Boards›Gameplay

Adding Diversity to Early Game Jungle Meta

Disciplined·9/14/2014, 10:23:36 PM·9 votes·1,325 views

****So I recently Read a forum on this and had a great idea on how to add diversity to the jungle competitive meta. Here is a snip from the forum to help explain my line of thought.

Over the past season, we've seen an overarching problem in Jungle diversity within the competitive scene of League of Legends. That problem? There is none. Diversity has been super small and has been a concern all season, even gaining Dev notoriety for how much of a problem this is. But even now, as the season is drawing to the close, we still only see about 3 or 4 Junglers in competitive. Why is this?

First, let's define the different styles of Junglers that are available in League of Legends.

Defenition of Jungle Styles *** Heavy Aggression Early Game Junglers: These junglers are going to be those who buy an Elder Lizard of Spectral Wraith early and use their early game strengths to snowball lanes into a victory. *** Passive Late Game Junglers: These junglers are going to farm the jungle, gank when it's opportune, but mostly just try to get items to be a force in the mid-late game. **** Heavy CC Tank Junglers:*** These junglers are going to provide a lot of crowd control to team fights, while also providing various other forms of utility, while being tanky.

Now, what we see in LCS the majority of the time are Heavy Aggression Early Game Junglers. These are Champs like Lee Sin, Elise, Evelynn, and Kha'Zix. These have all been strong picks throughout the season, due to their ability to snowball lanes while still bring a strength into the late game, while that may not necessarily be their damage. Lately, we've also see a Heavy CC Tank Jungler come into play, Nunu. Nunu is picked because he brings a lot of crowd control through his Ult and Snowball, a damage increase to a teammate, objective securing ability with Consume+Smite, and decent damage late if he hits his Ult on people. He is also extremely popular because of the meta of protecting the late game hyper carry.

This means that, for the most part, there are two different groups (if we leave out Nunu's recent surge) that are rarely seen in competitive League of Legends: Passive Late Game Junglers and Heavy CC Tank Junglers. Why are these not strong picks?

Credit to FatedTitan Forum Link ( http://www.reignofgaming.net/blogs/guest-posters/29604-community-gold-lets-talk-about-the-jungle )

ANSWER The answer to this question is that they do not provide enough early game gold advantage to give the lead to their lanes. The early game aggression aspect that is so prominent in the pro scene is all to provide their lanes with as much lead for snowballing as possible. No matter what this will always be the focus of the jungle in the pro scene and in competitive play, so why not instead of nerfing the early game of champs so that others can shine give a buff in a different way to make other champs contribute more early game? My idea is this Give a Targon effect to Spirit of the Ancient Golem and here is how.

Spirit of the Ancient Golem RECIPE Quill Coat + Kindle Gem + 450 gold TOTAL COST 2000 gold HEALTH +350 ⇒ +200 COOLDOWN REDUCTION +10% ARMOR +20 NEWBONUS HEALTH +25% Bonus Health NEWPASSIVE Sapping Barbs: Attacking monsters lose 5% of their maximum Health over 3 seconds (up to 195). Wearer gains +60 health regeneration per 5 seconds and +45 mana regeneration per 5 seconds when in combat with monsters. NEWACTIVE Hunter's Bounty: Upon killing Epic monster or Camp boss gain a charge (Up to 4) with a value 35g. This Item be activated at 3 Or 4 charges (range 1500) on a friendly champion. Upon Activation transfer all charges to targeted champion .

Quill Coat RECIPE Hunter's Machete + Cloth Armor + 75 gold TOTAL COST 700 gold ARMOR +20 PASSIVE Sapping Barbs: Attacking monsters lose 5% of their maximum health over 3 seconds (up to 150). Wearer gains +40 health regeneration per 5 seconds and +30 mana regeneration per 5 seconds when in combat with monsters. NEWACTIVE Hunter's Ward: Upon killing Epic monster or Camp boss gain a charge (Up to 4) with a value 25g. This item can only be activated at 4 charges (range 1500) on a friendly champion. Upon Activation transfer all charges to targeted champion .

So here are some Ideas that we struggles with when coming up with this concept.

Cool down: With this idea we looked at jungle timers and decided that due to the jungle re spawn times and the require amount of charges to activate the item having a cooldown for the item served no purpose.

Range: We wanted enough range to give diversity to where jungler could be while activating the item while still making him have to go out of his way to get there.

Death: This one was very interesting, we threw around ideas of giving up the gold on death as well as loosing charges on death. In the end however we decided to have no death penalty because having charges on respawn forces you to choose between losing potential gold to give away or lose time farming for yourself.

Animation: We want this item to have an animation like Targons for clarity, on both sides of the battlefield. It enables a easy method of telling when the jungler need to appear in lane for both sides.

I believe that with the addition of this item it will provide a good amount of options for snowballing a lane beyond just having a super good early game. This will give a nice buff to tank who usually have weak early game presents for lack of damage or cc.

Me and my buddy who brain stormed this all morning

UnrealSkilllz

MeatshieldVIII

Please 1+ So Riot can see Any ideas on how to improve are welcomed in the comment!

7 Comments

67chrome9/15/2014, 5:00:27 AM3 votes

****So I recently Read a forum on this and had a great idea on how to add diversity to the jungle competitive meta. Here is a snip from the forum to help explain my line of thought.

That post says a lot of things I don't agree with.

It's calling CC-heavy tanks bad at ganking and saying they bring no damage to ganks, which just isn't right. CC tanks are the best gankers in the game, bare none.

There damage also doesn't suck, at all, when they're ganking.

Any ideas on how to improve are welcomed in the comment!

Sucking at giving gold to lanes and snowballing them ahead is a non-existent problem of CC-Tank junglers. They're exceptional gankers and very solid at applying early game pressure.

The problem with most CC-tank junglers is there low clear times.

They did rule the jungle when the jungle overall had awful income.

Now the jungle specifically offers solid income if you can make use of the clear-happy passives on jungler items, which makes low-clear time junglers stuck at a noticeable gold disadvantage end-game.

Anyways - CC-tanks like Maokai don't need to act as support #2 by giving bounty to his teammates when he pulls off a level 2 tower-dive.

What CC-tanks need is either faster clear times, or the available income in the jungle needs to be tonned down to allow a heavier focus on raw ganking power.

Tuss9/15/2014, 1:23:50 AM1 votes

That's quite the interesting idea! I'm not sure how tanky jungler players would feel about their second ward source going away though.