My thoughts on Jungle twitch, and some questions for Riot that are crucial to his future.

From the Champion Insights for Kindred :

"The ranged champs we’ve seen appear in the jungle - most recently Twisted Fate and Twitch - have been really gimmicky, and either dominate a game or do absolutely nothing. Their early ganks are often devastating (not many can survive invisible red buff ganks or TF’s guaranteed stun), but they’re pretty much useless if they fall behind, and absolutely need kill or assist money to keep up. What’s more, anyone familiar with either of their super predictable jungle paths will know where they need to be to kill or maim them, and because they were designed for life in lane, there’s very little they can do against strong counter-junglers like Lee Sin or Rek’Sai. These were all issues we had in mind when we started working on Kindred, and issues we hoped to address while creating the champ."

I was a very dedicated twitch jungler from season one till it was more or less killed in patch 4.10, with the coffin being nailed shortly afterwards due to jungle changes. I'm very excited about the changes to jungle leashing to help ranged champions out on the PBE right now, as it might let me Jungle Twitch again, but I'm disappointed sated is getting nerfed pretty damn hard for ranged champions, entirely due to Kindred it seems, as Riot's stated they didn't intend to nerf Jungle Kayle, the only ranged sated user performing well, even though we do see some jungle Vayne and TF.

While Jungle Twitch IS pretty gimmicky, he hardly tops the list - Shaco, for instance, is far more dependent on early ganks and snowballing than Twitch is, as unlike Twitch, Shaco had no late game to wait out for when behind, and both of them are much more interesting and fun to play with and against than Yi, who's entire premise with Sated now is to AFK farm and hope his team doesn't feed to the point that he can't murder everyone with his insane DPS and untargetability/ mobility once he has Sated.

As far as having counter play with predictable Jungle paths and counter Jungling, I hardly see this as a reason these champion aren't healthy, and should be removed through sated nerfs - I got to platinum last season with nothing but jungle Twitch, which required me to learn good map awareness, warding, and coordination to deal with these threats like the Lee Sin in half the games. This is an important aspect of balance for many Junglers, the prime example being Amumu; and like Amumu, learning to deal with players who knew how to deal with you was what separated the mediocre Amumu's from the good ones. (Incidentally, Amumu is the champion I played for the rest of the ranked season once twitch was nerfed - oddly enough the skill set I learned from over a thousand games as jungle Twitch was most transferable to an AP heavy Amumu.)

As far as Jungle marksmen being designed for life in lane, and therefor unable to deal with counter junglers, quite a few meta junglers were designed originally with no or little intents of being junglers - Ekko being the the most recent example, but Fizz, Gragas, Kayle, Pantheon, Poppy, Wukong, and Nidalee (sort of, they decided to make her jungle focused when they saw people were beginning to do it, then proceeded to nerf her out of lanes.), and I'm sure plenty more champions managed to pull this off just fine.

I have some questions for Riot important to the future of jungle Twitch -

1. Why do ranged sated Junglers need to be nerfed due to Kindred? Are they really less healthy than other sated Junglers, or snowbally Junglers like Shaco? They certainly aren't seeing much play, and I don't see them performing statistically that well in any tier of play, although I could have missed something.

2. What are you thoughts on Jungle twitch in general?

Prior to his rework many years ago, jungle Twitch was not too uncommon, and I never felt like it was problematic. I've hardly seen it since, but I've certainly enjoyed it.

3. Do you have any plans to make Expunge Contaminate feel like more than a dumbed-down version of Kalista's Rend?

Hitting six stacks feels more like a punishment than a reward right now; it marks the end of your expunge and passive increasing in damage, not some threshold where it is suddenly awesome; it really should do something special at 6 stacks. Having it do true damage at 6 stacks, similar to Rek'sai's e at full furry would be alright, but an even cooler mechanic would be this: "At 6 stacks, the poison is Expunged, removing all stacks of Deadly Venom to deal 72 / 108 / 144 / 180 / 216 bonus true damage" (At levels 1/5/9/13/17; this is the same damage the 6 stacks would have done over their 6 seconds had they not been Expunged) (More on my thoughts about this here!))

I've played a few games on the PBE with jungle Twitch, and it seems very doable once again, although sated feels really unsatisfying with him - Warrior is probably the better choice on both him and Kindred. I'm really looking forward to seeing if I can make work once again when these changes hit live!