FOR PEOPLE FROM LS STREAM, “parnellyx” WAS ABANDONED NEAR THE END OF THE SEASON, HERE IS MY MASTER ACCOUNT https://twitter.com/parnellyx/status/1062111747212013575?s=21
Hola /r/leagueoflegends, I'm parnellyx and I want to talk about the current state of the jungle and why it is problematic and potentially one of the worst iterations of the jungle. If you have any differing ideas or opinions about this topic feel go ahead and comment. If I typed anything that is incorrect or lacking in support, I will edit my post.
Potentially Relevant Background:
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League player since Season 1
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5 months Challenger NA in Season 8
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Ended Master in Season 8
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Jungler, Warwick Main
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Former Top laner and Mid laner in Diamond(Season 5 - Season 7)
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Former Gangplank and Katarina One Trick
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Ban Akali every game
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Parents aren't siblings (to address the yasuo in my last game)
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Make a mean Parmesan Chicken according to my friend Niko
Goal:
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Address an "under the radar" issue.
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Objective as possible. Improve the game as a whole and not just my role/champion etc.
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Create enough discussion to lead to change OR have mind changed by convincing argument.
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Find solutions to the problem(weigh all options, even ones that aren't normally brought up).
Disclaimer:
When I speak about the opinions of a certain role or group of people, I am talking about majority or common tendencies among that group, not targeting you specifically.
What is the Current State?
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Jungle is the second, sometimes first most powerful role in the game
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Most meta junglers in high elo have been roughly the same since the Mid-season (Camille, Graves, Xin Zhao). Other champions such as Udyr and Kha’Zix terrorize low elo.
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Multiple CLASSES of champions are significantly weaker than the meta champions.
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Jungle is the snowballiest role in the game but often requires assistance to get ahead. If they have no mid pressure, they lose jungle pressure fast.
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Junglers gank more than they did previously (pre-Scuttle patch) despite Riot’s attempts to reduce them. Mostly due to the types of champions in the meta.
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Riot has shown no interest in changing the jungle or fixing the problems. Meta Summary
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The meta for the past 6 months has consisted mostly of early game junglers with strong level 2 and ganking presence. The most popular examples are Camille, Xin Zhao, and Taliyah (nerfed).
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OP champs are/were strong because they can generate leads without as much assistance (Xin, Cam, Tali, Graves). They have the most agency.
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These champions destroy anyone else and if you attempt to play a non meta jg you will be at a significant disadvantage (more than before).
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Usually, high pressure junglers like Xin or Camille sacrifice clear speed for their ganking and dueling power. However, scuttle crab removes their clearing weakness since they get an extra camp or two for free. They aren’t falling behind in levels and gold when spam ganking for their team.
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Jungle was especially strong at the end of season 8 since OP junglers weren’t banned because mid and top hogged the bans. This allowed multiple people to climb to high challenger playing Taliyah/Camille every game.
Scuttle Crab
Most people dislike Scuttle Crab. It makes laners and jungle have to fight for it early, ruining the jungler’s route as they often have to secure a crab opposite of where they want to path, and making laners have to rotate and ruin their lane position. In addition, Scuttle Crab spawns at an inopportune time for most junglers who don’t come online until level 3 as they need to risk running into an enemy while they are weak. It destroys any jungle variety in the meta and causes some junglers that aren’t even supposed to jungle become meta (ex. Camille, Taliyah, Panth). Crab lost its value as no one fights for the shrine in order to get control of an objective. Instead they fight for the gold and xp and its identity is just another jungle camp.
Ganking
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Right now, jungle revolves too much around ganking. It seems that Riot tried too hard to stray away from the season 6 powerfarm meta that we ended up with the opposite issue. Jungler’s are just spam ganking and camping lanes without having to gank smartly.
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In the midseason, Riot tried to remove level 3 ganking but instead promoted level 2 ganking. They need to add value to the camps early if they want junglers to not gank so early.
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There isn’t really a way to punish these high agency early game junglers since their intended weakness is a slow clear speed, but now they can take crabs to stay even or ahead while also pressuring lanes. In addition, there is so much downtime between these camps that junglers get to gank or invade for a minute or two straight. This means that junglers rarely get punished for spam ganking as they won’t miss out on gold or xp if the camps aren’t up. A lot of junglers prefer the “jungle chess” and proper pathing that there used to be, but now it feels like a cluttered mess of just running around the map and ramming into enemy champions. Autofilled junglers don’t even look that much worse than jungle mains if they just walk into lanes and attack champions. Autofilled junglers spam ganking is similar to laners just perma-pushing lane with dematerialize earlier in Season 8 and the role has become dumbed down.
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There is little skill expression and jungle feels less like you outjungled the enemy and more like the enemy lanes just allowed themselves to get ganked more than your lanes did. While the season 6 style was way too uninteractive, there should be a middle ground between season 6 and now, where smart ganking and pathing exists, and jungle feels less like a bullshit role.
