Jungle Issues I've noticed (with an aside on jungle creeps)

There's a lot that's wrong with the new jungle right now.

• Jungle camps hit too hard
• Jungle sustain is incredibly limited, to the point where early pressure junglers can no longer pressure early at a rate high enough to impact the game
• The best jungle champs are those that scale with attack speed and those that have high innate sustain
• The gold/experience disparity is too high between junglers and laners. Even playing a top tier jungle like pantheon, at level 7 doing my second red buff, I am easily just killed by a solo laner that can just walk in and kill me, or just take my buff.
• Dragon is too good, and anyone that can solo the dragon early is considered strong. DRAGON SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO BE SOLOED if the buff is that strong and lasts the whole game.

I don't think we've firmly realized what the point of jungle creeps are. Unless I'm wrong, the point of jungle creeps is to give a jungler gold and experience in order to keep them slightly below where laners have gold/experience. It just seems to me that the investment of life/mana and time that a good amount of junglers spend clearing camps does not amount to this. Instead, camps this season are meant to bar a particular champion from enjoying a strength in their kit. Why does sustain make or break the jungle? Isn't the jungle meant to be accessible? Wasn't the idea of preseason 5 jungle to expand the pool? Well look what's happened so far: All season 4 top picks: nerfed to the ground Feral flare champs are back in. Sustain makes or breaks whether or not you can truly jungle. Sustain should be something that helps out, it should not be the deciding factor. Early game junglers cannot shut down late game hyper carries early, and thus defeats the point of picking them. Early game junglers cannot turn around lanes at a decent rate, and have only 1 of 3 outcomes that are helpful: They get a kill, they don't get a kill, and they are killed.

The point is that season 4's jungle only limited a small amount of picks, but it was a step in the right direction The issue with the statement that this "improves jungle diversity" is that it makes weaknesses that champions have too prevalent to keep up with the upper tiers. Sustain issues infringe too hard on the pressure potential of a lot of junglers. Xin Zhao, Pantheon, and Noc just don't care. They do what all of those other champs do, but they can survive. Making the jungle diverse involves making the jungle not too tough on people.