Upcoming Jungle changes – How will they impact you?

‘Riot Sotere’, an official Rioter has posted on the NA League of Legends boards. It details some upcoming changes to hit the PBE. These changes are set to impact the normal league servers in Patch 8.10.

Riot has finally addressed the issues many casual players, streamers and youtubers have all been complaining about, jungle pressure.

Changes:

  • Talisman will grant greater mana based on the amount of missing mana. This’ll improve not only clear speed, but the amount of time a champion can spend in the jungle without needing to back.
  • Jungle experience down slightly in the early game

Rift Scuttle:

  • HP, increased from 800 to 1200 (at level 1)
  • Health scaling, down from 60 per level to 25 per level. Lowers HP at the late game, but makes scuttle less ‘free’ time wise.
  • Experience, massively increased from 10 to 170, forces junglers to contest the camp
  • Respawn time, down 30 seconds to 150s
  • Spawn time, earlier from 2:15 to 1:40
  • Gold, 70 to 100
  • Mana returned, the amount is 5x compared to before

Goals for the changes

‘Reduce early lane pressure from junglers’ – Currently, Junglers have way too much pressure in the early game. A gank at level 2, or ganks anytime before 8 minutes can completely tilt the lane in or against your favour. Even if junglers can not secure an early kill, they are able to push the opponent out of lane, or at the very least, give lane priority to their laner, leading to an eventual snow ball. Junglers can do this because they aren’t punished much for a failed gank, since the jungle exp isn’t as significant compared to previous seasons / years, where camps actually meant a great deal.

‘Increase the number of jungle v. jungle interactions in the early game’ – Riot will likely do this by making counter jungling much more important. Possibilities include buffing ‘Poacher’s Knife’, or increasing the enemy jungle camp EXP and gold values.

By making counter jungling more prevalent, it will encourage junglers to invade more and also defend their camps from the enemy. Currently, junglers have a too-safe early game, making this change will make it so that the ‘better jungler’ wins, as seen by the current scuttle change.

‘Encourage variation in optimal pathing’ – The jungle path is pretty standard now and can be repeated with almost every champion. Having better variation will make junglers less easy to predict, and increase the possibility of surprise ganks.

‘Reduce mana restraints as a hard blocker for champions that want to jungle’ – Some champions simply can’t jungle due to their high mana cost. Making a change to allow more champions to jungle will flip the meta and make the game much more fun.