Boards›Gameplay

I am at a point where I do not care about the absurd damage, the absurd mobility, lack of defense...

HateDaddy·9/19/2019, 1:24:10 PM·40 votes·14,855 views

I don’t care about hard counter match-ups. I don’t care about riot overbuffing everything. I don’t care about champions having too much in their kits. I don’t care about bruises, tanks, assassins, ad carries, mages, supports, and all of their sub-classes respectively. I don’t care about summoner spell diversity lacking. I don’t care about keystones brings disproportionately favorable to offense. I don’t care about the entire inspiration tree in general. I have gotten to a point where I accept these things for what they are, because I have a choice: enjoy the game or don’t enjoy the game. If I wish to enjoy it, I need to put up with the downsides....

Because: I enjoy playing top lane. I enjoy playing my small handful of champions I enjoy. I enjoy playing with my friends whenever I can. I enjoy the good games that come around when they do. I enjoy the rush of competition I’m still able to get at the tender age of 31. I very much enjoy playing against an equally skilled or even more skilled top laner, because the challenge is a thrill to me. I like thinking about creative ways to win lanes, survive lanes, or all out just be functional and whatever that results in, it results in - even the uncertainty can be thrilling. I enjoy the champion interactions, and though I am not nearly as invested in lore as I once was, I still enjoy those dynamics of the game that I’m familiar with.

But, after all these years, I have one great frustration. It persists through every season, and since I am a top laner you can probably guess where I’m headed. Understand that I’m not attacking this playerbase, because your frustration very well may be greater than mine.

What am I still greatly frustrated about? The importance to d the jungler. The higher that you climb, the more it matters. And again, junglers, I am not attacking you guys. I have to imagine the idea of needing to gank non-stop is probably a great frustration for you, too - after all, clearing is a breeze for most champions. Then you have nothing to do but gank, and that’s what frustrates me as a solo laner.

It’s not even about my jungler being incompetent (or me being incompetent for that matter). My jungler could do everything right and still lose because the other jungler did everything slightly more right or simply played the better champion. And while the difference in performance may have been marginal, the results are anything but. That’s because once a jungler gets one gank off, it becomes easier and easier to get more off. And they are incentivized to play like this, because there really isn’t anything to punish them if they don’t. They can always go back and clear, and often times they may have already cleared and simply have nothing better to do. And it doesn’t matter where you are: under tower, in the middle of the lane, overextended - you can be ganked just about anywhere at anytime. And this is, in my estimation, the single greatest frustration of most laners.

Let me pull back a little though: I am not suggesting the role be removed. I understand that the jungler in solo queue will always be the most important role. Ganking will always be a part of the game. However, laners have very little tools now to combat this and junglers are encouraged to gank because of how rather meaningless farming can be. As a laner, I have limited wards. Yes pinks exist, but that is a luxury that you often can not afford. And when you do have them, junglers are overloaded with ways to creep through terrain, stealth, jump around vision spots or just flat out run you down even when you see them coming. There’s a popular saying in solo queue: the better jungler wins. And that’s true, though the sentiment may not necessarily be - a jungler that is actually more skilled could lose because of one simple botched play.

What I want, what I would dream for that is, would be for the jungler role to be significantly reduced. That is, encourage farming early so laners can actually get on their feet. God help you if the jungler starts on your side of the map in top lane - you can’t play the game for the first 3 minutes. Most junglers used to spike really hard at 6, so that gave a lot of champions some time to get their feet wet before a jungler could live in a lane without punishment (and back in past seasons, that would’ve been a bad strategy). Can we please have a feature where jungler camps are reduced in EXP, but they respawn much faster early and slowly but surely respond slower over the the course of the game. This does two important things: it prevents afk clearing junglers scaling for free (I mean, the camps will just stop spawning at some point so you’ll hit a wall where you can’t just farm if you want to continue scaling), while simultaneously punishing junglers really hard for attempting to gank a lot early (they don’t get a whole level off of one camp to make up for lost time, for example). If they want to stay up in levels, they need to farm some. This makes it necessary for junglers to selectively choose when and where to gank rather than just say “ah fuck it, I’m gonna piss top off - he looks like the kind of guy that punches toads.”

I realize this comes with some problems, but please...something has to change. This is maddening, and it makes the game super unfun for most people when you have an even marginal difference in junglers.

27 Comments

Linna Excel9/19/2019, 3:12:47 PM9 votes

IMO riot should put in a feature where up until level 6 or something, junglers get enough benefits from the jungle that they are ceding an advantage in mid and late game to the other jungler if they start ganking early.

