Riot details League of Legends pre-season Jungle changes

The last few days have seen Riot release a lot of information about its upcoming pre-season changes to the Summoner's Rift, with tweaks to the meta, objectives, items and a lot more. Today though, it's talking Jungle and what can be done to make it more viable for more champions and keep those that choose the role, competitive when it moves to the team fight phase.

In its latest forum post on thee matter, Riot highlights some current issues with the jungle, namely that counter-jungling is perhaps too effective, completely crippling your opposite number and making it almost impossible for them to catch up and become a threat later. Likewise, champions that can't gank early are at a disadvantage to those that can, as farming just isn't that useful in comparison.

To combat this, Riot is proposing a few changes:

• Adding a new camp near blue buff and wolf camp. This will create new routes for junglers to clear the camps and equalises the number of neutral monsters on the top and bottom of the map.
• Jungle monsters will scale in level with the players. Each time they spawn, jungle monsters will check their level off against other players, meaning their experience offering will increase, but so will their health and damage output.
• More gold for junglers. While it's not for certain yet, there are some planned changes for jungling items to give them some extra gold.

Do you think the lion is sleeping tonight? Source: Conorsta

A Riot employee by the name of RiotSolCrushed posted on the Reddit thread discussing the update, with the following possible item tweaks:

• Wriggle's Lantern: Now the item for farming junglers, grants very bad combat stats but gives a very big increase in gold from jungle monsters
• Spirit of the Ancient Golem: Now intended for support junglers who will move with the team more than farm the jungle. Allows you to ‘bank' the gold bonus for a little bit of time which you can cash in by killing jungle monsters.
• Spirit of the Spectral Wraith: Now intended to help mage junglers who are hurt by not having blue buff and needing to spend too much resources to clear jungle mid-late game. Will give Health and Mana back equal to a % of spell damage you deal to monsters. (Vlad and co. will still have their selfish spellvamp item – it just won't be Spirit Wraith)

Smite is also having its cooldown halved, but its early damage reduced.

KitGuru Says: What do you think of these changes? I'm interested to see how they effect the game – might even make me head back into the jungle myself. 

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