Lack of Jungle Diversity in Professional Play

Horus2·2/6/2019, 12:31:45 AM·2 votes·1,640 views

As a fan and player since Beta, I feel like champion diversity is one of the most fun/challenging things about League of Legends. When I watch LCS, I love to see new strategies and team compositions each season and throughout a season, to outsmart and counter opponents.

Right now, we're seeing almost the same meta and champion pool as at the end of 2018. There's 2 issues, meta/champion balance. While rapid meta shifts can also frustrate pro players, I do feel like champion balance is still a major issue, most prevalent in the jungle.

EG: Season after season we see pro players maining Lee Sin. Then you've got your secondary champs like Gragas, Sejuani, Elise. They've done a bit better with us now seeing more champs like Nocturne the last year. That said, there's still well over half the jungle champs that we NEVER see. Warwick, Udyr, Amumu(rip Hai Amumu), Ivern(they literally killed the poor tree) Nautilus, Wukong,Volibear, Shyvana,Rammus, Pantheon. (a few more are debatablly junglers).

We NEVER see these champs in professional play. For me it's made LCS increasingly boring and I've watched this season less than any other past season. Champion balance is key to the game and Riot is doing a very unsatisfying job of it in the professional jungle scene. There are too many objectively BAD champions, that aren't played in pro and have very poor winrates in ranked as well.

1 Comments

Horus22/17/2019, 12:21:27 AM1 votes

Just wanted to add to this. Going into this week, Lee Sin or camille have been used 26 times in 30 lcs games. Kha, Noct, Gragas were used 16 times. This means 5 Junglers total have been used 42 times in 30 games. Jungle is in desperate need of diversity.