Basically it's like being an early game bully vs scaling. Make it so that if a jungler is going to gank a lot in the early game, he's risking something. Right now it feels like riot is compelling junglers to hard gank without caring about what they want to do (Shyvana player when I jungle) and is less concerned about how it makes other lanes feel (probably why battlemages don't mid anymore). I really think they should make ganking vs not ganking a tough decision where you might be giving something up and thus have to consider team comps and what the other jungler wants to do instead of it being an auto decision to gank.

Rαy9/19/2019, 4:52:44 PM6 votes

I do care about all the things mentioned in the title and they are frustrating the shit out of me.

ImTheJuggernauty9/19/2019, 4:42:38 PM4 votes

I once was top lane as darius against I don't remember who. Could have been renekton or aatrox or something similar. I was almost exactly in the middle of lane, had flash and ghost up too. River was warded, and tri bush (enemy side) may have been warded for me too.

None of it mattered. Nunu came snowballing in FROM THE ENEMY TOWER and caught me in a never ending gank. The only thing that would have saved me would have been to immediately pop BOTH FLASH AND GHOST. Sure, that part was my mistake. But the truly sad part is that I would need to do something like that just to safely retreat from the middle of my lane as darius, when, for reference, I was relatively even with my opponent in kills/cs/XP.

Basically it meant that, even with two mobility sums up, I wasn't safe IN THE MIDDLE OF MY LANE, as a LANE BULLY type champ, because the instant my lane opponent lands CC it's a virtual guaranteed cc chain from nunu the jgler, even though I had proper vision up at the time. Like, nunu just ran it down from tower. Once I was cc'd by my laner just for a moment, I had no chance. Again, I would have had to have popped both my sums immediately. Instead, I tried to save them for when it would matter in the hopes that I wouldn't have to blow them for nothing. So what happens? I end up blowing them both anyway and explode anyway.

Like, there is no way to counter that short of sitting under my tower and eating dirt the whole matchup. If I don't have both sums up, I might as well not even step out of tower range at any point for any reason unless my lane opponent is backed or roaming somewhere else.

WoonStruck9/19/2019, 6:31:53 PM4 votes

Make it so camps take time to clear. Increase rewards. Make them scale through the game so that even if you have a lead its a choice to commit to farming or ganking. Make cinderhulk scale vs non-epic monsters linearly (%hp?) so even when you're behind and not building offense you aren't fucked over trying to farm.

Cräfty9/20/2019, 4:02:07 AM3 votes

I made a post 8 days ago about some of the biggest problems in the game, in which I talked about the jungle problems, as a main Jungler myself. I'm just gonna copy paste what I wrote there, because I think you will learn few things about junglers, and the jungle in general, and why junglers are not as powerful as you think:

4. Jungle

Oh boy, where do I even start with this one? I main jungle, and let me say this to all of you who don't main jungle and think that Jungle is fine: Jungle SUCKS right now! It's so bad and so fucked up that it is actually the worst role to main, atm, and has the least impact of all the other roles, on average! Right now, you have a way better chance to carry from the ADC or MID role than from the Jungle role. Not that I'm saying you can't carry as a jungler, but I'm saying that you need to put in 10 fold the energy and effort of other roles in order to carry games. Here is why:

  • Significant lack of agency: In this coinflippy meta, where each game you're hoping you have the better bot lane and/or mid laner, you're completely at the mercy of RNGesus! You're so dependant on your teammates to carry you in the later stages of the game that, even if you camp your lanes and get your teammates ahead, if they don't play well, all your efforts are wasted and you lose automatically. This is more of a problem in higher elo games and in low elo games with relatively the same skill level. If you're smurfing in low elo, it's not that big of a deal, though.

Most junglers fall off late game, so it's extremely difficult to carry games that go beyond 30 min. As a jungler, in soloQ, you're forced to play " carry " junglers and you absolutely need to snowball really hard, early on, to be able to 1v9 the games. But one mistake on your part and you're done... especially if your teammates are bad and can't support you and help you carry them. You're too reliant on your teammates doing well in lane, especially in the first 10 min.

  • Jungle experience and EXP distribution: We all know, jungle exp sucks ass. That's why we take some farm, gold and exp from lanes after ganks, not because we're assholes, but because we're poor af and need it. We don't even see it as a reward for our ganks, like in the old days, but as a necessity for our survival.

Not only that, the exp distribution is so unbalanced, in the jungle, that it favores a certain playstyle that you're pretty much forced into, if you wanna maximize your exp gain. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, if you don't know, right now, the red side camps (Raptors, Red buff and Krugs) give way more exp than the blue side camps (Gromp, Blue buff and Wolves). That means, if you wanna maximize your exp gain and not fall behind in terms of levels, you need to always prioritize clearing you red side jungle as soon as possible. In fact, I've seen so many pro junglers totally play the first 15 min of the game ignoring the blue side jungle, except maybe taking blue buffs, and win the early game for their teams, because they maximized their exp gain and their pathing by taking the whole red side jungle and soaking up exp from the lane they ganked.

