Duo Jg Meta (RIP)
I know this wont happen this season, esp bc of the new draft, but I think a solo laning + duo jungle meta can be made to happen. Ill list the advantages after explaining how it would work.
There needs to be a mechanic where you can choose to clear the whole camp for a "burst" of gold or u can choose to let the big monster live and let it spawn baby monsters u can frequently kill for a "Gold per second" farming strat. The idea is that you want to roam your jg hunting the little guys and then only kill the big guy when you are ready to gank or leave the jg. You get the buff, gank, but you spend the respawn time of that monster ganking a lane. Since you wont be farming the creeps it spawns anyway you wont miss the time its gone. It has to be balanced such that killing the camp and failing the gank is punishing, but rewarding if you do get the gank kill. Btw, theres your counter jg mechanic. You target that camp since its the only camp a farming jg really needs to focus on and you would force them to gank in order to be productive during that time. If you anticipate the gank you can counter it and chain a series of mid game victories. Its good interplay. Lots of interaction there.
Since there is one of these camps on each side of the jg you can afford two jglers. Hell, there could even be two of these camps and that would attenuate the impact of counter jungling. You would need both continuously spawning camps to be up for max gold. An invade to assassinate a single farming camp and then leave as fast as possible would lower the gold per second, but not kill it off. It would make ganking a temptation but not a necessity.
The advantage of having two junglers is 1) a more balanced map, and 2) the lack of a duo lane. 3) You can also have cooperation between the junglers to take down the buff camps which can have a huge impact on the game, but also be somewhat revealing if you know the junglers are now both at the super camp taking that. 4) Leashes wouldnt be important anymore. The little guys you want to farm the most arent challenging so you can just macro manage during that time (observe your lanes for instance. Communicate. Shot Call), but the buffs you get from the big guys really give you strategic advantages. Like the raptor sweeper or the wolf sentinel which are really cool. 5) You could put the champion smite mechanics on monster buffs rather than the 4 machete items. Smite red and you get the regular red buff, but you also get a champion smite like challenger. Smiting blue give you a cooldown increase smite which might be cool for dueling. Maybe you could smite the ground for a ground buff that you can place anywhere. You could smite an allied minion for a mini banner of command like buff. 6) I think that the gromp buff and the krug buff can be left behind and you can put more strategic power in the jg. So jungling can still be a lower income role, but power is equal because of the access you have to strategy. 7) Laning can be more about mechanical prowess and you carry by dominating income. 8) Jungling can be more about carrying the game with strategy and tactics and your macro skills. 9) I also think that the baby monsters could act like the skuttle. They sort of run from you while you dps them and I think that might make ap junglers easier to balance cause they dont fight you back.
The down side would be that its not as much fun to farm the jungle. It feels more like a grind I think, unless you are a ganking jungler. These guys would be smiting more often, getting buffs more often, just doing things more often. Farming jgs would just grind till six like they currently do, but in a more boring ho hum way.
