Changes: Jungling

Latest revision as of 10:05, 29 March 2024

For the plants, see Jungle plants.

Jungle camps SR — Monster camp locations on Summoner's Rift.

On maps that have multiple lanes, the jungle consists of the parts of the map between the lanes proper, excluding the teams' bases, characterized by the lack of vision or dense Fog of War. Neutral—not aggressive unless attacked—creeps called monsters live in the jungle, and a monster or group of monsters at a certain location of the map is called a camp.

Jungling encompasses three specialized responsibilities of the jungler. These contrast with laners', whose primary purpose is to farm minions and defend their lane's structures in the earlier stages of the game.

Farming the jungle, meaning the slaying of monster camps.
Having access to the Smite summoner spell in order to secure epic monster objectives, which are beneficial to the entire ally team ( Voidgrubs, Rift Herald, Baron Nashor, and Drakes).
And lastly, because of the jungle's extent, generally assisting and influencing lanes.

Basis

The primary reason for a jungler to exist is to maximize resource allocation. The jungle offers a lot of gold and experience that can be accessed through slaying the monsters that spawn and respawn in predetermined locations on the map. With a lone player dedicating themself to accruing them, more resources can then be collected in lanes by the laners, rather than sharing them with another teammate. This is especially important for solo laners, who can possibly earn the highest amount of gold and experience from creeps on the team.

The structure of the map also naturally leads to that resource acquirement being done in desired paths, formally called pathing, as some camps are closer to each other and/or some camps may be prioritized over others as desired. Because the jungler can obviously only be situated close to one half of the map at a time, this pathing also determines which lanes or objectives are within their more immediate sphere of influence. Minimizing the time and resources spent clearing camps is imperative for a jungler to be able to have priority over further camps, fights, other objectives, and general pressuring of the enemy team. The farming of camps is generally balanced to be able to be done in cycles while both champions and monsters level up and become more powerful as the game goes on. Junglers that are ahead will cycle monsters much faster, allowing more free time between the camps' killing and the camps' respawning, as well as being able to farm the next cycle of monsters much faster too.

The jungler, much like any roaming role, can undertake the initiating of ambushes against enemies in order to overpower the enemy in numbers. Ambushes against laners within the lanes are called ganks, and the lack of natural vision in the jungle heavily facilitates this. This means laners also have to be mindful and avoid ganks through proper vision and zone control, or defend against them through various means such as a counter-gank.

Lastly but not least, access to Smite as the jungler additionally provides them with a clear advantage in taking down jungle monsters compared to laners, and agency over important epic monster objectives and the game.

Camp Farming

General combat

See Monster for details on monsters' behavior, such as patience.

Farming, or "clearing", a camp is done within each camp's leash range, indicated by a circle around the camp when initiating combat with its monsters. Outside of that leash range, the monsters will start to lose patience and eventually automatically regenerate any damage taken and run back to their original position (= reset).

During combat, the attacker can create a window of timing where they can avoid incoming damage by moving away from the monster before it can start winding up an attack, while also potentially retaliating—a ranged champion can perform this more consistently, since they are able to attack at a longer range than monsters' attack range. As a general rule, large monsters may either move or attack slower (or both move and attack slower) than most champions as the game goes on.

Monsters will always attack the nearest champion regardless of having vision of them or not. A change of targets can alert a team of the presence of an enemy nearby. Monsters will attempt to follow a target into brush, and not immediately "forget" that an attacker has hidden in them.

Jungle items

In order to incentivize junglers to be able to farm camps in a compelling way and better than laners, junglers are provided with exclusive and essential jungle items. These items also ensure laners practically cannot gain much from farming camps rather than lane minions, especially during the early game. Conversely, junglers gain heavily reduced experience for farming lane minions, because of their jungle item.

Purchasing a jungle item summons the respective type of pet to assist the jungler in clearing camps by dealing significant damage and restoring them health and mana. In order to be most efficient, the jungle item must be purchased at the start of the game, because it allows the jungler to gain increased gold and experience bounties for killing jungle camps in general, as well as feed their pet treats for each large monster killed to gain certain bonuses for themselves. The pet can be evolved at certain thresholds of treats to grant the jungler a powerful permanent buff based on their type of pet and unlock access to the Smite upgrades: Unleashed Smite for the first evolution, and Primal Smite for the final evolution.

In Classic 5v5 Summoner's Rift, those evolution thresholds are at 20 and 40 treats, respectively.