Needless to say, this is the most efficient basic way to jungle, atm, and it's very restrictive and uncreative. Pathing is basically the same each game, with the same champions, with minor adjustments, here and there, depending on whether there was an invade or not, or maybe you wanna gank the other side of the map 1st so you start at the opposite side, but nothing too creative or anything. It's boring, it's repetitive and it sucks!

Red side jungle is always more important to a jungler, since it gives more exp. So, if you're a laner and you see that both jungle sides camps are up and you see your jungler coming from base, you should always know that he's heading towards his red side 1st, to clear it. So, if you're on the blue side of the map and you need a gank, don't fuck up or do anything stupid before your jungler clears his camps on red side and comes towards your side of the map.

  • Scuttle crab: I hate this thing! Riot fucked up so hard with the jungle exp that they gave us the little piece of shit in the river to fight for and to give us poor vision but a decent exp and gold. I've talked earlier about agency problems, well this mofo actually created another agency problem for other lanes as well.

" If your jungler is heading to take a scuttle crab, you better push your lane and have priority and come help him secure it ". I bet all of you heard this line before, somewhere. Well, even though Riot pushed the timer of the 1st crab to 3:15, it's still a problem and laners are getting sick of stopping everything they're doing to go help secure this little shit.

Also, the RNG of the crab spawning makes pathing really bad for junglers, since if you go for a play on one side of the map but the crab is spawning on the other side, you better make that gank work, my friend, and get some gold and exp out of it, because the other jungler is gonna take that crab for free. And let's not forget all the unnecessary fights that happen simply because your jungler wanted to secure a crab in the river. So many games gets thrown over a piece of crap crab that isn't even worth the effort!

Riot could have easily made us establish vision in the river without adding in the crab but they forced us to fight over it because they want more highlights in pro play... urgh! We're fighting over river vision (wards), dragons and barons anyway, we don't need this forced fight trigger in the game!

CubanThund3r9/19/2019, 8:39:49 PM3 votes

this. makes sense

you could even have jungle camps on a timer so they just leave the jungle after a while and spawn back in 1 minute

so that you have to choose between killing the creeps or ganking

BackdoorPrincess9/20/2019, 5:53:47 AM2 votes

Honestly with turret plating the way it is, it's almost recommended to camp one lane, unless there's a garen-teed kill somewhere else if you visit. On top of this, mana regen this season is absolutely bonkers, blue buff isn't really as necessary on junglers so invading to steal it doesn't hurt them as much, and if you're a nunu/reksai/udyr/hec or what have you, and a laner has some form of cc, that enemy is kinda fucked anyways regardless of ward or naw, as it's a garen-teed flash or die scenario, and all of the current fotm junglers have some kind of gap-closing (whether it's boosted ms, a leap/dash) that could nullify that flash anyways, ESPECIALLY in a solo lane.

Some champs have innate anti-gank in them, your Leblancs, Zeds, even Ekkos depending on the matchup, and i usually let a laner know that unless you happen to outplay that leblanc hard, me visiting is going to just be wasted time, best case scenario is usually trading a kill for me with a death for you if theyre greedy, possibly blown sums if not. Which circles back around to toplane, when you have one garen-teed escape on a hefty-ass cd, the salt-fairy will probably be visiting frequently to give me juicy juicy platings, as well as to ensure i dont have to fuck with top after the second or third kill because my laner can now effectively 2v1 with the gold advantage they have. AND IF THEY CANT, im gonna get this sweet-ass drag while they pull of this coordinated gold heist up top, since it is now mandatory that junglers can solo dragon lest they be called a bitch by all other junglers

DarkTree19/19/2019, 10:54:54 PM2 votes

high elo jungle players that i've listened to have said that it's primarily an issue with jungle exp - they've nerfed it to a point where afking in someone's lane will let you leech more exp than powerfarming even if you have fast clear, that, coupled with longass respawn timers on camps makes strategies besides permaganking objectively just inferior as you'll still be behind while also having less map pressure

but apparently also permafarming was a toxic unfun to play against strat so they don't want to go back to it

idk

Evil Jester9/20/2019, 8:42:50 AM2 votes

As a jungler main for many seasons, I gotta say it's always been a broken role. I can't remember a single season where Riot didn't overhaul something about the role, adding krugs, the arrival of the rift herald, hell the map layout during the Rift update completely revamped jungle pathing while changing little to lanes, then there's the added new dragon buffs with a stacking system, that time where we had 3 smites to choose from, one of which was an AOE.

Also Top's layout sucks for gank defence, and I sadly take advange/

Mid lane, you got 3 options of escape, river bushes, and your tower, most mids have a dash or CC that can help with the getaway too.

