The state of Balance [A players perspective]

Standard disclaimer: I'm not claiming to be a balance expert or do this for a profession. This is just what I would do IMO.

The Jungle:

The good: Jungling matters more. In the past you plowed through every camp you came up against, and the only ones that mattered were your blue and red buffs primarily because you didn't want the enemy to have them. How you use your smite actually matters now. The harder camps also removed a lot of the unusual JG's that probably should never JG in the first place (like TF, LB, and Teemo jg.. yeah those were all things at one point).

The bad: The jungle is too difficult at this point. It's pushed out a lot of the typical junglers, even ones that are meant to JG (nautlius and kha'zix for example). Poachers knife is also still problematic. They seem to continue down this path by just nerfing junglers who have safer clears. This also makes jungling not fun for a number of people because they can't play their favorite JG's and win, leading to a slug fest between the top 3 (Vi, J4, Leesin).

Possible fixes:

1. Gromp and the chickens do too much damage. They seem meant to counter ranged jg's by being ranged themselves (no resets, or kiting). They also do an abnormally large amount of damage for smaller camps. Way more than the stone creatures or wolves. This is also problematic because gromp is supposed to enable tank junglers. Just slightly tone down the damage on these two camps, but maybe even increase the damage (again slightly) on blue buff and red buff camps.

2. Poachers knife needs a simple upgrade to let you use an active ability which lays down a caitlin'esque trap. This trap should last for about two minutes, and root and give vision of anything it snaps on (doesn't need to deal damage). The point of this is two fold, first you can place it at entrances to know when laners or the enemy JG is coming towards you giving you a heads up. Secondly, you can place it under an enemies monster camp so that when it respawns the trap goes off and you know it's there. Lastly, this would also help make clears with the poachers knife slightly safer for JG's who choose that route because you could root a camp temporarily (not unlike nidalee's ability, which by comparison to ranger's trail blazer isn't nearly as strong).

3. Tank junglers are worse because it's hard to clear effectively and gank effectively as a tank. Your clear is safer, but a lot slower and ganks aren't always any better than the bruisers. The fix is the JG mastery in the defense tree called "bladed armor." They had a good idea when they wanted to increase the gromp buff with HP for tanks and the new item. However, they could just combine both of these into that one rather underused mastery by allowing it to work on enemy champions as well as monsters and scaling appropriately with HP.

---Continued on 2nd post---