The State of the Jungle

With the changes to the jungle over these last several patches, I am beginning to see a worrying trend.

With camps taking longer to spawn, but rewarding more heavily for taking them (and then nerfing that aspect slightly) it is apparent that Riot wants to have games with gank heavy early games whether the jungler is designed for that or not.

The real key to being a great jungler (aside from great map awareness) is time management, you can't just walk around aimlessly and expect to not fall behind, but with the current state of the jungle, you can clear all the camps and have plenty of time to do whatever until respawns start, and even then, you're still on par with laners if you are managing your exp gains right.

why is this a bad thing? well it hurts jungle playstyle diversity. Currently high impact and kill pressure junglers are starting to shine, and its no wonder, they are in a situation where there is no punishment for being an incredibly gank heavy jungler. There is no reason to pick a farm heavy jungler anymore because you can't effectively gain a lead by doing it, and counter jungling is less effective because the enemy camps will be up less often due to increased respawn times (though you can still time it if you track the enemy jungler well enough)

Why is having a gank heavy jungle meta bad? It leads to the jungle having too much influence over the game early, which is why riot nerfed the exp gains, to keep snowballing junglers under at least some control. It forces other roles to suffer at the whim of whether your team has the better jungler or not. It makes or breaks laning phases based on the decisions of one person. With this gank heavy meta, it leads to every game having a make or break scenario in the jungle, and does not allow for a more stable farm and punish over extending style, as junglers can pick and choose where to be and when, but with the way things are currently, its more and more about getting early levels super fast, then racing around trying to gank everywhere and everything possible to influence the game as early on as possible. This also leads to harder snowballing laners and overall shorter games.

why are shorter games bad? it leads to a pidgeon-holed meta where early game is the key. You can't rely on farming up and getting to late game as a hyper carry, you have to try and snowball early game as a hyper carry in high risk, high rewards engages.

Overall the changes to the Jungle have simply shortened game duration and put much heavier emphasis on early game champions.

This affects the game as a whole and leads to a lack of diversity in terms of viability in the meta.

The point of this thread is to try to help bring diversity back to the jungle and hopefully see a wider array of viable picks, as well as make games less reliant on a single role. This is coming from a jungle main.