Camp recycling

The level of monsters is calculated from the average champion level of both teams in the game at the time of their spawning, with the exception of epic monsters which upgrade based on game time. As their level increases, so does their experience bounty, but also their health and damage. It is therefore important, especially at the earliest stages of the game, for the jungler to pick a pathing that allows them to reach certain levels by clearing camps most efficiently, thus creating a cycle for them to respawn and be cleared again sooner, and enabling the jungler to accrue even more gold and experience on their own.

Monsters' bounties differ; regardless of this, (and assuming the jungler is not gaining experience from other sources than their jungle yet) clearing the first camp of the game will always level up the jungler to level 2. Some monsters, such as the Mini Krug or the Lesser Raptor, may not be as important to kill in order to achieve certain level breakpoints, since their bounties are exceptionally low.

Champions evidently take much longer to clear camps in the earlier stages, while some junglers may lose a lot of health or time if they start fighting monsters alone, even with a jungle item. To solve this, the jungler may ask for a "leash" for their first ever camp of the game, where the allies essentially contribute some damage to the camp so that it can be taken faster. Regardless, this strategy is not always optimal for laners, because they may lose control of the lane earlier on. Balance changes for the jungle camps and junglers' starting items have made leashing less and less important over the years, but it remains an important strategy to situationally employ in certain games nonetheless.

On Summoner's Rift, the assisting allies are specifically only the top or bot laners, since minions in the midlane arrive much sooner than top and bottom lane relative to camps spawning.

Timers

Live camps are marked on the minimap with a diamond icon at their distinct locations. When there are 60 seconds until their spawning, an hourglass icon will appear at their location on the minimap and will be greyed out. At 10 seconds until their spawning, the icon becomes highlighted. Visual spawn timers are only available for the Red Brambleback, Blue Sentinel, Voidgrubs, Rift Herald, Baron Nashor and Drake camps. Their timers can also be viewed in the scoreboard.

If a team has vision of a camp when it is cleared, the exact spawn timer can be calculated, as the respawn takes 135 seconds (2:15) for a regular camp and 300 seconds (5:00) for the Red Brambleback and Blue Sentinel camps specifically. It is important to note that the respawn timer for the latter two can appear on the minimap if a team gains vision of the camp's location, regardless of if the team had vision of the camp when it was slain. An epic monster camp being slain is announced to both teams, so their exact spawn timer will always be known to everyone.

Invading

Invading is the act of walking into the enemy half of the jungle with the intent of gaining information, and if done by a jungler, potentially stealing away camps. Invading can severely impact the ability of the enemy jungler to cycle their own camp, and the ally team can utilize the information gained from invading for various decisions and strategies themselves.

Counter-jungling is the act of invading with the express intent of stealing away camps to cover a known deficit. For example, if the enemy jungler is confirmed to have invaded and cleared the ally Raptor camp, the ally jungler can counter this by invading to clear an enemy camp themselves, potentially equalizing the difference.

Both invading and counter-jungling can become an explosive cause for fighting, as laners come to scare or fend off the invaders on their own or assist the jungler in a skirmish to try to ambush them.

Ganking

Ganking refers to the act of ambushing one or more laners within their lane, with the intent of scoring takedowns. While the act of ganking is not exclusive to junglers, it is one of the primary activities expected from the jungler earlier in the game, because they are not bound to any particular lane. This free-roaming nature within the jungle's Fog of War can render their decisions somewhat unexpected (though still more expected than the Support who can truly freely roam despite starting in the bottom lane; the jungler actually has to go to camps and farm them at some point).

The vast majority of viable junglers are given explicit tools to be able to gank effectively and be the primary facilitator for their team: a mix of crowd control, gap closers, and burst damage.

Not all junglers are meant to be ganking often, though. Some junglers benefit from the potential safety of farming in the jungle rather than lanes against opponents constantly contesting them, and are more efficient in clearing camps than ganking due to lack of the aforementioned tools. This renders them more of a carry instead of a facilitator, and separates junglers into two main categories. If a jungler has very good base stats and tools for ganking early in the game, and prefers to gank often to get their team ahead, they are referred to as a "ganking jungler". On the other hand, if a jungler is better served accruing as many resources as possible while ganking less often, and then potentially becoming a primary carry with massive resource leads over the opponent, they are referred to as a "farming jungler". Both strategies are valid, but the extent of "preferring ganking" vs "preferring farming" differs from champion to champion and even from one balance patch to another.

