The new jungle items, and how they lower a players diversity

Hello everyone,

       This is a post about the new jungle items, and my perceived problems with them. It is rather long, but I have no desire to write a Tl;DR, so instead I will be writing it in a way that separates points from discussion. Discussion will be in blockquotes to allow easy skipping over and will have the point being discussed at the very beginning of it. 

In order to properly state what problems I see, some game design thoughts first need to be put down. I see the core goal of games to be maximizing the entertainment of the players. In order to do so, we need to minimize the emotions which lower the enjoyment of the players, which I’ve classified as coming under either boredom or helplessness.

From this idea all game design values which I have come across can be derived. For example, counterplay is a value which lowers the level of helplessness a player will feel in the game. By giving the player ways to react and play against what another player is doing to him, he doesn’t feel helpless against the other player. It’s a simple concept, but in reality it can be difficult to execute due to needing to remember all aspects which may effect helplessness and boredom, and the idea being completely qualitative, with no way to compare the two. If you have a change which lowers helplessness but increases boredom, should you do it?

The reason why a more diverse jungle is a good thing is because increased diversity lowers boredom. “Increasing diversity” can also be called “Widening the meta”. As a general rule, widening the meta is always a good thing.

The reason why a meta was established, why it exists, is because it helps players win more often. In order to win, the team and each of its individual players need to maximize their effectiveness, and the meta was established as a result of many players attempting to maximize their effectiveness. The meta is on average the most effective way to play and win.

An example of how the meta was formed from the game can be taken from the positions players take in the game. The current player layout stems from there being 3 lanes providing gold and XP but 5 players to provide with said gold and XP. The meta evolved from the map and the need to maximize effectiveness taking said restrictions into account. This video from extra credits does a good analysis of how it game to be. One thing which isn’t mentioned in the video is why the support and adc combination is bot lane instead of top lane this is due to the presence of dragon. If the adc and support were placed in the top lane instead of the bot lane, then dragon is easier for the enemy team to get, so the effectiveness of their team is reduced. In some situations putting the support in mid lane or top lane may be more effective overall, or mixing things about, but this is very situational, and on average is less effective than the current lineup.

In order to widen the meta, a players effectiveness should be spread out. The more ways a player can be maximally effective, the more equally viable options they can take, the more diverse the game. Likewise, if a players effectiveness is focused on one event or path, then not only is their diversity reduced, but they become vulnerable to having that path prevented by the enemy team, vastly lowering their overall effectiveness.

An example of this would be . Blitz relies immensely on landing his hook, but if his hook is dodged or blocked somehow (Why you gotta do this to me :’c ) then he’ll be far less useful. If a players goal is to win, then the players goal is to maximize their effectiveness and the number of ways they can be effective, because the more ways they can be effective the lower the chances of them being useless. Thresh is more popular than blitz because if he misses his hook, he still has ranged autoattacks, his flay, his box, and his lantern to provide damage and utility, he has more options than blitz if his most effective part is blocked.

From what we’ve seen in the dev blog here, what I’ve stated matches up with Riot’s goals for the new jungle. They want to allow players to choose junglers with more freedom and variety/increase jungler diversity, and they want to have a jungle which allows junglers to take multiple different choices, increasing the number of ways a jungler can be effective.

Now I’m finally getting to talking about the jungle items. From what we’ve seen on the live servers and has been repeatedly stated by some of the better junglers in the community (<3 Foxdrop) Rangers Trailblazer is the most popular of the 4 jungle items. Second place is taken by Skirmishers Sabre , with the other two items barely being used at all. Why are Stalkers Blade and Poachers Knife less popular than the other two jungle items? Because they lower a players overall effectiveness.

Poachers knife is the better example of the two to explain this statement. In order for poachers knife to be effective, the jungler needs to counterjungle their opponent. However, counterjungling is quite risky, and this risk is amplified by purchasing a poachers knife. By doing so the jungler is announcing to the enemy jungler “Hey, I am going to try to counterjungle you!” allowing the enemy jungler to trap the jungler or deny him his counterjungle. If jungler A purchases the poachers knife, it is extremely easy for the jungler B to block the entire usefulness of its upgrade, rendering it useless and lowering jungler A’s effectiveness massively. Jungler A purchasing the poachers knife allows team B to back jungler A into a corner, and it’s not even difficult to do so. The Stalkers Blade. In order for the blade’s ability to be used effectively, Jungler A needs to gank. And the ganks need to be successful. If a gank is unsuccessful and has no result, then Jungler A will have wasted his time and will be set somewhat behind. However, he still needs to gank in order to make use of his gold and time investment in the blade, so he’ll constantly be forced to gank. If he has multiple unsuccessful ganks, then his effectiveness is reduced. This trait of the player - being forced to gank - is something that can make a jungler more predictable, giving the enemy team an upper hand. Skirmishers Sabre has a similar issue to stalkers blade, with the main difference being that the sabre’s ability can be extremely powerful on some champions ( WARWICK ), and so it turns into a risk VS reward scenario. For some junglers (grumble) the risk of taking Sabre and thus lowering your versatility is worth the benefit of the incredibly increased power output that Sabre can provide. Sabre also scales better into the late game than Stalkers Blade, which is another reason to prioritize it for the champions who can make use of it.