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Laners should feel like they got punished for making a mistake when they get ganked and die instead of simply targeted.
Laners hate:
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Getting ganked over and over again.
There isn’t much that can punish a Camille or Xin Zhao camping a lane. They can just clear a couple camps and then run around and gank for 2 minutes straight without a consequence. They can fail to get a kill and have “bad” ganks but still be the strongest person on the map. There is not much smart ganking anymore as much as there are pressure ganks and drive-bys. -
Helping their jungler.
Laners don’t want to help their junglers especially as early as they do. They want to get settled into lane. -
Relying on junglers.
Nothing is ever going to change that will make it so that no one complains about their jungler not ganking their lane, but since jungle is in such a gank heavy meta it feels as if laners need to call for their jungler every minute before the enemy jungler gets to them. -
Scuttle wards.
If laners do not ward both sides of river level 1, Junglers will be at risk of getting ran over early and being unable to track the enemy jungler. Laners don’t like using their warearly because they won’t be able to ward out jungle ganks later on. This is a buff to ganking since there is less vision pre-6 for laners.
Junglers hate:
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Fighting with the team for Scuttle Crab.
As a neutral objective that spawns so early, laners can rotate to fight without losing much so whichever mid laner is able to rotate determines which jungler takes crab, which is a free jungle camp (worth more than a minion wave when you consider XP + gold gained and taken from enemy). Calling for their laners to rotate is frustrating since laners often don’t want to help them out if the laners don’t get anything directly in return. Giving up a scuttle crab due to stubborn or weak laners hurts, and while junglers shouldn’t straight int for it like some do, it is one step to determining which jungler takes over the game. -
Lack of Champion Diversity.
If you don’t play a jungler that can contest crab early, you will lose most crabs, which matters since jungle is such a snowbally role. Jungle variety is destroyed and limited to a few early-game oriented carries. Sure, carries are fun and its better than months of tank meta, but there should be more options, especially since the same champions have been meta for MONTHS. -
Less emphasis on Pathing.
Junglers are massively aroused when they feel like they outpathed the enemy jungler, but proper pathing is more restricted and unnecessary most of the time.
Riots Goals/Contradictions:
Extend laning phase. More 1v1 and 2v2 oriented phase of the game.
Contradiction: Junglers influence lanes too much and are now given more time to snowball the game
Make Junglers active on map instead of hiding in their jungle
Contradiction: This goal was achieved but in an unhealthy manner. No one likes fighting for Crabs and half of ganks are forced. Junglers have become “Roamers”.
Remove Funnel/Smite Strats
Contradiction: Not fixing the underlying issues that allowed this strategy to develop in the first place. No more bandaid fixes, work on the foundation.
Pre-season jungle XP nerfs
Contradiction: Nerfs non-meta junglers more than it does the problematic ones. Junglers don’t notice the difference unless they are powerfarming.
Reduce power in 9.2 (via RiotMaple)
Contradiction: Ignoring the issues. If jungle becomes weak almost no one will want to play it. Anything other than gutting the role will still make it problematic for everyone else.
Other Thoughts
If something is oppressive, it should be at least fun for the user, but both junglers and laners dislike it.
Meta DOES NOT EQUAL State of Jungle. Some people love the champions played in the jungle, but I am not talking about the carries as much as I am the way jungle works and how it limits other champions from being played.
This isn’t just my opinion. Many people from every role in low elo and high elo strongly dislike jungle.
Funneling is such a toxic strategy. Nothing feels better than being Master Yi (or Warwick :D) and being funneled all the gold on the map to 1v5 the game, but it has no place in League of Legends and takes away from what makes the game enjoyable.
Possible Solutions:
Reduce downtime between camps by lowering spawn timers and decreasing their gold and xp value as compensation (obviously jungle shouldn’t be buffed). If an autofilled jg is spam ganking and getting random kills without sacrificing much theres a problem.
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Rewards smart ganking and punishes bad ganks since the jungler will miss out on XP and Gold if they do not get a kill.
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This also prevents funneling since Funnelers won’t be able to eat their entire jungle and have time to farm mid without missing anything.
2) Revert crab to old xp and gold value
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Crab was already valuable as it provided objective vision. Now no one is fighting for it for the vision
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Removes all of the glaring problems of having Scuttle Crub worth a jungle camp in the middle of the map
Tweets expressing Conflict/Frustration:
[Also Crab] https://imgur.com/gallery/Od2MB https://twitter.com/LoLTarzaned/status/1082427438402027520https://twitter.com/Metaaphor/status/1028040071675617280 https://twitter.com/Lohpally/status/1078038501629685760https://twitter.com/hiitsviper/status/1078834895156211712https://twitter.com/LiquidDominate/status/1076141155769708544https://twitter.com/brokenshard/status/1076143729424195585