Summoner's Rift Jungle Overview

On Summoner's Rift, there are 6 regular monster camps per side. The blue- and red-side jungles have an equal area and the same number and type of non-boss monsters, except mirrored across the river:

Epic monsters break this symmetry, but still do reside on opposite sides of the river:

Voidgrubs, Rift Herald and Baron Nashor reside in the baron pit at the top half of the map, sheltered closer to the red side but only open to the blue side.
Drakes reside in the dragon pit at the bottom half of the map, sheltered closer to the blue side but only open to the red side.

Runes

The majority of runes do not affect combat with jungle monsters, however, there are several that either through directly increasing the stats a champion has or by having an effect which is activated by attacking, being attacked by, or by either killing or participating in the deaths of large or epic monsters respectively. The following runes all in some way either assist in the farming of monsters, or increase in power as a result of having done so:

History

Click on Show for an overview of jungling changes over the years.

Jungler itemization has gone through some considerable changes over the course of the game's lifespan, mainly owing to the unique difficulty in balancing a relatively unorthodox role with the more traditional laning mechanics.

During Season One, the jungle was a highly profitable source of gold, so much so that often a Jungling champion could even obtain more farm than the lanes with some effort, eventually letting them afford expensive and deadly items if their farming efforts were not halted. This was offset by the enormous difficulty of the jungle monsters of the time - there were extremely few junglers who could even clear effectively in such an rigorous environment and even fewer junglers who could begin the game with anything other than a Cloth Armor and 5 Health Potions.

The jungle rework of Season Two reduced the difficulty of the jungle monsters and the gold and experience that they gave out in an attempt to open the jungle to more prospective champions. Despite the decreased monster health, however, it was found that the decreased gold meant that dedicated farming was simply no longer an economically viable strategy, and many junglers were forced to find alternative solutions to the resultant gold starvation (most often amounting to early stacking of gold generating items such as Philosopher's Stone and Heart of Gold), while other junglers whose core item builds often demanded a high gold income to be feasible simply could not function in such a low-gold environment.

The jungle in Season Three attempted to compromise between the high farm of Season One and the low difficulty of Season Two. The introduction of Hunter's Machete allowed many junglers to successfully clear without many sustain issues and offered fallback solutions in the form of the highly gold efficient items it built into in case of a poor early game, and the increase to passive gold generation saw most junglers in possession of at least passable amounts of gold. These changes saw the number of viable junglers increase greatly.

Season Four was built upon the framework set by Season Three, with several gameplay refinements aimed at combating issues seen at higher levels of play. Of particular note, all of the high-tier jungle items provided benefits exclusively involving killing monsters and an entirely new jungle monster, Wight, was introduced, enabling much higher potential profits to both farming junglers who are sufficiently fast to keep up with the respawn times of the four camps and ganking junglers who do not perform well early on. These buffs to farming junglers were boosted further with the addition of Feral Flare, which provided massive bonuses to junglers who could farm fast enough to acquire the upgrade early on. On the flipside, the addition of Quill Coat kept slower utility junglers useful during a metagame period dominated by heavy early offense.

In Season Five, the jungle received a major update that coincided with the Summoner's Rift visual update. It introduced 4 items that upgraded Smite: Poacher's Knife, Ranger's Trailblazer, Skirmisher's Sabre, and Stalker's Blade. On top of that, four unique enchantments to those items that diversified champions and granted them unique Legendary-item tier statistics and effects: Warrior Cinderhulk, Runic Echoes, and Warrior. It also added new effects to jungle camps to the jungler when Smite was used on those camps: Gromp would grant a buff that poisoned enemies when attacked; Ancient Krug would grant a buff that stunned jungle monsters every 5 basic attacks or dealt bonus true damage against turrets; Crimson Raptor would grant a buff that revealed wards when detected; Greater Murk Wolf would spawn a sentry that would alert the presence of an enemy champion; Blue Sentinel would restore a portion of maximum mana; and Red Brambleback would restore a portion of maximum health.

In Season Six, Poacher's Knife and Ranger's Trailblazer were replaced by Tracker's Knife, which did not upgrade Smite but stored sight wards. Tracker's Knife was eventually removed in V8.4, largely due to its staleness in higher-level and professional play (where vision is strongly valued).

In Season Eleven, enchantments were removed. In their place,

Emberknife or

Hailblade were introduced as started items that would eventually be consumed after 5 uses of the summoner spell, at which point Smite would gain a one of two unique effects,

Challenging Smite and

Chilling Smite, respectively.

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