Some ideas to bring jungle impact in line with other lanes WITHOUT ruining their XP

Full disclaimer: I'm not a jungle player myself and I strongly agree with Riot that harsh nerfs to jungle were needed and long overdue.

AT THE SAME TIME I can understand that for a solo queue player falling behind 4 levels doesn't really translate to 'fun'.

The thing is, advantage that jungle has, especially in solo queue games, comes from many, many different places. I strongly believe that Riot could bring jungle impact closer to laners without runing jungle XP, simply by hitting those places directly.

Here are some suggestions, I hope to see your opinions if those would be (potentially) any better then rektifying jungle XP.

• remove red/wards bring back original pink wards

  • why? red wards put a lot more power in jungle hands. Especially in camping scenario, the side with the jungler can keep their red wards alive forever while the person on recieving end of the camp is not able to keep their wards alive nor contest enemy red wards without help from their own jungler.

  Original take on pink wards (stealthed, time limited and no vision denial) was much healthier, because camping side was not able to keep them alive forever (== gold cost), and camped side could still put some vision down.

  Now that stealth was reworked I see no reason not to bring pink wards back, except maybe for making pro play "less dynamic". But since we have a precedense for differences between solo q and pro play, personally I'd even find scenario when pro play keeps control wards while solo queue has vision wards acceptable.

• significantly lower SMITE damage to EPIC monsters

  • why? epic monsters in this game are basically win conditions (except for Rift), in season 10 more then EVER. If you think about this it really makes no sense to allow jungler high pressure of stealing the win condition even from multiple players, provided they don't have their jungler with them - note that EPIC monsters do not include buffs, so this change doesn't make invading the jungler by laners any easier

  • this also has side effect of making taking Rift Heralds more realistic for toplaners. Putting 2 Rift Heralds was intended to increase toplane impact, but completely missed the mark because it is just too risky to do unless enemy jungler is dead - even if they are far away and have no direct vision of you, it is usually obvious that you went for Rift and there is usually enough time to come steal it.

  • alternatively, creating an item with monster-only active damage proc with values similar to smite to give laners possibility to help contest the win conditions is an option. This way a laner that is ahead could opt to spend some gold to "make up" for jungler being behind. I like this option less because it creates a risk of some teams spamming 3 copies of this item (especially in pro)

• make smite heal based on MISSING HEALTH

  • right now smite heals for 10% TOTAL health meaning that strong clearing junglers stay at high health all the time, which makes ganking often both possible and not really risky. Changing it to say 20% MISSING health would force most junglers to stay at middling health values more often, making 1v2 ganks more risky

  • it also has a side effect of making weaker jungle picks catch up somewhat to stronger jungler picks - a common complain from jungle community is that jungle changes in last years force them to play only select few champions. So this change could help making the game more fair both for laners AND for jungle mains who don't love to spam 3 champions all the time

• change RED BUFF from small permament slow to stronger, but short lived and with per-champion CD

  • red buff slow is meant to help low-CC junglers to still be effective gankers. The thing is, because the slow is permament it also helps already deadly gankers to be completely unescapable. Changing the slow to say 20-50% percent (based on level) for 1s with 10s per champion CD would often make the slow partially overlap other CC more often -> helps low CC junglers to stay relevant without making high-CC junglers unescapable

  • with a cool visual efffect it would also make the buff more noticable and more satisfying to use, while also allowing more skillful use (i.e. spread your combo to maximize CC duration)

  • damage can stay the same, to avoid making the game more bursty

• nerf red smite

  • red smite dueling power is massively underrated. Nerfing or removing damage reduction would help preventing junglers from completely denying splitpushing strats without necessity to make them so much lower in levels