Jungleology 101: Why Shyvana is and isn't good.

So, I wanna talk about Shyvana a little bit because people have this misconception that she's always a good pick and she is absolutely broken. A lot of champs this season have been considered "broken" but in all honestly haven't been. Shyvana is one of them, at the same time, she's still pretty damn good. Here's why!

First, Shyvana is pretty good higher elo like Diamond 4 and higher. The reason is because well, you SHOULD have slightly more reliable teammates that being a weak early jungler is somewhat acceptable. But she isn't weak in terms of 1v1. I like to call this the Udyr standard where Udyr is shit early game because he can't do good, proactive ganks or.. much at all early. But she's very strong in 1v1 scenarios like Udyr early. The difference with Shyvana is that she is very good at counter-ganking. Like, she's the only devourer jungler who can counter-gank reliably. Reasons being that she is actually strong in 2v2 skirmishes because of her base early strength, despite her lacking tools to get an actual proactive gank off. This is a pro a lot of other devourer junglers do not have. Yi for example is actually really weak early in terms of damage, nothing like Shyvana's damage. Yi is meant to be completely useless till he spikes thus where the weakness shows that the game is basically 4v5 until Yi spikes. Sure, Yi can come in late when your teammate is dead and you clean-up and maybe get a double kill but chances of that happening depends on a lot of variables and if you're relying on that to get fed and all, your still gonna be weak even with those kills if anything all it does is help you get your spike a little sooner with those being +2 devourer stacks. Yi just isn't good in straight up 2v2 skirmishes because he has very low base strength early on. One thing Yi is good at is that he scales very strong into late-game. Shyvana does this too but here's why Shyvana is better in this subject as well. Yi is someone that runs up and just goes HAM. Normally not very tanky and can just get bursted as soon as you CC him. Shyvana is a brute force that can just go straight in with R and tank a lot of damage while still dealing a lot herself. The reason she outclasses Yi is because she doesn't have that late-game weakness Yi has. Looking onto other devourer junglers like Xin and maybe Udyr...?

Basically, Xin and Udyr outclass themselves. Xin is an early game jungler with that high base strength and has a dash, he's actually really close to being good but the issue is that his jungle item is devourer... Why would you go devourer on an early game jungler? It's a late-game scaling item that's strength only shines there. Xin falls off pretty damn hard late-game so it's like um... I don't know. Udyr isn't good at anything! Like I know he had this false beacon of light. You know what's good? Zz'rot Portal. Zz'rot portal just happened to be a good item that happened to be popularized by Trick2G using Udyr. So uh... guess who got popular. I like Udyr, he's a champion that needs more spotlight in terms of lore, story and everything. He's a really cool concept like Kha, who is also one of my favorite. But they're not good i'm sorry. Udyr does... 0. He's probably the best 1v1 champion to date but I doubt people are gonna just let you 1v1 them, he'll just run in the opposite direction.

Any other devourer junglers i'm not forgetting...? "Tryndamere?" I mean relevant ones... No? Ok. Shyvana is just dominant as a devourer jungler as she has the least amount of flaws. But do not play her low elo... Just don't. The thing about devourer junglers is that it's basically a 4v5. Do you want your bronze/silver/gold whatever teammates to be left to a 4v5 for a limited amount of time? Do you trust them to at least go even in lane? I would hardly trust high elo players, I would never go devourer jungler with a low elo team. They'd just get steamrolled by the enemy jungler and what's worse is that the enemy jungler who is an early pressure jungler probably isn't even relevant your teammates just die solo. I guess if the enemy picks yi, it's fine to pick Shyvana. That way it's a 4v4 and you have the dominant jungler. I would still highly recommend going for an early pressure jungler though. I am not saying it wouldn't work because it's low elo, you can literally win a game with Nami jungle, trust me. But it's just too inconsistent.