP junglers. To me, making scuttle worth so much plus having the rng spawning makes no sense. Scuttle was a balanced objective as it was.

If they wanted to keep junglers in the jungle longer, they should have just limited the initial exp amount, made camps do more damage and/or have the first camps spawn a little later.

What would be best would be if the early game and duelist junglers had fast clears that left them low health while tank junglers cleared slower but remained healthy. Having that balance would make it so clearing camps or attempting an early gank would be a bigger decision.

Tik1155/19/2018, 1:28:38 PM1 votes

So here's how I see it,

The solution to the whole "Level 3 in 3 min" problem could of easily of been solved by lowering the initial xp of the camps, rather then both buffs and a camp to level 3 they could of changed it to say 3.5 camps to level 3, this would put them on par with other solo lanes, the introduction of the scuttle changes have pushed out any jungler which is not a duelist which has limited the jungle pool to around 5-6 viable junglers with none of them being tanks or AP which by extension makes the runic echos changes moot since no AP jungler can survive well enough to utilize it and skuttle xp is so huge we now have mid laners taking smite, the last time mid laners took smite was the original implementation of Runic echos and we all know how that little period went (Looking at you Ezreal).

At this point Riot have the choice of nerfing early game junglers, which would essentially run into the same issue that we have with carries (Why pick an early game carry when the late game hypercarries can match them then surpass them late?) buff the mid/late game junglers which if we want the Sej+ release Cinder meta have fun there, they revert the patch which given they reverted Kog, Rengo and LBs stuff there actually might be hope for that or they do big changes to the jungle again.

If they go with changes then this "Super Skuttle" has to go, having RNG for free vision is fine but when you add onto that 4-5 minions worth of gold AND 100 xp it'll warp everything around it.

If it were me I'd do the following

Reduce xp from camps so it takes 3.5 - 4 camps to hit level 3 and in the event of too many junglers getting to 3 quickly focus primarily on adjusting the camp xp before looking at bigger changes Remove "Super skuttle" and return the normal skuttles, the RNG appearing part can stay imo If they HAVE to have super skuttle then don't have it be every skuttle, have it be like dragon where it spawns every X minutes but don't have it spawn at the start (Lets say after 6-7 minuetes and it spawns every 4)