Discussing jungle balance ideas for various play styles/smite upgrades

There has been a lot of talk going around recently about jungle changes and jungle variety and play styles. I am hoping for this to be a place to put forth ideas (and constructive criticism to those ideas) in order to help identify key elements of the jungle system and how to fix it. I'll start with some of my own ideas. The jungle opened in the preseason with something that players had never seen before: different smite upgrades. these different forms of smite were suppose to encourage different play styles of jungling but have had little effectiveness to bring forth more differentiation between the jungle play styles we see commonplace today. I personally feel the reason for this comes an identification misunderstanding of what junglers try to do, or what they can do for a team with their time. The four smite upgrades really encourage 2 and a half ways to play the jungle role when I believe there are 3 or 4 viable routes for junglers to take. So lets take a look at what the upgrades are and why they encourage. 1) rangers trail blazer: this encourages hard farming jungle monsters by giving better sustain and an aoe smite clear. this is an efficient upgrade for anyone looking to farm up and gank less as its smite has no use outside of monsters and minions and it does a very good job at this. sometimes champions want to gank but they need to get out of the jungle with higher health to do so, so this allows them to actively and more efficiently clear their jungle and then gank if they want or hard farm more if the opportunities are not there. 2) poachers knife: this is were I think the "half" comes into play. poachers knife encourages counter jungling, however counter jungling is just another form of jungling and is usually done so at the inconvenience of the other jungler when they show themselves to gank rather than as a pre-planned idea (past maybe a level 1 or 2 buff steal). In reality poachers knife encourages farming the jungle like ranger's trail blazer but at a lot more risk and with less effectiveness than simply hard farming. 3) stalker's blade AND skirmisher's saber: I lump these two together simply because they encourage two ways to pull off the same playstyle by increasing ganking/combat effectiveness. Obviously one gives a slow while the other gives reduced incoming damage however I feel these both encourage fighting play styles whether that be against the enemy jungler or an enemy lane opponent. Effectively what this comes down to is this, the jungle options offer better options who can hard farm the jungle more or fight champions. This, in my eyes at least are not the only ways junglers can be effective on a team however, and thus may be one of the reasons why we have a bottle neck of champion diversity and play styles in the jungle role, simply because there are too few play styles being helped out by the item paths. I personally feel there are 2 other was that junglers can be effective to a team without messing with combat effectiveness and farming. 1) junglers can play a vision/control game. many junglers in competitive play build sightstones very early on in a match in order to keep control over the map and more specifically other junglers. Nunu is a champion that comes to mind that does this since he is very control oriented and is more focused on controlling and setting the opposing jungler behind than he is snowballing (hehe) himself ahead. He accomplishes this by warding for his lanes so they know when to play safe and counter jungling when it is opportune for him to do so. other jungler like the old elise and especially lee sin can follow this trend as well (although is a much more aggressive and popular option). 2) (this is more geared toward competitive strategies than anything else) tower siege/fast pushing. More and more in competitive play we are seeing lane swap scenarios where the adc will go into a lane with a support against a solo laner and a couple things can happen, either the adc sets up a slow push back towards their own turret in order to free farm in lane forever, then end up in a 1v1 lane against the enemy top laner while the jungler and support act as roaming play makers, or the jungler adc and support gather a minion wave, maybe 3v1 or 4v1 dive the enemy top lane under tower if he is there, and then fast push the tower to take down objectives as fast as possible. the lanes then swap to continue the objective fast push in other lanes as well. In both these scenarios I feel there is an opportunity for the jungle upgrades themselves to help with each play style. 1) in the last season we ended up having the tank jungle item "quill coat" that did %hp poison damage to monsters and gave the junglers a ward to place every 3 minutes. the idea I quite like about this item was the extra vision it gave you over junglers choosing more aggressive options and I feel like something similar to this could encourage control style junglers to play their ward game early. this would not effect their clear times as smite's effect on monsters would remain unchanged and it certainly would not help in a fight to place a ward down (unless you need vision in a bush i guess). something that maybe acted similar to the yellow trinket upgrade as it is now but accessible from the first jungle item smite upgrade. this would allow them to focus on other items without worrying about building a sight stone and taking up inventory space while encouraging heavy vision control and/or counter jungling without giving weird speed buffs or excess fighting power to those who buy it. Thus they would not be able to duel or gank as well as opponents with the dueling smite(s) nor could they clear as fast as junglers looking to hard farm but they COULD keep their lanes and their own jungle much safer by sacrificing these other advantages. this would allow for teams who run this option to have 2 heavy warders (the jungler and support) who can still get the sweeping lens for vision denial. 2) the second idea of siege, tower pushing is one that I'm still not sure about but thought it might be and interesting avenue to explore. If teams wanted to focus more on taking towers fast and utilizing that free roaming person on the map called a jungler to do so, why not make it more a viable strategy? allow the smite upgrade to be able to either smite towers to grant extra damage to them for "x" amount of hits or time or flat damage or something similar to that? Maybe instead of damaging towers with smite there can be a mini "banner of command" active if you want to smite your own minions instead to help them shove a tower more efficiently. This way teams looking for quick advantages in terms of tier 1 towers or looking for better minion wave control may be able to do so more effectively while giving up more jungle pressure in return for the lane pressure since it would require the junglers to spend a bit more time in a lane. The benefit of these being "smite upgrades" would be that it allows certain play styles to show up earlier as they do now with stalkers and ranger upgrades while still allowing the stat boosting upgrades to be catered to the kind of build you want your champion to be. tanks could still be tanky but have separate roles (ganking, farming, vision control, lane pressure) in the same way that mages or fighters or assassins could still build the stats they want while supplying the same options of play style to their team. specifically thinking about the vision upgrade, It would be a little tricky to get it working correctly but it effectively could work three ways: 1) either it gives ward charges (like sight stone or upgraded yellow trinket) to use and smite remains unchanged, 2) it consumes a smite charge to place a ward where you want it to be giving much more cost to placing a ward vs just farming with smite, or 3) it becomes the median between options 1 and 2 where a ward placement will consume smite but place it on a lower cool down than if you just used it to smite a monster, giving you reason not to just blatantly use it as it would take up a smite charge, but not completely making the option become farm or ward. as for the tower smite: like i said before it could be damage to a tower by smiting the tower, a banner of command active, or maybe even an aura active you can choose to use on a minion wave that gives the entire wave small buffs (like the baron passive but much less) for a short duration. These are my thoughts on how to start diversifying the jungle play styles and champion pool a bit more. this stuff may lead to (assuming both extra smites are implemented) either 5 smites existing by keeping stalkers and skirmishers and getting rid of poacher's or the extermination of one of the dueling smites (I honestly believe poacher's just falls short in general and needs to be removed for a better option). please leave responsive criticism and other ideas if you read through this and have a great day! :)