My thoughts on the Preseason so far.

**The Jungle: Bad: **I am noticing, as I am sure others of you are, that the new jungle has had a huge impact on the effectiveness of low damage early game/tank junglers. With the amount of damage the new buffs and jungle camps are putting out, these champions have a hard time with clearing their first two buffs, let alone the rest of their jungle, without backing after the 2nd buff. With the new, expensive price of hunter's machete only allowing for 2 hp pots at the start, this makes sustaining for these champions really hard. Now, I am not saying these champions ( among others) are completely useless and can have no impact on the game. However, these junglers tend to fall behind early in terms of farm, items, and ganks. When it comes time for grouping, these champions will be behind on items, due to how slow they have cleared the jungle. This means they will not be tanking or outputting (or, perhaps, both) the damage they need to in a fight, at least in the mid game. Another HUGE issue I am noticing in terms of balance in the jungle is on champions such as Warwick or Shaco (Warwick much more so than Shaco). Warwick has the ability to solo dragon at level 5. LEVEL 5! As long as he farms fast enough and gets a Saber > Devourer (any item with Devourer, really), which, as Warwick, he will always be able to do because of his built-in sustain of his passive and Q. When I first heard of the new SR update, Dragon (and Baron, too) were supposed to be more boss fight-like events, and when a champion(s) can solo dragon earlier than they could pre-SR update, well I think they've failed to meet that boss fight-like goal. I believe some balance changes are in order.

**Good: **I am definitely a fan of the versatility offered by the new jungler items. With 22 different ways to build your jungling item (the four base items ( ), and then a choice of four enchantments, the math comes out to 22 different item paths you can take). Riot has done a good job at representing not only the different types of junglers (tank, ad, ap, farm heavy, gank heavy) with the items, but also different styles of play. The play styles are represented by the Smite enchantments offered by the new items. If you like putting down damage, you can buy a Sabre for the damage over time smite effect. If you want to slow your enemies so they cant escape, then but a Stalker's Blade. Counter jungling? Poacher's knife. You get the idea. I also really like the dragon buff and how important the dragon has become. Although I do think the dragon could be less snowbally, the change to a stacking team buff makes dragon control that much more important.

**Support: **I would love if Riot added some item variation to the support role. As with jungle, that has so many different options in terms of item building, I think support would benefit from the same types of variation.

**Top Lane: **I feel that top laners are useless when they are on their farming islands in lane, unless they take teleport. With dragon being a much more important objective than it used to be, a lot of focus is placed on controlling and taking dragon as well the bottom side of the map in general. While laning in top, unless you have TP, you have no effect on this control. The presence of someone playing top is never truly felt, unless they roam or are constantly pushing and taking turrets, until the teamfight stage is reached.

Baron: Baron in my opinion is better than before. With the buff making nearby minions a lot stronger, the whole idea of "Get Baron then push for win" just got a lot easier to do. While I do miss the old Baron's hp/mp regen, which was a very big advantage when sieging towers, the new effect on minions while pushing has made up for that, in my opinion.