League of Legends’ Season 2 World Championships are now wrapped up tightly enough for our Rob to tie them in a bow coloured with their very best games, and Riot are looking forward to the next season.
Their highest priority? Jungling is in for a real haircut. Says assistant game designer Statikk: “The current dominant jungle strategy (GP10 Support / Tanks) is fairly stagnant and the overall current jungle playstyle in many cases severely limits potential strategy and choices in other lanes/roles as well.”
A major issue, says Statikk, is the tiny payoff jungle farming offers as an alternative to applying lane pressure by camping and ganking. For the most part, even the most efficient junglers are left gold-deficient unless they plump for a GP10 strategy or “successfully gank and snowball the game from the get-go”.
“The approach we’re currently taking is to significantly increase the rewards of jungle camps over time (junglers already have a huge impact on the early game),” continues Statikk in the LoL forums.
“To go along with this though, we are buffing jungle camps back up to actually be more threatening while simultaneously offering new / improved item paths that allow players to specialize in the jungle.
“Overall we want junglers to be rewarded for building combat stats rather than always being forced to build gold generation items.”
When asked whether Riot would be reverting their recent jungling changes, Statikk replied in the affirmative – he stressed, though, that the game wouldn’t be returning to the dark ages.
“We aren’t going all the way back to the extreme of the old jungle where you would just get crushed unless you were Warwick, but we do feel there is a happy medium between Season 1 and Season 2 that we can strike.
“The biggest difference here though is that we will be offering itemization that will help champions who need that extra boost in the jungle. Champions who are already super strong in the jungle may opt to not build these items, but it’s pretty interesting to see what new junglers may become viable with these new items.”
Junglers! Leap from the brush and tell us your thoughts on Riot’s proposed changes.