Hi there! I don't believe I've ever actually responded to a red post, so I'm going to try and make this informative.
First up: I started playing League at the tail end of S2 preseason, and have been a jungle main since I was.. Level 19? I think? I have, off the top of my head, over 5,000 wins in League of Legends. I'd guess I have over 11,000 games at this point. I would be willing to bet that at least 70% of those games are as a jungler. Napkin math, that's over 7,000 games played as a jungler.
Unfortunately, you guys have nuked the part of the API which allowed websites to pull hours and # of games played, so I can't get that info while at work. Suffice it to say I've spent a lot of time in the jungle and have pretty extensive experience with every iteration (except S1) of the jungle which you guys have put forth.
I want to talk to you today about the design ideology I've noticed in the jungle, and also the 'punishments' for junglers and how they operate.
Historically, the jungle has always leaned heavily towards one of two playstyles; those being gank centric or farm centric. We are currently in a gank-centric jungle (my favorite) and I'd like to talk about how we got here.
Most league players, at least those who jungle heavily, with some time under their belt will remember S4 and S5 as the ages of Feral Flare and Devourer, respectively.
The S2 jungle was heavily gank centric and, after that, S3 was spent trying to encourage more farming in order to curb a pretty nasty 'feast or famine' jungling style. This didn't really come about until S4 and S5; these were the two seasons when Riot heavily doubled down on the farm centric style. This led to one very big game play orientation / problem, which then splintered into numerous other effects.
The big gameplay dilemma: Ganking wasn't really worth it. You would be giving up ensured gold and xp for a shot at gold and xp; and in most cases the difference was marginal enough (you could easily farm 200g+ from your camps in that time) that ganking was usually the wrong choice. This split into the two primary problems with the season. There is more to this (it was INSANELY hard for a jungler to catch up when falling behind), but more on that later.
**1: **Junglers didn't gank much, if at all. This meant that laners had no 'safety net', for lack of a better term. If you fell behind / had a bad lane match up, you were pretty much on your own. This led to a lot of laners being upset that they didn't get any outside help (and that one hostile gank could REALLY fuck them over), but also felt bad as a jungler because you didn't participate much. The higher up the skill ladder you climbed the more junglers would gank, but ganking pretty much always felt shitty / extremely scary during these seasons.
** 2:** Somewhere between 15-20 minutes the jungler's would emerge, and subsequently run the rape train on everyone else in the game. The combination of interaction free - and therefor threat free - farming meant that Junglers would get insanely strong off of farming.
This felt bad for laners because there would suddenly be this hyper powered monster curb stomping them, and they got so powerful without needing any lane dynamics / offering no real opportunity to 'shut them down'.
It also felt bad for junglers, because farming camps for a quarter of an hour is not an engaging experience.
Some other minor problems included:
The trivialization of counter jungling (steal a camp? np, they all have a 45 second respawn timer) which really reinforced the "afk farm" play style.
The pub-stompy nature of flare and later devourer. These items were reviled in lower leagues due to the power they gave their bearers, but totally non-viable in higher levels where a team would capitalize on the power dip it forced on the enemy jungler.
So, what's the solution?
Well, we currently have the counter point. Laners cried and whined about junglers being able to afk farm, without worry, before emerging to stomp their entire team; junglers hated the immense risk vs miniscule reward style of ganks. Now ganks are mandatory; they are absolutely needed, and a major contributor of gold.. But, we've seen this before, and it leads to 'feast or famine' in a huge way.
The solution is simple: Junglers, similar to laners, need to be able to participate in the game even if they do not crush their 'lane phase'.
One of the problems with s4-5 - which I hinted at earlier but didn't harp on - was a "fall behind, stay behind" style of jungling. The jungle was an xp stream roughly equal to that of a solo lane, provided it was aggressively and repetitively farmed. This led to one of the major reasons not to gank; if you failed the gank, or heaven forbid died, you would never be able to (reasonably) recover that xp. This meant that ganks gone bad would result in a gold AND xp disadvantage, which was too heavy a risk to take in most cases. This is why, as I said earlier, ganking was nerve wracking and felt 'bad'. It was less about what you could gain when doing it, and more about the horrible price you could pay.
