Get rid of jungle items completely, make red/blue smite separate summoner spells

i cant move wtf·Jul 28, 2018·1 votes·1,256 views

It just seems unnecessary to give junglers their own item lines. Being able to do an instant burst of true damage is already enough compensation that the summoner will still be taken by 99% of junglers. If you want to keep the talisman and hunter's machete buffs you can put them as Blue/Red smite summoner passives respectively. That would be an interesting tradeoff for a jungler to consider in pre-game.

Why does a jungler need to have an earlier power-spike than the rest of the team? What sense does that make? Get rid of the jungle-specific items completely - they're just more random things for League players to memorize that don't add anything.

5 Comments

Stick In MuddJul 28, 20183 votes

It's interesting that you say this. The jungle-specific items came out several seasons ago, when Junglers had a very difficult time catching up with the rest of the team gold-wise. Riot invented them so that they can have that extra gold and not be so useless in the midgame. Junglers were basically like supports, without a whole lot of gold income.

Then Riot began to add little smite effects to the items, so that ganks were more important. Then they had a stacking effect, and each jungle camp gave a different effect. This made Shyvanna a goddess in the jungle (good times).

And now in the modern times, junglers may not even need the items anymore. They've become somewhat difficult to balance in this ever shifting meta. Perhaps Riot could simple make the talisman and machete build into regular items, which get modified whenever someone takes smite. This makes it so the jungler can hit a power spike at the same time as his team, while also giving him the early items to clear the camps.

i cant move wtfJul 28, 20181 votes

That's exactly what I'm thinking. If you make blue and red smite separate summoner spells (they would be castable on monsters as well as champions from the start with the same effects they have now but probably with scaling damage/effects based on level) then why is there any need for jungle items anymore? And if they're not strong enough at that point then they could add in the mana regen and +AD passives to each of them. Seems like it would be way easier to balance and you would eliminate 10+ unnecessary items clogging up the item shop inventory.

AptestJul 28, 20181 votes

not 100% correct.

jungle items were introduced to have 2 effects: to prevent junglers from having early (levels 1-6) power advantage over laners through the mechanism of forcing junglers to sink their gold into PVE stats, and to prevent laners from poaching the jungle at levels 5-11, thus making the jungler into a second support, the mechanism being very similar to what we now call "funnel strat" (basically, the mid/top lane would take over the wraiths and wolves and leave the jungler with nothing).

Colored smites were part of a rubber-band effect. Designed to align jungle item power with lane items at some point in the mid game.

AptestJul 28, 20181 votes

The purpose of the jungle item is to clog up the junglers inventory and dump his early gold into PVE stats so he sucks at dueling lanes with level and buff advantage.

How do you keep this effect?

i cant move wtfJul 28, 20181 votes

Smite itself is a direct sacrifice of a champion's power (one of their summoner slots) for PvE stats. So I think a simple and direct way to keep that tradeoff you're talking about is to nerf/buff jg camp toughness/exp as well as smite cooldown.