The Jungle Suffers from too many Options

Typically options are good. Choices are good. Choices give the players something to think/strategize about.

The issue is that as more and more choices are added, the razor wire of balance becomes thinner and thinner. Choices also need to be fairly simple in order to give a player an understanding of what to do when.

In this iteration of the jungle, there's just too many, and quite a few of them are complicated. Before the game starts a player needs to choose their champ (duh) and runes and masteries. Those are mostly going to be preset things that go by the player's preference, so they aren't as taxing as an in game choice.

Now in game a jungler has 16 different combinations of jungle items to go. A number of them read fairly complicated and long with multiple numbers/stats attached to them. On top of that there are additional choices for where to use their smite and when for what buff. The problem here is that there were previously 2 choices (open red or open blue) and now there are 6. Additionally, with less potions across the board it means that the player has less of a margin of error if making the wrong choice. All of this leads to players just doing "auto-pilot" and picking what they usually do rather than assessing tradeoffs.

And these choices are just what items to buy/where to use your smite rather than the plethora of ganking choices. It's too much to think about and unnecessarily complicated. These options end up crowding out each other and because there's so many it ends up realistically being less.

Historically, Riot's balance philosophy has been reactionary - see what is strong on live and adjust it. With all of these choices, that type of approach simply will not work. With every change some new combo will rear its ugly head. Some new set of champs will become the default with the jungle item combination that best suits them.

Right now the game snowballs so hard because of global dragon values, weaker outer turrets, and the difficulty of the jungle means that the team with the early game ganking jungler will have an easier time securing those objectives and controlling the map. Jungle spawn timers push it back further because it's easier to set a jungler behind who is already on their back foot. Riot's typical approach will be to just change some numbers around, but that won't change the inherent problems with all these choices. A new optimal will simply take its place because there's too much for players to worry about outside of their own play.