Laws of the Jungle
Hello Boards, I am just a random jungle main who is very happy with this new season. However, due to the jungle's recent increase in popularity I have also been noticing quite a few more people flaming in their games about bad junglers who do not gank for them or other various complaints. So, I thought I would take this opportunity to remind all of the laners out there of some of the general rules that we abide by which help decide our actions inside of a game. This is by no means meant to be a flame post, and i would just like the laners to understand the minds of us junglers a little better. So without any further ado, here we go.
-
Giving away buffs. Usually we have a couple rules of thumb for this, for example: Is your mid laner losing? How badly? Could they get back into the game by getting this buff, or will it just go to the enemy laner as soon as you do? If the laner is resourceless, we will normally not give the buff away if we have mana. If we are ALSO manaless however, it comes down to who can use the CDR better (usually the midlaner in this case unless the jungler's main ganking tool is gated by high cooldowns (Rammus Q and Zac E for examples). Sometimes it is even acceptable to give the blue to the support (yes, I know, that's blasphemy)
-
Ganking. This is normally just a situational thing, but there are a few cases where we resolutely won't gank for you. For example if you have been raging and flaming at us all game, even if you are ahead. We don't like you, you are insulting us, why would we help you? If you have fed 3+ kills to the enemy without a jungle gank in a short period of time, we will normally consider that lane lost and try to help the other lanes get fed to compensate. What is going through our minds at this point is "better one lane loses than they all do." I assure all of you laners that it is nothing personal, it happens to everybody and we are not mad at you (well, I can't speak for everyone but I still love you), but we would still like to win and not bandage your ego a little bit. If you are over extending and pushing to their tower despite being way behind, we are not going to help you. That is just a free kill waiting to happen. In an even lane or one you are winning in, sure; because that can easily be turned into a successful countergank. Also, junglers tend to prioritize mid lane for the snowball pressure and dragon control that their damage gives us. So if we are ganking for them instead of your lane please be patient with us, we cannot be on every side of the map at once.
-
We are not your personal slaves. We are not going to do whatever you want, whenever you want. We have our own job in the game which we have to make sure we are doing, and it is only one part ganking. We have to worry about objective control, farming, warding (my weakness
.) and keeping track of their jungler. If we see a good opportunity, or know that the enemy jungler is on his way, we will make a beeline for your lane, but it will be on OUR terms. Pings are still helpful to let us know you are ready for a gank; but please, do not automatically assume that we will. there are also many different kinds of junglers, and you have to make an effort to understand that. There are very passive junglers, like Udyr, who spend most of their time farming up to become a late game nightmare. There are very aggressive early game junglers like Lee Sin and Shaco who have to gank early and often to stay relevant into late game, and there are junglers who are not good at ganking pre-six and may actually be more of a hindrance in attempting to do so, like Warwick and Fiddlesticks.
So, that's it for my list of rules we junglers abide by, I hope you learned a thing or two about why we do what we do (or don't do), and I hope this helps our community become slightly stronger as a whole.
