It feels like (to me) more CC oriented junglers are set on the wayside. Unless you can fight other champions effectively (Vi/Elise/Lee) you can't get to jungle anymore. Does anyone else feel that way? I mean when was the last time Amumu got picked in pro scene lol?
Sir ArmaMalum1 votesI completely agree, but that's just how the meta rolls. Assassin jungles are simply more popular right now. By all means though try jungling with them in normals, they are by no means bad. Personally I'm a fan of Voli jungle right now :)
Linna Excel1 votesNot all assassins, but those champs who can successfully gank early are the ones that are favored right now.
Guildrum1 votesThe Reason assassin junglers, now Carry Junglers like Wu and Panth are so popular now is that they carry. Carrying with Naut/Sej/Mao is a serious challenge. What they do is that they /multiply/ power rather than add.
Say Mid and Bot are snowballing due to Sejuani ganks. The overall team "power" is say 30, Sejuani's intense CC and engages multiply the team's overall effectiveness by 2, so it's really 60.
Say all lanes are losing due to a couple of failed ganks from poor Nautilus. Team power drops to 10 as a result, he multiplies it by say 2, that's still only 20 power, they are weak. You'd want Wu or Vi at this point, because they'd /add/ about 15 by themselves, and getting fed increases their power further.
Tl:dr: CC jungles require team to do well, but can simply snowball entire games. Carry jungles can, well, carry.
Goth Skunk1 votesI concur with this post. Nautilus/Sejuani/Maokai all have great kits, but if your team is doing poorly, they don't bring enough to the table to help you come back.
One could argue that if the team is doing poorly, Nautilus/Sejuani/Maokai may be directly or indirectly responsible for that and thus have no one to blame but themselves. But using these champions to make plays is risky because if the play fails, you've now set your team back significantly farther because of their inability to carry like Pantheon/Wukong/Lee Sin can.
Soaking up damage for your teammates is not very rewarding when your marksmen are shooting BB pellets.
burdluver901 votesThis is one of the problems with the current meta though. If you don't play a carry champion, your team can sometimes rightly blame you for a loss. This makes non-meta picks really risky. If I go Amumu jungle (who was my main in season 2) and my team just don't do well or loses out to stronger ganks from someone like lee or vi, I cost my team the game by not being able to compete on the same level. It doesn't matter that late game tank amumu is a team-shredding monster. The game doesn't make it that far.
It's just tragic that good champions are completely unviable because they don't mesh up with the current play style and all too often, teammates don't counterplay well enough to make a non-meta team comp work the way it's supposed to.
Goth Skunk1 votesDo you really cost your team the game, though? Is the blame squarely on your shoulders?
Assuming all things are even: If your bot lane teammates get caught in a gank by a strong jungler like Vi or Lee Sin, and you're not there to counter the gank, that is a mistake on your part. If your teammates get killed, that is a mistake shared both by you for not anticipating the gank and being prepared for it, and by your teammates for putting themselves into a dangerous position.
You can mitigate this mistake by making a play mid or top lane though. Or by counter-jungling Lee Sin while he's busy bot lane (though I confess, counter jungling with Amumu is easier said than done).
Bronze and Silver players, myself included, constantly make mistakes. I see it in my own play, too. I should've done that, or I could've done this. Enemy was in range for a free AA and I missed it. I forgot to put a ward there and now I'm almost dead because I got caught. They make mistakes constantly every minute. Most times it's positional mistakes, or missed retaliatory trades, but they are there, and they are frequent. The magnitude of mistakes may vary and certainly will intensify the later into the game you go, but no one is ever completely blameless.
Swak1 votesWhat I find being a problem for more traditional "tank" junglers right now is twofold.
First, they do not clear very quickly, and this hinders them GREATLY. Because of how the Conservation passive works on the jungle items, there is an "ideal" rate to farming the jungle, and if you fall below that mark (One camp every 40 seconds) then you are literally wasting gold. One camp every 40 seconds is very manageable for these champs, but the fact that they have to spend a quarter of that time working down the camp to get the money simply not to fall behind means that they can spend less time doing what they want to do; ganking.
Second is the counter-snowball changes that were introduced in the new season. Tank junglers in season 3 lived to get their lanes rolling and hand the game over to them. If they could get their lane one or two kills, then that lane SHOULD be good for that game. But with the dragon changes especially, that is no longer the case. The early first bloods to capitalize on their CC that they could provide are worth less and the objective they have the hardest time controlling and fighting over is now much more valuable.
Mogs01gt1 votesTheir one big issue is their inherit tankiness and CC. They clear slow and can be counter jungled because they have huge CC abilities.
They need to have lane partners that snowball quickly but its hard to do that in solo queue.A champ like Sej wants to get to late game. Right now the meta is to win the game before 20 minutes.
Pollyanna Wright2 votesI wouldn't say they clear slowly. Also, a majority of the tank junglers have some form of damage they can choose to max first before CC.
Sejuani has her W, Maokai has his E, Amumu has his E, Naut has his W. They don't bring CC to the table and aside from Amumu's minor defensive steriod only Nautilus gets defense (but at a price since it can go away).
If a tank jungler maxes out his damage first, he still loses out to Vi/Elise/Lee. If a tank jungler tries to build early damage they still lose.
Like look at this.
Lee's Cripple at rank 1 slows for **20% **and that decays over **4 **seconds.
Nautilus Riptide at rank 1 slows for 30% and that decays over 2 seconds
Not to mention how Lee's has an attack speed slow also attached. Why does it make sense for a tank jungler to get beat out on something like this when their damage is also miles apart?
Tulare1 votesI thin that Sejuani has the tools to help a weaker team come back. The one thing I frequently do with her us punish my opponents for overextending. MANY players, when they're winning, get cocky and overly aggressive. Sejuani can charge in from the side, knock one of them up when they're out of position, slow them down to let teammates get a kill, and then throw her ult into the clump of opponents that often is close behind the overextended player. These tactics depend on your opponents making a mistake, sure, but carry-style junglers need the right opportunities to exploit too. Sejuani just benefits from a different sort of opportunity.