Guinsoo held a Q&A session on the Chinese version of Twitter in which he talked about some upcoming changes to jungling. Jungling has grown into a staple of the meta game, to the point that I almost never see a game without at least one jungler, and most games have two. In some ways, jungling can be blamed for a lot of the passive play in the game. Junglers are the reason pushing is so frowned upon. Junglers push back aggressive play with ganking, and a big part of a successful gank comes from the slow on lizard buff, but that’s about to change.
As Guinsoo has it, red buff will be going from a slow on target to a haste, granting the jungler extra killing power without offering too much utility. I think it’s a great change. I’ve often thought that jungle buffs last entirely too long. I would much rather see a short duration, short respawn time on the buffs than the current long duration, but that’s not really the point here. The point is that jungling is being looked at in some significant ways.
Unfortunately the changes are a long ways off. The forums caught wind of the changes and started up the QQmobile, so Riot has stepped in to reiterate several times that the changes are in very early testing.
I really hope the testing goes well. I would bet that 50 percent of my games go stagnant around the 20 minute mark, the other 50 being the early surrenders. At 20 minutes you’re usually looking at the third full jungle clear, maybe waiting on the second dragon spawn of the game and a couple turrets might be down. At that point it’s still way too dangerous to overextend, so teams just stand around waiting for lanes to push. It’s insanely boring, and something I hope we’ll see change sooner or later.