Bot lane you got one most likely escape route back to tower, BUT they have supports with CC, heal, speed buffs and tools to help themselves and the ADC to get out of a gank, not to mention the bushes actually make the lane strategic and it gives you more ward options between the 2 of them.

Now take top lane, you got no buddy system, 1 escape route, only one way to run which makes it really predictable where you are going, bushes rarely get used unless during your escape but it's still predictable where to aim a skill, you don't get as many wards like bot gets, not a lot of escape options like mid has.

regardless of what champion is taken top, Top is probably the easiest lane to gank. Yeah some top laners have some dashes and CC too but your always gonna go in the same direction and most of top laners CC is ether single target like Nasus wither or Darius pull with very small AOE. and when there is 2 vs 1 well......your kinda fucked only being able to CC one target

And you have a good point about successful ganks being too impactful, I remember at one point there used to be a huge emphasis on securing jungler buffs which was nice for a while till it became a farming contest of whos faster at mob killing and Yi always wins that one.

JedenVojak9/19/2019, 9:44:38 PM2 votes

I haven't played in years but my understanding is, if junglers are constantly ganking all the time, either the jungle mobs aren't rewarding enough (not enough gold/xp, not spawning enough) or junglers are getting too much early game power from something.

Maybe riot needs to nerf the jungle items?

FSRER9/20/2019, 3:46:17 PM1 votes

I enjoyed playing Jax back in the days, the real Jax. The one on who you would get Bork Trinity and Ravenous, doing 1v2 and 1v3 because you calculated every Q, every flash and E, every third hit and every ravenous hydra auto reset proc. These days I enjoyed playing League, I enjoyed playing toplane. What is Jax now? Play trinity, spear of shojin, titanic auto win because of the items even if you have no idea what you are doing.

AlterMordred9/20/2019, 5:14:52 PM1 votes

Dont you love it when you outrade your opponent, out position them, out poke them, dodge everything they have, out CS.

You spend the first 2 minutes doing everything better just to have Nunu come out of fog of war with predator and snowball giving him 600 move speed, BOOM your not dead and behind for the next 10 minutes

GodlyBane9/20/2019, 8:02:26 PM1 votes

Solutuon: jg item massively reduces xp gained from lane minions until its fully upgraded, however hard buff jungle xp, and jungle tankiness imo

CytheGuy9/19/2019, 10:36:41 PM1 votes

The biggest issue is that ganking junglers tend to be better at clearing than farming junglers specifically because their successful ganks give them the stats to clear faster. I can be playing Yi and be outfarmed at 0/0/0 by a Kha'Zix at 3/0/1. He spent time ganking, so why should he be farming better than me? The biggest answer is that Lane minions are still better to farm than the jg even after the anti-funnel changes.

Saevum9/21/2019, 2:43:23 PM1 votes

The fact of a second player deciding your lane or game performance is annoying.

The fact that certain items in the shop have been changed or even removed beacause of this role is annoying.

The fact that their role secures the most important late game objectives is annoying.

The fact that they control the flow of terrain control or lose the terrain control is annoying. Its not the same having control near dragon than herald. Its not the same having control near Baron than dragon. It is not the same being able to invade blue or red than just counter-ganking.

Among other annoying facts..

Mihalikb9/20/2019, 2:26:12 AM1 votes

The simple fact that junglers will hit 2-3 and sometimes depending on junglers 4 before any of the lanes elicits them to gank early. Which if successful sends them into a snowball that makes them gank more.

This is clearly intended behavior. It's not an unexpected quirk of current balance. This is what Rito wants.

That and the ability for junglers to literally just sit and wait in brush for upwards of 40 seconds without actually falling behind.

I really think the fundamental problem is the sheer power of the level 2-3 power spikes junglers get.

Chainman39/20/2019, 7:16:16 AM1 votes

" I don’t care about bruises" Whats daddy doing to you? LOL

"I have gotten to a point where I accept these things for what they are, because I have a choice: enjoy the game or don’t enjoy the game. If I wish to enjoy it, I need to put up with the downsides...." " and it makes the game super unfun "

" junglers are overloaded with ways to creep through terrain, stealth, jump around vision spots or just flat out run you down even when you see them coming." "I don’t care about champions having too much in their kits."

My advice to you: stop lying to yourself. You do care but you dont want to say you do.

And the saying "better jungler wins" isnt true. I can give you multiple reasons why and why the people who say this, say it.

The thing is there's a lot to type about the jungle but from what you said about the jungle, i know you dont understand whats wrong with the jungle right now. I know what you want, but this; "Can we please have a feature where jungler camps are reduced in EXP, but they respawn much faster early and slowly but surely respond slower over the the course of the game" has the opposite effect of what you're looking for.

Aatrox Airlines9/20/2019, 11:49:49 AM1 votes

One thing i learned over the years of maining top: toplane is for masochists