- The devs concentrated on three main aspects of the Jungle
- Counter-jungling is the one that will receive the most change
- It’s going to be much more of a high-risk, high-reward affair from now on
With League’s latest patch, which was released on December 7, come some of the most numerous changes the Jungle has seen in a while.
The Jungle Is Being Changed a Lot
Preseason updates often bring a ton of changes to League of Legends, and the latest one the jungle is the one receiving the biggest shift. League dev Ezra “Phlox” Lynn explained without going into much detail in a State of the Jungle dev blog on December 7 what changes the players will see.
The new update will focus on three main changes to the Jungle as a whole – optimizations, pathing, and also counter-jungling. When it comes to the latter Phlox explained that it’s a pivotal part of the jungle role, and it’s been a hot topic ever since the preseason changes were first revealed. The idea behind this is to prevent early invades because it’s a “miserable experience” to be on the receiving end. However, this might make games last longer, as teams can have a more relaxed early game and not worry too much about rushing.
However, the devs want to make counter-jungling less regular, and more high-risk, high-reward. If players manage to execute couter0jungling well enough, they will get significantly ahead due to the Smite changes. Since Patch 12.22, Smite is enhanced by the number of camps players clear instead of how often they use it. As a result, to be effective in counter-jungling, players need to take down a few of the enemy’s camps to come out ahead, meaning counter-jungling is just not as easy to execute as it once was.
Plox also talked about optimization, saying Riot toyed around with the leash ranges and camp clear speed so single-target and AoE junglers could be on even ground. “Directionally, we think these changes are valuable, but the original launch versions overshot our goal and removed too much clear mastery,” the dev blog reads. “To correct this, we recently adjusted the leashing ranges to be a bit more lenient. That said, we do expect to continue to examine jungle clearing mastery/rewards and look at where we may have gone too far in the future.”
During the preseason, Riot also made some changes to camps like Krugs and Gromp, because the first one was almost always skipped in pathing, while the second was pivotal thanks to the healing it provided. With these changes, the devs hope to create more pathing options for both faster and slower clearers.
Overall, the Jungle saw a ton of changes during this preseason and what’s left is for Riot to monitor the situation to see if the reworks were successful.
