Why buffing Cinderhulk would cause more problems than it solves.

There's a very popular post on the forms right now claiming that rather than Sion and Sejuani being too weak, Cinderhulk is too weak. The post largely accomplishes this by pointing out the bottom 5 win rate junglers on champion.gg, Gragas, Olaf, Nautilus, Maokai, and Rek'sai, are Cinderhulk users.

They then fail to mention that all 5 of these champions have been nerfed severely because of their strengths and popularity in pro play, yet even still two of them, Gragas and Rek'sai, were played just almost as much as every other jungler combined in this year's worlds. They also fail to note that 6 of the top 20 junglers by win rate are dedicated Cinderhulk users, with many of the 14 others flexing into it. Cinderhulk junglers are as a whole performing about as well as every other jungle item, which like all the others, includes quite a lot of variance between its users. To be fair, the post does mention Skarner is performing fine statistically, although they attribute it to him being unbalanced in general. The only reason the five lowest win rate jungler use Cinderhulk is because tanks with high reliability and teamfighting utility dominate the pro scene whenever they are strong, and thus get repeatedly nerfed in order to make room for other options. Gragas, Olaf, Maokai, and Rek'sai are the worst offenders of this, so it's no suprise they have low solo-que win rates.

As I detail in my last post, strong damage itemization for tanks in Cinderhulk and Thornmail crowded out typical damage junglers for a good part of this season, just like anytime itemization lets one class fulfill the roles of another while still fulfilling their own. Thanks to innate armor or HP scalings many tanks are already uniquely problematic at beating other roles at their own game whenever they have strong itemization, and brutal DPS options, like the writer of the post calling Cinderhulk underpowered wants, would trivialize every other option.

There's no easy solution to the performance disparities between junglers, but it's not from one jungle item being too weak or too strong overall right now. Certainly, some champions utilize certain jungler items better than others, but as a whole right now this comes down to individual champions, not the items relative power towards each other.

The pre season brings about quite a few changes to the jungle, which I detailed in my last post, as well as some itemization changes that make tanks considerably stronger, which I'll detail in my next post. I have hopes that these will being greater variety to the game, unlike the complete removal of champion that wasn't a hyper carry, a support, or tank like the Cinderhulk meta did, despite any false nostalgia.