Junglers in the present game have a substantially weaker gold stream than laners. Even a jungler who is moderately successful at ganking will have less gold than their laners themselves; this is one of the reasons that jungler items are so gold efficient but also restricted to smite users, so that junglers can end the "laning phase" roughly equal with laners item wise despite being down in gold.
Basically, you cannot kick jungler gold AND xp in the balls at the same time, or else jungling becomes far too unforgiving. Junglers need to suffer handicaps to one or the other (gold is the better option) from 'failing', while able to stay roughly equal to the rest of the game in the other.
This is similar to when, in a losing lane, you will miss cs to stay safe, but also still stay in xp range. You'll generally find yourself SLIGHTLY behind in levels, and noticeably behind in gold, but not so much as to be total dead weight. Junglers do not have a 'lane' in the same sense, but they need to operate on the same principal to avoid being horrifically effected by feast or famine design. This is pretty much the entire reason catch up xp was added to jungler camps.
Wow, that's a lot of words! And, honestly, it was short hand. I didn't touch upon the Lee-Elise-Vi trifecta from S3 and S4, Trundle's murderous rampage through the jungle (and lanes, and every tank in the game) from late S5 and S6 preseason, or the GP5 demands of S2. But that's intentional; this is supposed to be 'broad strokes'.
Soooo, that's the history. Now for the actual point.
As I stated (and hopefully showed) I've been jungling for a very long time. Also, I think the current level 3 gank epidemic is a direct response of making the early game jungle so heavily punishing for so little gain.
The current jungle hurts. A lot. I feel like it's the most dangerous jungle we've ever seen in the game, and I also feel that the healing on smite backs me up on that fact.
The early game jungle is, as I said, highly damaging. I also think it's too heavily specialized:
Gromp is there for the single target junglers, and beats the snot out of you.
Raptors are there for aoe junglers; but they beat the snot out of you, break your knee caps, and steal your lunch money while they're at it. They're probably the camp with the highest entry bar, because they're extremely dangerous until you can insta-kill all the little birds, at which point they're super easy. They're also the most valuable camp.
Wolves are the middle ground, as they've always been.
Krugs are kind of like wolves on steroids; they're flexible but really mean.
There are very few junglers who have the tools to effectively clear the entire jungle early game; let alone on their first clear. There are even fewer junglers who can do it and remain even remotely safe while doing so, and some who cannot at all. For example the jungle will literally kill a Nautilus who goes for a straight-through clear, while some other champions like Nocturne and Kayn end their clears clinging to little more than 100 health, ripe for the murdering by an enemy who decided not to clear all the camps, and to instead invade.
To make matters worse, this first clear is also less rewarding. You receive less xp from these camps due to not having your smite-augment item, which means that you're getting a pretty shitty risk-reward ratio. But, at the same time, the immense small-camp respawn time heavily encourages you to do this full clear, to get those cooldowns rolling faster and allow you to farm them better with your augmented smite item.
Let's imagine:
I'm stuck in a jungle which wants to kill me and sure as shit has the potential to if I strive for level 4. Level 3, however, is quick and, due to specialization, actually not all that dangerous. I can finish it fairly quickly and relatively healthy. When it comes down to "risk a full clear for minimal rewards" or, "go murder laners and soak minion xp" the answer is clear. The current jungle is designed to encourage ganking via its long respawn timers, but it inadvertently doubles down on this due to the specialization of the small camps and their punishing nature.
By now, I've seen more of Riot's promises on jungle and jungler functionality fall through than I have sunny days; and I live in Arizona. So when I see you talking about hurting the jungle early game, and buffing the late game, I'm already going for the tinfoil.
I suspect what we'll get is changes which make that first gank a tiny bit more risky for the 'main' junglers, but also heavily cull the viable jungler pool. The end result won't be any different; just a lot of lower rep junglers will get caught in the aftermath.
My suggestions? I don't think the epidemic is nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I think that something as simple as nerfing the xp of initially spawned 'small' camps, so that it takes two buffs + two camps, to hit 3 would cover it. Really I think we just need a minor jungle redesign, to make farming a BIT stronger, and give jungler's another reward stream other than gank-gank-gank-gank.
