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A fair critique on increased jungle difficulty

Linna Excel··3 votes·879 views

I'm not going to say the increased difficulty is bad. In fact I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how the changes pan out. However there is one aspect of the harder jungle that is concerning. As it stands, jungling before the patch was the hardest role in the game to learn. You basically can't even start to learn jungling pre-30 very well because you need full runes and masteries.

So what does the new patch do?

It just adds more difficulty and choices to the only lane that has significant choices in the game. And to be perfectly honest, there's only so many half decent junglers in every division as it is. The good ones should keep up just fine. The not so good ones? Dunno. So now the team's shot caller has a lot more to think about and juggle on top of everything else the team is putting on him. So while adding difficultly might be called for, and in some cases (lee ganking at two) welcome, I'm not sure these changes are entirely a good idea.

IMO too much decision making is already being placed on one person, now you've just added to it. Now if you add in the fact that low gold and below players (myself included) aren't exactly making great decisions all the time and you've got a recipe for trouble.

Has riot taken any of this into account, both the learning aspects and responsibly aspects? How much of the decision making burden should fall on a single member of the team and how much more complexity should you throw at him?

7 Comments

1st HanarSpectre4 votes

They did something similar in season 2. What it ends up doing is killing the jungle role for casual jungler. Yes, people that main jungle will still be able to do very well, but the people that jungle occasionally to fill the team will now be afraid to do it due to how easy it is to mess up in there now. That's a problem because let's face it, you are at a humongous disadvantage without a jungler.

Linna Excel1 votes

That's a problem because let's face it, you are at a humongous disadvantage without a jungler.

Right, if the other team has a jungle main and your has someone filling the role, you'll be just that little further bit behind than you were before.

disregardable3 votes

No, all Riot seems to care about lately are those #LCSPlays

Linna Excel2 votes

That's my concern, particularly when it comes to beginner (or bad) jungle players. If doubling up a second lane was acceptable, it'd be different, but you need a jungler on your team once you hit 30. These changes are just going to make things worse for people who aren't comfortable jungling as it is.

DoYouEvenIntBro1 votes

But if jungling were made easier, be it via items or easier clears, then competent junglers would single handedly decide games. I'm a competent bot laner but I don't have the power to do that, in fact much of the deciding factor in games comes from the jungler anyway.

Laners have to work hard for their farm, and things like skirmishes, roaming, and objectives can only happen if you keep up and stay relevant throughout the game. But junglers will always have a reliably easy income in their jungle, so at least making them take more time to clear gives a bit more influence to the rest of the team.

Also with the way these new items are looking, it seems like to compensate for their lesser income they gave junglers some crazy fighting and objective power.

littleblupenguin1 votes

You may be right. I've mained jungle mostly because I hated waiting forever to play other roles... and it is a tough role to learn(especially as everything ends up being your fault :P)

I like the new changes, cause I'm the type who enjoys a difficult role/challenge... but if I didn't already have experience in the jungle, it might just be too much.

Kinkou Order1 votes

I remember learning to jungle in the season 1 jungle. It was hard to even survive the first few matches but it was also really rewarding being able to do Blue > Red > and 2 camps and being able to gank level 4 while the ones you were ganking were still level 2 or 3.

What price was paid? Well if a rammus didn't start with cloth armor (this was before hunter machet was added to the game) he wouldn't be able to survive blue buff. It was basically always Cloth + 5 health pot starts because you needed a lot of sustain. It was more likely that you would in fact die to a camp and as a result if you did not have some kind of tankyness or sustain you would die to camps.

Counter jungling was more than just a minor annoyance since a wraith camp was actually worth a lot and the camps came up less (something like 90 seconds for them to respawn after the last monster was killed for the camp instead of 50) However this also meant that each camp gave more exp making for higher levels to be gained really early on for the first gank or 2 while also red buff had a stronger slow making things like Udyr and shyvana ganks more effective.

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