@FeralPony Zenonthestoic Xelnath, Spirit of the Ancient Golem and jungle diversity

So the Patch Forecast (great idea btw) made mention that the spirit stone jungle items are getting looked at. I think that is great! In my opinion, the main culprit limiting jungle diversity right now is Spirit of the Ancient Golem and not the other spirit stone items. After the health reduction it received a while ago, jungle tanks started getting picked less and less. Jungle tanks like Maokai and Nautilus give up good base stats for their great CC, mitigation, and sustain (referring primarily to health). When Ancient golem took a hit, effectively, so did they. Both have abilities that scale off their health (Nauts shield, Maos passive) less health, means less defensive power, resulting in lower viability.

To help bring back Ancient Golem as a more attractive buy would obviously be giving it more health again. Since that would put it back in a state of giving to many benefits for how much it costs, just boosting its flat health is not an option. There is an alternate way however to approach this. The recent jungle item changes in how they grow as you continue jungling is a great way to bring back tanks to the jungle as well. Like Spirit of the Spectral Wraith, have Spirit of the Ancient Golem award additional health as you kill more jungle camps (up to a cap obviously). Since the issue before was that non junglers were picking it up before because of the stats it gave, having it grow as you jungle would keep it a jungle item and deter people laneing from wanting to buy it.

After Xelnath kindly dropped in with more info, I would say that adding a feral flare like stack of bonus damage to jungle monsters only might work well.