I think since the jungle nerfs players are still simply jungling out of habit. It's the standard.

Wait for double AD / Support lanes to take over, ranged ad scaling in this game is broken and boring, and double AD teams getting fed buffs from level one on would crush the current meta.

At the start of this season I was way out of practice (I'd taken a year off) and I dropped to the 600's in ranked solo queue. I worked my way back up to 1100 using nothing but Mids and Junglers (mostly Nocturne, Nautilus, Karthus and Galio) because I knew I could change the outcome of the game by myself doing either of those things. Now that I'm back to 1200 I can't help but hating jungling and trying to get out of it, because the same thing happens 4 out of every 5 games.

1.) I end up having to start cloth armor/5 pots on everything but Xin Zhao or Warwick because I either don't get a leash or I get a terrible leash (one hit and run away, or done in such a way that the camp resets and the mid or ADC doesn't leash it again).

2.) I go for an early gank/get in a fight with the enemy jungler under level 6. My mid/top/bot laners don't notice, even if I ping and am standing 10 feet away. I stare incredulously as I get counterganked/ignited/heal baited/collapsed on by four people, and the lane continues to stand there farming and not responding to pings or team chat.

3.) My top lane Irelia/Darius/some other bruiser who probably doesn't speak English decides to say nothing but take my second red buff either the moment it pops up and I am on the other side of the map, or while I am dead. He or she will refuse to respond to pings or chat, and continue trying to take it from me while I am playing something Red-dependent. I spend the rest of the game trying to both counterjungle the enemy jungle and counterjungle my OWN jungle as well.

4.) My energy/cooldown based mid demands/takes the second blue and tries to take every blue after it. Or my ADC, usually while I am dead or my Smite is on cooldown and I am clearing the camp or helping the mid get it.

5.) I go for objectives and nobody responds. We just killed four of the enemy team in bot lane and came out with full health at level 8? Better ignore Dragon and continue farming/recall to base because you want to buy/go steal blue or red buff before I am willing to let it go. Wide open tower that we can easily take down? No, you're going to ping me to fall back and type in /all "Our jungler sux".

6.) I initiate fights under optimal circumstances and nobody follows me in. This is followed by laners typing in /all "Omg report feeder cho".


Basically, yeah, the Jungler still has the most effect on the lanes, but it is also the most frustrating and thankless position.

Mid gets your wraiths.
Mid gets your blue.
Bot gets your golems.
ADC gets your red.
When lanes fail guess what happens? They take your wolves too.

riotpls

This would probably shift the meta slightly at the very least, but I would very much enjoy it.

100% agree.

I recently hit level 30 and have no experience with the S1 jungle, so take this for what it's worth. After reading through the first 20 pages or so of this thread, the problem seems obvious to me. The jungle doesn't give enough gold/XP. Now, Riot could raise the gold/XP amounts on the smaller jungle creeps easily enough; the hard part would be balancing so that the laners are not abusing this by stealing all of the jungles creeps all the time. If there is something else that's glaringly wrong with this solution, or you can figure out how to solve the problem of laners stealing jungle creeps, be my guest.

make creeps more valuable to a jungler who took smite and jungle masteries

jungler gets way more gold, laners stop trying to steal creeps because its worth twice as much if the jungler gets them

We've actually been working on changes for the jungle in anticipation for Season 3 and though I can't really give all the details here because we are still iterating, I'd like to give you guys some insights into what's going on.

There are a multitude of issues we're tackling and they are very much intertwined. The current dominant jungle strategy (GP10 Support / Tanks) is fairly stagnant and the overall current jungle playstyle in many cases severely limits potential strategy and choices in other lanes/roles as well.

One large problem is that efficient farming of the jungle has very little pay off compared to constantly applying lane pressure by camping / ganking. Overall junglers severely lack in gold unless they successfully gank and snowball the game from the get-go and/or opt for a GP10 strategy.

The approach we're currently taking is to significantly increase the rewards of jungle camps over time (junglers already have a huge impact on the early game). To go along with this though, we are buffing jungle camps back up to actually be more threatening while simultaneously offering new / improved item paths that allow players to specialize in the jungle. Overall we want junglers to be rewarded for building combat stats rather than always being forced to build gold generation items.

This is not the only thing we're changing in the jungle for next season, but these types of things are definitely on our radar.

Under statikk :O