Fixing the fundamental problems in the Jungle

Fixing the fundamental problems in the Jungle.

In the wake of at least the third attempt at buffing junglers via dumb jungle items (Wriggle's Lantern and Feral Flare come to mind) I thought I'd take a stab at laying out a fix for the more fundamental problems the items are attempting to solve.

Step 1, remove the existing jungle items. This is necessary for everyone to be on a level playing field. Step 2, buff smite. This is harder to quantify but given the rest of the changes I'm going to suggest it feels like smite needs to be slightly stronger, especially if we're removing the various pvp oriented smite variants. My initial thought is that smite damage should stay the same but in addition it will debuff the target to take 30% more damage for 10 seconds or so. This is obviously a really simple knob to tweak, as rioters like to say, because you're guaranteed to only be smiting jungle camps. Step 3, Buff the base gold value of the 4 non buff camps and add a stacking gold bonus the longer the camp is alive after spawning.

Obviously step 3 is the big change here and the first two are to set it up. As I see it, the actual fundamental problem of the Jungle is that champion effectiveness is determined almost entirely by the gold you're able to acquire (and spend) and the jungle just provides less gold than solo lanes. The naive solution to this problem, increasing the gold value of the camps, has the problem of encouraging junglers to stay in the jungle all game which leads to the problem of laning phases becoming too static and boring where both players know they're safe will just farm minions instead of pressing for kills and such.

As an aside, I don't think the above is actually true. Certainly at the levels I've personally played in there feels like plenty of opportunities even in a solo lane to pressure your opponent and gain advantages in either just more gold from last hits, zoning them off xp or even just killing them. Maybe this is less true in LCS level play where people are pretty good at not dying in lane, but it still happens even there.

Note that I suspect most of these changes should probably only take place after the second wave of camps have spawned. I don't know for certain but I think we want the first wave of camps to be pretty static. When they spawn, exactly how much gold and xp they give, and so on, since that's a pretty easy calculation. However it seems pretty trivial to have the second wave of jungle minions start behaving according to the new rules. (Or add an initial delay on gold/hp increase over time of a couple of minutes after game start. Whatever works best).

Also the amount of gold generated over time by the jungle camps should be scaled to the equivalent of a solo laner last hitting efficiently. I haven't done the math but if a "decent" solo laner averages somewhere between 7-10cs per minute, it shouldn't be too hard to convert that into an actual gold value and then spread that out over the jungle camps.

In any case, certainly the overall design of league involves junglers being mobile between lanes allowing them to set up 2v1 situations or 3v2 situations in order to tilt a lane into one player's favor via ganks. So we don't want the jungler afk in his jungle and not being involved in the rest of the map.

In the current design, the gold a jungler earns from his jungle is pretty simple. A camp is worth X gold and respawns every Y seconds, so if you kill it as soon as it spawns you get X divided by Y equals gold over time. The obvious way to optimize this is to kill every single jungle camp as soon as it spawns. So you delay the jungle camp spawns, greatly, in order to force the junglers to go do something else while waiting for respawns. This more or less works but it also punishes junglers for leaving camps alive since the longer they're alive the less gold, over time, you're going to end up with when you finally kill them.

So the solution to this problem is to have each camp rapidly accumulate gold, given to the killer, for everyone second or so that they're alive after they spawn. I can't give exact numbers for any of these factors, but the general idea is that if a camp is worth 300 gold and spawns every 3 minutes, then after 1.5 minutes of being alive the camp is worth 450 total gold when you kill it. I suspect you'd want the camp's hp to also increase over time, but probably to a much slower degree than the gold percentage increase. A little hard to say without testing it.

I think there will be two main effects from this change of allowing you to stockpile gold in camps. The first is that junglers who spend a lot of time out of their jungle aren't intrinsically punished for not farming each camp as soon as it spawns. For example you could just go hang out top lane, not even ganking, just giving your top laner a bit of breathing room to get some farm by zoning the enemy or even recalling safely and then head back in to your jungle and get the same amount of gold off your camps as you would from chain farming them. This seems like it encourages junglers to be active on the map and is a pretty good thing.

The second big effect will be that 'older' jungle camps will become considerably more valuable targets for steals and engages. You thought taking away krugs and raptors was a decent strategy now, imagine if those krugs have been alive for 6 minutes and are worth 500+ gold. That's definitely something worth fighting over. As an aside this is why I suggested increasing the camp hp slightly over time as well. I think encouraging invades for these camps is a hugely beneficial tactical change but we don't want situations where badly designed heroes like yi or trynd can just active super speed, sprint into the jungle, one shot a minion and sprint out before it's possible to interact with him. As an aide to this kind of tactical planning we'd want a visual indicator of how long, or at least, how much gold, a particular jungle camp has become worth. Something about an 'old' krug holding a giant bag of gold, with the intention of communicating "I'm worth a lot! Come kill me!".

