Rivering

Disclamer:

Sorry if this is a bit rambly. I had back surgery recently and had to write this on strong medicine.

Brief Summary:

The jungle is messed up for the overwhelming majority of junglers. Most of the reasons the jungle is messed up have to do with Riot deciding to balance the jungle around Vi, Lee, and J4, rather than balancing them around the jungle. This post is not to question that decision, but to theorycraft about how to react to the decisions. In the event that you're a Rioter, please don't nope out, thinking this is another jungle QQ thread. You're welcome to theorycraft too!

For the sake of brevity, assume I'm talking about all junglers who are not in the big three.

Reasons the jungle is usually a bad choice:

• Farming is really hard. Especially early.

Jungle camps were made harder, to contain early ganks from the big three. The result for everyone else is being at >25% health after clearing three camps and having to go back a ton early, which is a huge opportunity cost as time you're recalling/walking back/healing is time that you aren't farming/controlling vision/controlling objectives/ganking.

• The smite items suck, and they keep getting nerfed into sucking harder.

Stat decreases, cost increases. No stats until you've invested 2250G. No thanks.

• Smite itself sucks, and it's been nerfed again.

In order for smite to do anything other than just help you kill jungle camps, you have to invest 850G. The range on the spell has been reduced. Chilling Smite lost it's slow.

Moral of the story:

1. Some junglers are/were really good at early ganks.

2. Early ganks are very strong.

3. Ganking is more fun (for the ganker) than farming. Which can be a bit of a monotonous hell grind.

4. Riot tried to weaken early ganks, by nerfing smite and jungle items, and by making jungle camps harder to kill.

Enter Rivering:

I've started to play champions with strong early ganks. I take Ignite/Exhaust to try to maximize kill pressure and I do nothing but gank. The only time I set foot in a jungle is for a buff, to drop a ward, or to kill the enemy jungler. I farm the jungle crabs (because they don't hit back and they give me a way to regen health/get exp and gold/get vision when nothing else looks appealing) and take dragon or baron when it's up. The rest of my time goes to ganking. Nothing else in the jungle is worth taking.

Taking Exhaust/Ignite means that you avoid the smite nerfs and you get your gank pressure as soon as the game starts.

Not building jungle items means that you can start with an early damage item, to make your ganks even stronger. No waiting through 850+G to get stats.

Early ganks are very strong, and can help your team to snowball hard.

Discussion:

Do you think rivering is viable? It seems like it exploits the strengths of early ganks, while avoiding the nerfs Riot has put in place to try to contain them.

Credit where credit is due:

I got the idea for "Rivering" from the "River Shen" video. I just started doing it with champions other than Shen. Shaco being my current favorite.

Here is the video on how to play/build River Shen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHd-164z8I