Junglers lane camping don't feel adequetly punished in farm and level gains

PopcornBunni··16 votes·8,780 views

Not sure if this is an intentional meta push from riot, but the jungle camp respawn rate and exp yield at the moment feel like they reward playing in lane more than in the jungle.

Of note, Riot themselves have said that changes to jungle yields are meant to have junglers level at the same rate as duo-lanes rather than single lanes, which would indeed point to them intentionally making overstaying in a lane go without consequence; they'll get about the same exp from pushing in a lane as from their camps regardless. One consequence of this is of course the infamous carry jg +support laner funneling strat that keeps popping up in various forms. Because why even care about early jg before major objectives come up when you can do a quick full clear then lane for extra free levels and gold for 2 solid minutes before any camps respawn?

I'm not sure what can be done about it either. Just lowering jg spawn would make early jg duelists control the game even more, and just increasing jg exp would make funneling more prominent and let bad overstaying ganks continue to go on without deterrence.

Top lane feels the most impacted by it since it's the most out of the way to countergank and the most volatile in terms of matchups and snowballing,

Elise comes to mind in particular in this regard. Her strengths as a jungler have always been her ability to provide a combination of early harass and late game team fight contributions with the downside of having relatively poor clears. It's no wonder then that in the game's current state where early lane pressure is even more potent while clearing camps is a footnote at best that she would be the strongest jungler in the cast not just in pro play, but in solo queue as well.

Other prominent junglers using the unpunished overstays include XinZhao LeeSin Nidalee for carries and Amumu Sejuani cock blocking their enemy laner from any farm for two and a half waves. And of course funnel recipients like MasterYi.

If the goal really is to have junglers level at the rate of duo lanes, it should be from jungling, not from literally playing a duo lane, though to what end this would be doable I have no clue.

17 Comments

Ragnaveil5 votes

I mean, jgs reap the reward for camping top 24/7 because the lane can only be won with jg influence. Why else does shit like Top Tahm and Top Karma get away with being aids?

The thigh guy2 votes

{quoted}

I mean, jgs reap the reward for camping top 24/7 because the lane can only be won with jg influence. Why else does shit like Top Tahm and Top Karma get away with being aids?

I find it funny that in the past 2 days I’ve seen an even split of top laners complaining that they don’t get enough ganks, or that they are always being ganked.

PopcornBunni3 votes

I think these are the same complaint honestly. People complain they're getting ganked and not receiving them themselves because it's the hardest lane to get to from other jungle positions. So it feels like their jungler is always camping because they don't suffer any exp or gold loss for doing so.

Z3Sleeper3 votes

Top is jungle difference, all there is to it.

Thilmer2 votes

{quoted}

I mean, jgs reap the reward for camping top 24/7 because the lane can only be won with jg influence. Why else does shit like Top Tahm and Top Karma get away with being aids?

The whole top lane is shit in terms of balance.

And the fact that nobody in the balance team plays top often explains a lot.

Ragnaveil2 votes

{quoted}

The whole top lane is shit in terms of balance.

And the fact that nobody in the balance team plays top often explains a lot.

Yet no other lane seems interested in standing behind us, and think we cry way too much. Man, must be great that they have ears for you people (other lanes).

Karn Bishop5 votes

It's almost as if nerfing exp gain on camps as time goes on causes kill camping hmm... then again according to riot it does the exact opposite they heard it from nightblue so it must be true.

Tormentula4 votes

I can tell you as an Elise main, there is just literally no fucking reason for us to farm when jungle camps got nerfed to give welfare XP. Like whats the point of us full clearing when we get more benefit sapping XP shoving in the waves, on top of making our own lane priority, tower plate gold, and tilting the enemy?

This is why good Elise players just rush mobis and do as much ganking as possible, cause its not like the enemy jungler is going to tower us in XP and gold anyway if they farm and its not like we're gaining anything if we farm. If you were ganking, there was a tradeoff; you weren't farming and the enemy was.. the gap was atrociously high especially when devouror was a thing, but now its so narrow that the better jungler is the one that can sit in lane, make its own priority so it can extend its lead into starving the other jungler into irrelevance,

Its not an Elise problem (especially since she never really got buffed into the meta, she just popped in when the level 2 junglers that abused the strat better got killed off with their nerfs and crab changes) the state of the jungler is just fucking atrocious since season 8. Not sure where you get "late game teamfight contributions" cause that's where she falls off (evident by her decline in wr over game time length). She's pretty much a cocoon bot at that point, and only thrives when a player mispositions to get picked or facechecks her, this is why she's a very tempo based champion cause she wants to end the game ASAP since a late game ADC with PD + QSS is just too much for her to contribute anything to. Yes her early game is bullshit atm, that I can give you.


If you want to fix the jungle, here's how:

A) BUFF camp XP, what this does is makes more incentive for junglers to actually farm, what this causes junglers to do is;

  • never leave camps up for the enemy jungle to take as they'll tower above you if they get their camps and yours. This means more incentive to do the camps they walk past rather than straight to the next lane.

  • flip around what i said above; the enemy jungler will be farming more and invading camps more as they reap more benefit then simply going for the gank, making their lane presence a bit lower.