Again this change encourages the jungler to be off doing stuff in lanes, either just regular ganks or zoning or scouting or anything really because he has the knowledge that he can just retreat to his own jungle and pick up the extra gold from his own camps to get him back in to the game, even if his ganks and so on aren't very successful. Of course conversely it also encourages enemy teams to place more emphasis on taking away these 'banked up' jungle camps. If you see the enemy jungler hanging out top lane for 2 minutes you would definitely be encouraging to take your bottom lane and jungler or whoever is available to force your way into the jungle and just take away his banked camps since it will be a much more effective decision with the new changes, definitely worth taking 3-4 people out of lane to fight over some camps if you can deny hundreds of gold from the enemy jungler.

As an aside, whenever I've said camps so far, I'm explicitly referring to the 4 non buff camps. Raptors, wolves, krugs and gromps. The two buff camps already provide a huge benefit and as such are easy targets for invades and fights as well as being generally handed over to the non-jungler and I don't think you want to encourage the jungler to be required to take his own buff camps just to keep up in gold.

To summarize: Remove jungle specific items and make non-buff camps worth more gold, specifically by letting them "stockpile" gold over the time the camp is alive and on the map. Set all of these values in such a way that they're basically equivalent to a solo lane champion's gold income. When junglers have no super efficient jungle items and the same amount of gold to play with as everyone else, it's considerably easier to balance the entire ecosystem of items and champions.

Counter Arguments:

Question: Will this end up overpowering certain junglers now that they get more total gold?

Answer: Possibly? It's pretty hard to predict exactly what will happen, but frankly I doubt it. For one thing, you could play basically any current jungler in a solo lane right now and get the same amount of total gold (remember the jungle gold is supposed to be equivalent to last hitting in a solo lane) and if this "extra" gold was going to break any specific champion we'd already be seeing it.

Question: You're removing the pvp smites? But I really liked those!

Answer: Fair enough, the pvp smites are actually kind of unique effects so far in the current game. I don't have a perfect fix for this right now, but I think that, with the increased gold from the jungle, a jungler will be less reliant on some kind of super powerful smite effect to increase his jungler's power and conversely it's worth making the jungler slightly weaker by only giving him one slot for a pvp summoner. Again, given that he will have a lot more access to gold to just buy items. If we really like the effects of the various pvp smites, lets add them to new, non jungle specific items. "Sword of the Eternal Challenge: +50 ad, +10 arpen, activate to challenging smite a target; costs 2500 gold". Or whatever. This doesn't seem that hard.

Answer 2: The above answer also applies to any unique effects from the current jungle items. An AOE spellblade is pretty cool but let's just make it a normal non-smite requiring item and see how it works from there.

Question: What effect will this have on the Diversity Dirigible? Won't removing targeted jungle items make those classes less effective in the jungle?

Answer: Uh, maybe? I think the easiest spot to address this is the actual smite spell. My earlier suggestion of +30% damage for 10 seconds will hopefully allow any of the various types of junglers to clear camps effectively, but if this isn't enough we could add actual masteries or even runes to address it. Offensive mastery: do +3/6/9% extra damage to jungle monsters. Jungle Sustainer: Gain 10% of your damage done to jungle camps as health and mana. Just rough examples obviously but there's a lot of room to add some non item jungle specific stuff.

You might also get some more item diversity in your junglers. Right now you're pretty much locked into buying your machete + upgrades because they're by far the most gold efficient item for the jungle, but without them, people could try all sorts of other items against jungle monsters, especially with higher gold values to play with.

Also possibly the increased value of jungle invades will make heroes who have the ability to get in and out of enemy jungles while stealing camps more viable picks. Obviously nunu is the archetype for this sort of thing, but any kind of fast high damage champion can benefit from the same tactical possibilities.

Answer 2: Also of course right now it's not like the jungle is all that diverse anyway. You've got your bruisers and your tanks and your utility tank bruisers and the two or three designated mage junglers (hi ekko and diana). I'm not sure we could actually make it worse.

Question: What if this makes a specific champion either too strong or too weak now? (Hi Warwick)

Answer: This is always a possibility with any change, but wouldn't it be considerably easier to just fix the offending champion instead of trying to warp the entire game around him?

Question: Will this just encourage giving the jungle camps to the solo laners to increase the gold concentration?

Answer: Again.. maybe? For one thing you can already do this to some degree but generally we don't see it. It's pretty hard right now for sololaners to consistently take jungle camps, for a couple of different reasons, including how long it takes to clear the camp and how much damage you take doing it. I think the smite changes will just emphasize the speed differences between a jungler clearing his camp and a non-smiter user trying to clear it. This is also why I'm focusing the increased gold on the non-buff camps, so we can give the buffs to whoever we want without suffering too much. You could also just buff the smite..buffs you get from hitting the jungle monsters with smite, to further improve the power of junglers vs jungle camps as compared to non-junglers.

P.S. Something I think would be a fun change to just try out would be to change jungle camps from gold on last hit to gold reward in an aoe. Not a giant aoe but anyone standing near by, including the enemy, gets part of the gold when a neutral monster dies. This makes double jungling simple and might just open up additional possibilities beyond just doing it in the lcs when you're afraid of getting 4v1'd on a turret and it certainly makes invades more interesting when all you have to do is just be there when the monster dies. It's a pretty radical change so I'm not seriously suggesting it, but I think it would be fun to try and see what happens.