General thoughts on balance.

Okay, I've been playing for a while and rarely post on the forums because the backlash for dealing with general population turns into "You're (insert rank lower than they are), you're opinion doesn't matter." That get's brought up a lot when someone has a valid complaint with the game but aren't the highest in ranked.

However, at this point I wanted to offer my opinion on the divergent issue of all the different nerfs/buffs/and ignoring of champions.

This season the jungle is the hot topic because champion diversity in the jungle is at an all time low. Lee has ruled the jungle since he was released, because let's face it he was someone's pet project that has become an untouchable icon of Riot. Other junglers that are doing great right now in all situations have similar skill-sets to Lee. Gap closers, moderate to high scaling damage and general forms of utility that put them far and above the rest of the old unglers. Rengar is still viable, but you either snowball or feed, there is no real middle ground for him, or any of the other junglers with similar Kits. If you're ganks fail you can't recover by destroying your opposition with utility, you end up flat on your back getting harassed by your team and the enemies for failing at what you were trying to do.

This season has seen nerfs to smite, cost increases on jungle items to reduce your sustain and a number of other things. It's no really change the stronger ones, because they have inbuilt sustain, shielding, slows and other such utility. The range nerf to smite was negligible to them because they have fairly accurate and/or low cooldown gap closers.

One of the things about season 4 that I enjoyed so much was the ability to go off-meta jungler and make an impact on the game. I'll use Brand as my example because he was probably one of my favorite junglers. You had a hard time with your first clear or two if you had a bad leash, but after that you had a great clear time and still brought utility and burst to a team fight because of hey, stun and massive burst. I've been terrified to try Brand this season though because unless I'm running WW or Lee I still have issues with clears, even in bot games when I'm not being counter jungled or have to worry overly much about ganking.

I'm sure there is a great reason for the lack of diversity for basically every role, but I'm at a loss as to what it is. My hope is that the 5.5 changes will bring at least a little bit of diversity back to the jungle so we could look at other positions and discuss the health of the lane.

Also, yes, I'm aware there is a fair pool of champs for Top, Mid and Bot, but when you're build, no matter the champ, is basically the same thing every game because doing anything else would cause you to lose, it's not a healthy form of game play, nor is it divergent at all.