  • discourages rubberbanding the same 2 camps + buffs since you'll be missing even more XP from leaving the others level 1 and the rubberbanded camps themselves still won't provide comparable XP to a jungler thats full clearing all their camps.

  • if a jungler is very ahead in XP even in comparison to laners, well at least they didn't sit in your lane. Of course champs that can power farm that fast and sit in your lane (looking at kayn, potentially evelynn too) need tunings of their own.

B) After buffing XP, REMOVE CATCH UP EXPERIENCE

Base XP means junglers want to reset their camps and take all the camps they can get. Catch up XP basically subsitutes for having to kill a camp or two, which saves the jungler time and allows them to ignore it entirely, making the gap between a champ who does the camp and a champ or doesn't a narrower gap. By removing that crutch, the XP makes a bigger difference between the champs since now all their XP is based on their respawned camps, not their level in comparison to one or two respawned camps (where being behind somehow fucking benefits, even if you full clear as a shyvana and get level 4, the jungler who did 3-4 camps, ganked, is 80% level 3 still, and catches a level 4 respawning camp just profits more in XP and evens out with you who did the full clear. )

XP and gold was never an issue with junglers imo, all of the jungle frustration relates to ganking, and in the past, that frustration wasn't nearly as evident as it is now when we targetted jungle gold and XP to breaking point of farming being irrelevant so pressure increases to make up for it. S7's catch up system was a bad idea, nerfing base XP instead of removing catch up XP and changing crab sooner to spawn later just long term hurts the jungler and indirectly the laners as well.

novac37213 votes

I think the intention was to make junglers stay in the jungle longer to gain the same exp/gold. The problem is that doing so means when they come out of the jungle they are behind. So you end up with junglers that gank and take towers, because farming isn't a real option. Or you have junglers who can duel, because they can get the opposing teams jungle exp/gold, mitigating the loss from their own.

If junglers lost more exp ganking repeatedly, I think a lot of players would simply stop playing jungle. You might even end up with duo top strats. The only way to stop jungle from camping lanes is to give them a reason to stay in the jungle. That can be by increasing exp/gold, or giving them some kind of scaling advantage for doing so. Though I'd prefer the former, since we all know how feral flare turned out.

The thigh guy3 votes

That happens when farming the jungle is garbage for xp.

Barso553 votes

the design is flawed currently. The way it is right now, enemy jungler invades successfully and gets a camp or two and your behind in gold and levels and have nothing to do but try to look for ganks, which is entirely teammate and team comp dependent and therefore not reliable.

Also, top and mid 2v1s can easily be lost in your favor because the enemy just focuses your underleveled ass, putting them further ahead and you further behind.

right now mid/top are 6 when bot is 4 and jg is 4.

Should be mid/top 6 bot 4 jg 5. That way, top and mid feel some pressure about using their ult before the jungler gets theirs in a couple of minutes. Also gives junglers some advantage if they have to 2v1 bot after an enemy double kill, without giving them the advantage of having an ult when bot lane is level 4.

OtterlyLost3 votes

Jungle has become this huge, unmanageable beast, tbh. Jungle camping is and always has been an extreme issue but it used to have options for mitigating it, namely in the form of wards. Warding has been grossly nerfed over and over and over again, however. Wards don't last as long early game, they're on a higher CD early game, you can no longer buy green wards, a sightstone, or the tracker's knife, and even the support's warding item is, on average, not going to give wards unil 7 to 10 minutes into a game. They could easily make jungle more manageable by reverting some of these buffs/changes to fucking wards. Jungles are free allowed to camp because you just can't ward enough for them.

RekSai CoffeeCo2 votes

A common sense change (besides reverting scuttle to not be a "mini-objective") is to make red side and blue side give same experience so pathing is a little less predictable.

If red side can yield level 3 by 3 camps+scuttle then so should blue side+scuttle, granted red might take a bit longer to clear for some tho maybe swapping gromp and krugs may fix that to be a bit more balanced in first clears.

inuitmailman2 votes

JUst had a twitch who was 1/0/1 with 17 farm at 20 minutes same level as me with 128 cs. (I know it’s shit farm not the point) but he camped botlane and somehow stayed the same level? The fuck?

wildfox9T2 votes

revert the XP nerfs but make jungle camps hurt WAY more (don't make them more tanky,just increase the damage) so junglers will have lower HP when ganking

this means

  • if the jungler overstay/gank too often the other jungle can just come and he will be pretty easy to kill,you can get ready and bait him into dying more easily or poke him so he will die the next time he ganks

  • if the jungler greed on ganks he can be punished by getting killed by the laner(s) (overall they will be more scared of laners,they won't be able to act so carelessy as they do atm)

  • if the jungler fails the gank the laner can attack him (especially if it's ranged) forcing him to either back losing a lot of farm and time or making him an easy target for counterjungling

this should make ganking more a tactical choice than something you just spam until someone doesn't die or fall behind

Yenn1 votes

This is a top problem, not a jungle problem.

Top snowballs too hard, the match ups are too binary, and top lane champions that get ahead can easily 1v2, so you can't risk letting them get ahead. Not camping top can turn the game into a 4v5.

This is likely never going to be fixed, because the state of the game has been rewarding aggressive play for too long. There's no way to fix the lane when all of the people who play it are hyper aggressive monkeys.

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