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Season 5 vs Season 4 Jungle

coppinslinger·2/27/2015, 4:05:17 AM·2 votes·1,706 views

Season 4 Jungle - Which Junglers thrived best when given large amounts of resources (short smite cd, more camps, faster respawn times). Season 5 Jungle - Which Junglers aren't complete garbage at clearing and can still gank with a small pool of resources.

Riot intentionally designed the jungle right now such that it would be PUNISHING. They wanted Junglers to decide between farming and ganking. They didn't want it to be a competition of who can do it all the best. Unfortunately, WE ARE STILL IN THE SAME SITUATION. The Jungle is STILL a competition of those who can deal with it the best, fulfilling all niches as generally as possible. Unfortunately, now we have to deal with 5 top tier picks with every other Jungler being significantly weaker than the top.

Season 4 Jungle - A multi-tiered Jungle with even champions who faired poorly in clears being playable thanks to sustain being prevalent and numerous resources. Season 5 Jungle - A two-tiered Jungle - Viable tier and Shit tier.

You made the Jungle harder but didn't COMPENSATE Junglers for it. Overall, we make LESS gold and get LESS experience than last Season. You took away our options, and you didn't give us anything back. The only option in the Jungle right now is GANK because assists (and lane tax) give the most gold and experience out of anything else. OF COURSE Jarvan and Vi and Lee are going to be strong. You built this Jungle from the ground up for them to survive in. These champions can actually clear AND gank - they don't need experience or gold to do it either. In fact, ACTUALLY CLEARING is a precursor for ganking. Nobody can gank a level 7 mid-laner as a level 4 and expect things to go well.

Not to mention how your numerous vision changes have indirectly nerfed the crap out of Junglers. Wolf-smite, Scuttle Crab, Trinkets, CHEAP trinket upgrades. Vision is more prevalent and cheaper than its EVER been in League of Legends. There is no trade-off to lighting up the whole map. OF COURSE Champions with multiple gap-closers are going to be strong. Not only does every champion in this game have FLASH and a DASH, but they can also SEE YOU COMING FROM A MILE AWAY. If I don't have high-mobility and burst, I'm basically useless in this jungle.

I think Riot has taken the wrong direction with this Jungle. The NUMEROUS blanket nerfs across the jungle have completely buried anybody who doesn't fit the niche this Jungle was designed for. LESS resources means LESS viable strategies. Riot, this Jungle needs a LARGE overhaul. I don't think small tuning can fix it. I don't know how you are going to approach this monster, but you've pushed the Jungle so far down the wrong path that it's going to be hard to recover mid-season.

1 Comments

LongHair Fox2/27/2015, 4:50:48 AM1 votes

Ok lets see what has actually changed. If we want to discuss this in a realistic manner rather than just throw mud at each other we need to get rid of wild overestimates.

Jungle of season 4 was very easy with any champion being able to jungle (i saw katarina jungle in a few games do well). The jungle did not punish you for ganking in that you had conservation gold stacking up while you did it and the camps had a very low spawn time so you could clear one side go to gank the lanes on that side of the map and farm those camps again. Effectively this promoted a meta of gank, gank, gank, gank with the junglers only farming very little and sometimes leaving up camps for extended periods of time. Riot tried to punish this with giving less xp for camps that had not been cleared in a long time but it failed to have that effect.

Jungle right now on the other hand is much harder. Katarina and most junglers relying on camps soft resetting have a really hard time clearing (at least the first clear, second clear is almost as easy). This means that playing katarina jungle is not good anymore and this might be good or bad depending on how you see it. Camps have much longer spawn time so you need all camps to do well but this just ties into being efficient and moving in a way where you farm and gank when given the opportunity and not because you can deny a cannon minion and take some health. This means that junglers can be good at farming, good at ganking and so on but not being able to do one means that you get set back very much. Some needs to get back in line but mostly I find it is very balanced right now with some 8 top tier junlgers compared to last season where 3-4 junglers were top tier. The meta now i believe (and yes this changes from competetive to soloq because those two are almost different games) is farm, farm, gank, farm, farm, gank etc. If you only gank and think that the jungle gives nothing then I can understand you are getting behind. I have seen streamers being higher level than their bottom lane and more farm than their solo lanes in challenger. Sure it does not happen every time but it has been a long time since I saw them being lower level than the support. In my elo (gold) laners I can consistently be higher level than my bot lane and have some 20-30 less cs after laning phase since I like to gank a lot.

There have been hinted at some jungle tank buffs in the comming patches probably pushing them into being better at farming than their brusier counterparts in exchange for worse ganks. In this patch jarvan got nerfed to start this trend.

All in all as a top/jungle main I love this seasons jungle. While I don't have as much carry potential in the jungle it is far easier to play better than a a bad jungler and abuse his mistakes. I recently had a game as diana where I ended up 3 levels higher and with double the kda of my opponent shaco simply because he did not know how to play the jungle.