@Meddler: Possible fix for gold funneling

Hello Meddler and rest of the boards,

in a part of this gameplay thoughts you go into nerfing the gold funneling strategy. You already mentioned some ways of going about it, but I thought of a variation of "jungle items giving XP penalties for lane minions".

My idea is to have the jungle items give the jungler a debuff that makes it impossible to get shared XP until x minutes into the game. So if a jungler is in a lane with someone else early game, the laner takes the full XP of the lane minions while the jungler gets nothing. However when the jungler is in a lane alone to collect minions on turret after a laner died for example, then he would receive full XP. This eliminates a "goldfunneled carry" with "second support" because either they run around together and the jungle carry gets no XP, or the support leaves the XP for the carry and the support gets no XP and is much further behind.

This also has some side effects which could be seen as beneficial. For example after a successful gank the jungler usually helps a laner push, which boosts the junglers level because he shares XP, at a relatively low cost for the laner since the 30% extra XP from XP sharing means the laner still receives 65% of the XP he would receive otherwise. This XP sharing debuff would eliminate this. Another small benefit is that junglers moving around near lanes would no longer accidentally "leach" xp from their laners (for example taking raptors while minions are dying at the middle turret).

I don't think it would be that much of a nerf to the normal jungler playstyle, especially if you make the debuff last for lets say the first 8, 10 or maybe even 15 minutes (exact number should need some testing) and remove it after. Junglers could still group with their team when the laningphase is over and get XP as usual. The only nerf I could see is that it reduces how much 1 or 2 early ganks can snowball the jungler if he helps push the wave as well. And I think that is probably a reasonable thing in the first place.

Btw. the reason I called it a debuff at the start is because I would also propose to actually make it a debuff, that shows up in your HUD. This way you don't need to make an enormous tooltip for the jungle item, but can still put all the relevant info somewhere ingame for the player that buys the item, that he can check out when he mouses over the debuff.

Would like to know what you think. Kind regards,

Johan / dbm