@Fearless, Clarification on Jungle Change Reasoning

Fearless, I appreciate your recent post on why you guys changed the cost of jungle items, since the reasoning on the patch notes was obviously lackluster. It seems like people have been pretty disgruntled at Riot recently for a number of changes or lack of changes, and starting to show the reasoning behind your changes is a good step towards helping deal with that negativity. So props to you for that.

That said, I feel like what you said didn't made a lot of sense and that you didn't explain your reasoning very clearly.

The change was made to punish easily gankers from destroying lanes with level 2 ganks. Due to the smite charge changes, junglers could spend a fair amount of early time ganking and since their smite would just keep charging, they weren't wasting smite CD. I see the problem and agree it exists. On board so far.

What I don't agree with or even understand is the solution. It seems like it's targetting entirely the wrong problem and hurting a while bunch of junglers without actually affecting the problem it was meant to address. I'd even argue that it's making the original problem worse.

For instance, I'm thinking that the 5.2 jungle pattern for a normal (non-early ganking jungler) will be 1st camp with smite, 2nd camp while smite's on CD, 3rd camp with smite, 4th without.

If I'm an early ganker, this is a huge disincentive to run a normal route. I'd rather start red and smite it to keep my health high, then go and lvl 2 gank so that my smite has some time to stack. That way, even if I don't net a kill with the early gank, when I come back to the jungle I'll be able to use smite twice on my next three camps. That's three smites for four camps instead of two like a normal jungle path. Isn't that even MORE incentive to gank early?

Regardless, if you wanted to affect early ganking junglers, rather than just making a blanket change, wouldn't it be better to look at how the play pattern of an early ganking jungler differs from a more conventional jungler's play pattern and then make changes targetting that difference?

For instance, it seems to me that the big difference in the play pattern between an early ganker and any other type of jungler is that the early ganker will spend a minute or so of the first 3-4 minutes in a lane ganking, and then will go and farm the rest of their jungle a little later. So if I were going to make a change to affect early gankers, I'd try to target that difference specifically.

One way to do this would be to up the early damage/health of monsters and then make it so that buying a machete gives you a buff for the first 3-4 minutes of the game that increases the damage you deal/decreases the damage you take from monsters. You could balance it so that it would be a net zero impact to junglers who spend their first few minutes clearing, but for junglers who wanted to go try an early gank, they'd be wasting that buff and would come back to a much more dangerous jungle. The numbers could be adjusted until Riot felt that the tradeoff for an early gank was acceptable.

I'm sure there would be other ways, but the current solution just seemed so inaccurate and ineffective that it didn't make any sense to me.

Am I missing something here, Fearless? Did you try other methods and find problems with them? How did you justify the tradeoff of a whole bunch of junglers suffering from this change? Really just trying to understand here, cause right now I (and most of the rest of the community, from the sound of it) don't. I figured that rather than ranting, I'd give you the opportunity to rebuild a little credit with the community and improve communication.