Over the holiday weekend I did my best to stay as far out of the loop as possible. I wasn’t checking my usual gaming sites, I wasn’t reading any of the forums, and obviously I wasn’t doing any gaming. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came back to discover the jungle changes.
I’m not going to do much analysis here. I haven’t been able to spend enough time in the jungle to really assess the changes. For now, it seems like the damage nerf makes jungling possible for a wider range of characters but the XP nerf makes it less viable for those characters. As I get more time in the jungle I’m sure I’ll have more to say. For now, let’s go over the changes.
Smaller jungle camps now respawn more quickly, offer reduced XP and gold rewards (though these now scale with duration of the game), and drop a health sigil from the largest mob. Buff camps are easier to kill and offer extra XP but with reduced gold rewards. The changes are designed to help a wider variety of champions and builds get into the jungle. These changes should also make jungling more viable at lower summoner levels. When I used to play on my smurf account a bit, it was nearly impossible to jungle because of the lack of runes.
Even with the changes, jungling odd champions feels extremely slow. I played a jungle Teemo earlier today and fell way behind the bottom lane. It was partially caused by his reduced speed, but I think the reduced XP from smaller camps really hurt me.
Like I said, I’ll have more impressions in the near future. For now, let me know what you think. Is the new jungle better or worse than the old version? Any strange new build you’ve seen play successfully?
