jungle changes – Fearless Gamer

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This may be old news for some of you, but I didn’t notice it until today while I was playing Shaco. I Deceived over a wall to catch a low-health Ashe under her second turret. She saw me and moved away, though not before I could land a Two-Shiv on her. I was devastated to see that the spell wasn’t quite enough damage to drop her, especially since I was soaking so much turret fire to attempt the kill. Much to my surprise, she died just as she entered the fog of war. As she disappeared, I saw what looked like the burning animation from lizard buff.

I haven’t been able to find anything official from Riot regarding this change – it certainly wasn’t in Volibear’s patch notes – but it seems that this has been active since the most recent patch. I saw it today with Shaco, Nunu, Ryze, and Swain, though some of the threads I’ve found confirm that it is any single target spell.

This is a pretty huge change, one that further complicates the current jungle situation. Imagine giving lizard buff to Urgot at level two. Yeah, now his Q applies lizard. Have fun with that. How about Ryze? Katarina? LeBlanc? Kassadin? Kennen? Akali? Oh dear god, Akali. The problem, of course, is that it means the jungler is giving up a serious amount of XP early in the game. Unless he is ganking extremely well, passing off buffs isn’t really an option in the early game. Still, I always like to have more options than fewer, so I’ll call this “interesting” a the very least.

Had you already noticed the change?

Leave Well Enough Alone.

After yesterday’s patch I decided to spend a little time on the forums, checking the reaction to the jungle changes. Yesterday’s jungle patch is the most significant change to the meta we’ve seen in more than a year, or at least it could have been. According to recent red posts, it looks like Riot will be hotfixing the jungle to pretty much keep things as they always have been, the only real change being that low-level summoners should be able to jungle more easily. I’m stuck wondering one thing: why does Riot think the jungle needs “fixed?”

Before you go all ragey on me, let’s consider a few things. First, the game as it currently is hasn’t changed in any significant way in more than 18 months. Having a dedicated jungler has been a staple of the game for so long that people forget what the game was like before jungling became popular. Second, the changes have been live for a mere 36 hours. Even Riot was saying players were complaining too early, but a day later they’ve changed their stance.

I agree that current jungle rewards might be a little low, or maybe they just don’t scale up fast enough, but let’s imagine, just for a second, that Riot left the game as it is. Maybe we’d see more duo lanes top. Wouldn’t that be an interesting twist? Wouldn’t that offer more flexibility in lane choices and in-game swapping? As things currently stand, when a top or mid-lane starts to lose lane, there aren’t many options for them to switch out. With two duo-lanes there are more options for addressing problems once the game has started, not just at the champ select screen.

If League of Legends needs anything right now, it’s more changes like these. Changes that shake things up. Changes that make the game different. Changes that make the game something other than what it has been for two years.

Tag: jungle changes

Single-target spells now applying red buff

Why is Riot “fixing” the jungle?

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