Riot continues to miss the mark with Jungle changes

I started jungling a good bit throughout season 4. Never got great at it but could fill the role ok in a pinch, especially with more tanky oriented junglers. Anywho, come season 5 and I have avoided the jungle for the most part. I have played it some and found that it punishes mistakes, setbacks, or wasted time much more harshly than before. Even when things go well junglers fall behind in xp and gold.

I expect to make a lot of mistakes jungling so this new jungle kept me at bay until the change to swapping out jungle items. Once that change hit I could take rangers on anyone to make just the basic micro of clearing camps much smoother and then just switch over to one of the other two useful ones once I could handle jungle easily without item. I still found I didnt enjoy the punishing nature of the jungle but at least I was finding more consistent success at the basics.

The latest two changes to the jungle again punish weaker junglers over the core 4 or so (j4/vi/rek/lee). These strong junglers dont need rangers and most probably dont pick it up even when one could just swap out jungle item later. So really this change is just punishing weaker junglers who really benefited early from rangers.

As many have already pointed out, the reduced range of smite again tends to hurt weaker junglers over the core 4. Those 4 all have fairly reliable gap closers so lowering the range wont hurt them nearly as much as weaker junglers. None of those 4 rely purely on a skillshot to close the distance (lee can even safeguard to ward if he misses Q).

Meanwhile a tiny late game nerf to Jarvan? Thats it?

Riot will never get a good view of their jungle until they deal with the core 4. The feedback they are working off of us inherently warped by how much better these few champions jungle over the course of a whole game than pretty much everyone else.

Right now the jungle requires a much higher burden of knowledge on the jungler than at any other team in Lol by a long shot. Its especially skewed when in comparison to the burden of knowledge of the other roles. Its feeling like you practically have to become a jungle main to be remotely serviceable to your team.

*And yet the reality is in solo que sometimes in order to follow the summoners code you will have to jungle. *

Given that inescapable reality which exists because of how Riot has structured their came they cannot keep changing the jungle in the direction that makes it even harder for non-main junglers to be able to do it with a variety of champions. The sad irony is that as Riot implements changes which make the jungle harder for everyone in hopes to balance the core 4, all they do is put the core 4 even further ahead of other junglers.

TL:DR: Riots jungle changes are making the best junglers even better because the changes hurt the weaker junglers more. Riot continues to make jungling a harder role to play putting non-jungle mains in an increasingly difficult position when they get stuck with the role.