Idea how to solve level 1 jungle poaching

Dantilq·12/17/2014, 9:42:05 AM·8 votes·3,100 views

tl;dr; Reward getting to lane early, instead of punish for poaching

Level 1 poaching, is when laners start on a jungle camp to get a massive advantage by instantly jumping to level 2 (or if it's shared get big way to level 2). This is negative, because it makes junglers get less camps, which makes them more predictable, and it changes the meta towards champs that can fast and easy solo/duo a camp level 1, and it also heavily influence how laning is done because you start at level 2 instead, and overall this can cause some big snowballing.

Current approach by Riot is to change the jungle; to make it spawn later, be more difficult for laners to take and a few other solutions. All of those have big costs attached to it, and changes how the game are played quite a bit. Late spawns changes how invades are being viewed, high difficulty make jungling harder, and attaching too much on smite/jungle item and laners can't use jungle as a fall-back pattern. Overall Riot is not too happy with solutions tried so far.

How about instead of changing jungle alter the first wave, which in effect also make it more costly to do Krugs or Gromp at level 1 for laners. If the level 1 wave is worth much more than it is currently, or if there is mechanics making it more valuable to be in lane early, then the cost of poaching would be higher.

I imagine something like first wave drops gold/exp like thresh souls, and if they are last-hitted you get it automatically, but if they die to minions, either side can pick them up, so if you are late to lane, enemy can pick up both sides exp or similar.

It does add another complication, but a mechanic like that or similar would make it more valuable to be in lane early.

Another possibility is that two mini-buffs spawns in lane early on each side, so if enemy comes to lane late, you get both the buffs. The buffs could grant temporary AD/AP or that it gives Gold/exp or something similar. The general idea being that the one being late simply doesn't get the buff.

Add some small objective to the lanes, making it valuable to be there, and make the objective fairly powerful too, and not very easy to take, unless enemy gives it up to poach jungle instead.

tl;dr; Reward getting to lane early, instead of punish for poaching

16 Comments

Espy Psyche12/17/2014, 9:34:46 PM5 votes

That's why Machete (and upgrades) needs a new effect:

Unique Passive -- Jungle Guard: Unlocks experience gain from neutral monsters before level 4.

And then non-machete holders get 0 XP no matter how many jungle creeps they kill, until they hit level 4. After they hit 4, then they get full XP.

Cale01712/17/2014, 10:14:49 AM3 votes

Yes, because lanes need another way to snowball early on. Level 1 Dragons aren't enough yet.

Honestly your heart is in the right place but considering that the game is currently being ruled more and more by who can push an early game advantage, giving laners a way of adding to the snowball that junglers can already nudge over the edge of the mountainside is just asking for trouble.

AFK Push12/18/2014, 12:06:19 AM1 votes

One time my adc wanted to poach the krugs, but while we were doing that the lucian was pushing and got level 2 not long after we got back into lane. In short, it isn't worth it when you can just safely push the lane and get that level 2, with more hp than than doing a camp.