User blog comment:Lukeatlook/Pyro's Item Overhaul 4 - Welcome To The Jungle/@comment-8506165-20140412193345

I don't see the passives on jungle items or the (lack of) variety thereof as being the "problem" with jungle items. As has... well, almost always been the case, Riot are constantly trying to balance jungle items in such a way that only junglers pick them up, which has unfortunate consequences for the junglers themselves - if the items are crazy stat efficient then laners are going to pick them up, so junglers get landed with items that are barely stat efficient and definitely not slot efficient when they're already one of the most gold-starved roles. The best one is still Golem, but really it's only Tenacity holding that in there as a valuable pickup. (Spectral Wraith's actually decent once you stack it though - more on that later.)

So... you can already kind of see the problem. Because of the gold gen passive being linked to the fully upgraded jungle items, which barely work out as gold efficient already, junglers are pigeonholed into picking them up even if they clear fast enough not to need them otherwise. So in a role where you already receive less gold than a laner who's actually decent at CSing, you're effectively forced to "bank" all your early gold into an item that gives you very poor combat stats, in order to keep up in gold for the rest of the game unless you're snowballing pretty hard. I mean, all other things being equal, who's going to win, the tanky jungler with Golem or the tanky laner with Sunfire Cape?

Is it really surprising, then, that Feral Flare has suddenly become the FotM item for junglers with even the vaguest of synergy with it? It's not because it's tremendously OP (really, the only thing on it that could be called OP is the sustain, unless Wit's End has been this hugely OP sleeper item since S3) or for the theoretical solo Baron potential (if you're buying Flare and a Spirit Stone and the enemy doesn't ward Baron when they look in your inventory they deserve to let you get it, really) but because it's actually an item that serves you well outside the jungle. Wriggle's is already very stat efficient compared to some of the other jungle pickups before you even unlock Flare, and then it becomes a "budget BotRK" as I've heard some describe it. As for all the other jungle items though? Nah, really you'd sell them if you ever got to full build with enough gold to spare to trade them out for something more worthwhile. Come on, compare Elder Lizard with a Black Cleaver and Ancient Golem with... I don't know, maybe Spirit Visage (health and CDR) and you can see how much of a disparity I'm talking about. The only one that could really be thought of as an exception to this? Well, it's got to be Spectral Wraith, because that has a passive that means if you farm your jungle even vaguely well, you end up with an item that's actually halfway decent in an end-game build - 80AP, 10% CDR. Not too shabby - it's vaguely comparable to a Will of the Ancients, even if it doesn't quite match non-jungle items. I'm pretty sure you'd see it more if there were actually more APC junglers, but the only one I can think of that's at all a meta pick is.

So the simplest solution, in my opinion? Bring some kind of vaguely equivalent stacking system onto the other jungle items. I'm not asking that they be as good as a non-jungle item in terms of stats, but it would be nice if they weren't... well... kind of bad. This also prevents junglers from just being a overwhelming force early game by only granting these stats after they've spent a while farming up, and so long as the stats are capped as with Spectral Wraith they don't automatically become lategame monsters either. If that doesn't work, sure, look to maybe introducing more jungle items and making Conservation available to junglers earlier. But I honestly think this relatively minor change - one that probably wouldn't even affect which item junglers bought(!) - is a more elegant solution to the whole issue. Supports get GP10 items that are very very nice in their full build. Why shouldn't junglers?

(Mained jungle since I had the right runes to do it at all. I've thought a lot about this. xD)