Talk:Kog'Maw/@comment-4636093-20160104010339/@comment-4460132-20160108113435

^ StarSaviour

The "omg it is just ultra-late useless squishie" argument is quite flat in my opinion. After almost a dozen of games testing this (i am an avid jungler for a few seasons and particularly like strange picks from time to time, so i know about warding, objective control and ganks + the habit of playing ranged kayle / kindred). I'm not 100% sure for Graves falling back (but i highly guess it's more because he got nerfed recently), but for your Vayne example i'm sure it was due to a big nerf (around devourer and something else) to kick her out of this because a lot of people were abusing Vayne jungle horrible synergy with devourer procs in high elo. It was simply disgusting.

The reasons you gave for those ranged characters for "becoming less picked/efficient" is simply not the good one, it was way more nerfs than meta shifts.

The "ranged jungler" archetype, outside of the few pocket-picks "flavor of the month" adc put in the jungle, is now a completely acceptable type of jungler. Riot enforced it with Kindred who is one has been one of the top junglers for a while and is still ultra efficient. Add on top of it Kayle that is (after tests) as good as before in the pre-season, Quinn and a few others like the qt mouth of the abyss.

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Back to Kog : his gameplay is certainly quite different but you can gank or at least apply pressure on lanes early-on. Like most devourer-champions you must not fall under the "full farm" trap and still just proceed normally with ganks and objectives focus (which gives stacks anyway, plus it does have plenty of time for these considering he is cleaning really fast if he ever needs to).

If i should compare him to Kayle, i'm not really sure who would win on the "overall efficency" level. Sure Kayle does have her ultimate and more utility with heals and peel/chase but she does have a poor range, and Kog's tremendous range and high %dps kinda makes up for it (he is squishy but makes everyone like him with his dps, and can be hard to catch if your placement is correct).

The bigger difficulty here for wanabee-junglers would be to handle correctly the way to play as a ranged champion with all the placement and kiting tricks and skills to pull-off before being really efficient, imho.

And yes, it can put a team in trouble if the whole composition is not built accordingly (as we both said, a lot of people expect the jungler to be in more supportive/tanky role), but having a squishie jungler is not THAT strange with all the assassins we have around, and bulky tops/supports are quite popular picks too. Plus, the "squishies" we are speaking about still provide good DPS, and a ranged one too : it is simply just a different tactic or a shift of roles between lanes, nothing surprising or that exotic. Like item builds, it is just an other option available and you (players in general) maybe should learn them to (ab-)use them when the occasion comes =).