Rangers Trailblazer is not the most powerful jungle item because of its maximum possible gold income, or its kill potential, or any of the other factors that make one item or champion better than another. It comes down to quite simply: Rangers Trailblazer is far more versatile than any of the other upgrades, the chance that its abilities will be most useful to you is far higher than any of the other items.

So lets compare this to what we had previously as jungle items. We had our 3 spirits, and we had the flare. These jungle items were roughly equally versatile.

If you had any of the 3 spirit items, your ganking potential would not be effected, your jungle clear speed would not be effected, your counterjungling ability would not be effected. With the spirit items, the items themselves didn’t determine what you would be doing in the game, the player would be doing it. In the moment decision making rather than being forced down a route by a decision you made 8 minutes ago. The flare is the one jungle item I’d like to comment on due to its ability has partially transferred over into the new items (although the flaws are less extreme). The Feral Flare had the nasty side effect of causing players to play farmville for the first couple of minutes of a game, which was harmful to your own boredom in addition to your own feelings of helplessness and your teammates feeling of helplessness, but later on in the game it made the enemy feel helpless because what the heck do you do when you’re being chased down by an Udyr with 60 flare stacks. This is heavily against the concept I presented earlier.

I firmly believe that in the moment decision making with equally versatile items is far superior to what we have now. And evidently the community agrees after having chosen Rangers Trailblazer. I believe that the jungle items as they are now will need to be redone once more. I don’t think that a nerf to Rangers Trailblazer is the answer at all to improving the desired jungle diversity because then the player is stuck between a rock and a hard place, needing to choose whether to buy something versatile but overall not powerful at all or to choose something else which backs you into a corner and allows you to become less powerful with that, neither of which seems like a fun prospect.

While writing this post an idea came upon me that may help this issue. Instead of choosing machete and then upgrading into smite, design the jungle items so that an upgrade into either AP, AD, tank, or “New Flare” comes from machete, and afterwards the smite enhancement is the enchantment.

It would fit better to the theme of enchantments, and would allow different smites to be used but punish junglers far less for not doing what they chose to do when they bought the item originally. Buying AP, AD, and tank would also allow riot to return to giving different jungler types different clearing perks, and not make some junglers rely on smite completely for clearing/the blasting smite upgrade becomes obsolete - I know many players have been complaining about some junglers not being viable anymore simply because they can’t clear as well as other junglers. Then later on in the game when it becomes apparent how the game is going, smite can be upgraded to allow the jungler to fill the missing role on his team VS the enemy team. Smite the enemy carry to allow your team to catch them out more easily/allow you to kill them faster, smite this person, smite that creep, all depending on what the result of the game is. Changing the upgrade path like this will allow junglers to choose not to upgrade their smite for a while, rather choosing to see how the game progresses and then making an educated strategic decision based on what your team needs instead of blindly stabbing in the dark before anything has happened.

To anyone having read the post to here: Thank you for sticking with me xD I’d love to discuss these ideas some more, and hear some other players opinions, whether it is through a reply to this thread or pressing that little up arrow wherever you please. To any rioters: I know that y’all are very busy, and you may not be able to or have any desire to reply properly to what I have written. I would appreciate it if you would simply give a reply stating that you have read it, just so that I know that I haven’t been talking to a brick wall. Of course I’d far prefer proper replies, I’d especially be interested in one from Fearless or Axes due to their dev blog on the new jungle.

And as a final side note: While writing something like this and collecting thoughts, there will obviously be a lot which slip out/are out of place or sidetracked somewhat. I had a random fun little idea while writing this, namely a featured gamemode: A gamemode where you can change the champion you play each time you return to base, but your items stay the same. I think it’d be fun and chaotic, but also interesting.