User blog comment:Neo-Mitsu/Best Pick/Favorite Champion?/@comment-25003900-20150126173159

I've got a few actually. I spend most of my time in the jungle so far this season as it's just what I find most exciting so far. Dragon having team-wide buffs, each camp having their own benefit to smiting, you can empower your split push with a smited Krug, deny vision with the razorchickens, bolster your health/mana for a gank by smiting buff camps, slowly burn your enemy's health with the Gromp, and prevent counter jungling, or even provide security for your own counter jungling with the wolves.

That being said it should be of no surprise that junglers make up my favorite picks. Most recently I've added to my repertoire, formerly consisting in large part of, , , with a side of.

So for my Elise, which has proven to be quite lethal in recent games, I obviously play her jungle as per my preceeding paragraphs. I go from glass cannon to full tank and everywhere in between depending on what we need in the game and how things are going. The versatility allows me do what's necessary for our team, depending on if it's assassination to get super fed and carry, tanky to support and provide a frontline with some damage, or bruiser for a little bit of both. My specific builds vary from game to game so I couldn't tell you that if I wanted to. I find that Elise is a bit of a jack of all trades, but master at none.

She's never perfect at any singular thing, but provides a strong all around champion for reliable jungling. She comes with CC, Escape/gap closer, Passive movement speed buff, AoE, % HP damage, as well as a small heal paired with a pretty substantial attack speed steroid. She holds strong up front burst on pretty low cooldowns, and some pretty solid sustained damage. She doesn't rely on an ultimate ability to be effective, as hers is a short CD transformation.

All of this packed into her kit makes her strong at counter jungling, while at the same time being difficult to invade. She's also capable of surprise jumping over a wall to steal objectives such as the enemy camps, as well as Dragons. I think her main flaw is that if she doesn't hit the cocoon to engage, her ganks become infinitely more difficult to pull off.

I try to approach the game almost entirely with an objective based mentality. If you're dying to a gank in bot lane, and I'm towards top, I'm getting top a kill, telling you to play safe, and either taking tower with top lane or going down to obliterate the enemy's top side jungle and ideally steal buffs. I countered an Olaf so hard last night that I was Quad buffing it at one point, eventually giving my buffs away because I had his every single time they spawned. I managed to sneak dragon even though the enemy had scuttle, because we were blue side and I could Rappel over the wall on top of the dragon with zero worries. The only problem I had was late game when we were taking the nexus turrets I didn't last very long in team fights, which was to be expected as I built straight into assassin style without being actually punished for it until this point, but I always at least took one of their carries with me.

All in all Elise provides me with basically everything I could want in one continuously interesting to play package. Massive burst, solid sustain in jungle, decent sustained damage, an escape for when I screw up, as well as a way to chase effectively when they try to escape me.

I'm still weighing the option of Blood Moon vs Death Blossom. Any input from you guys on that choice?