Advanced Jungle Tips for League of Legends Season 8 - Boost Yourself to Platinum and Beyond!

Season 8 is well underway, are you ready to boost yourself up? Your primary goal as jungle is to create advantages to enable your team's win condition.Which leads to the question, what is your team’s win condition? Identify it and begin to set up around that.

Win conditions will require resources funneling to certain areas (player X getting fed, player Y not getting fed, early tower lead, late game push, etc)

Those resources mean pushing for specific objectives. An objective requires making a play.

Making a play requires vision control, coordination, and mechanical setup.

- Vision control means they'll be unaware you're coming, you know they won't have backup (ex: their jg or rotating lane) or that if they do you can handle it. Whether this means you use a scanner or yellow wards is up to you, but always take control wards.

(Note about scanner, wards won’t show you when you scan them unless you attack them so you can still gank after scanning a ward).

Scuttle is also great for vision control, healing yourself, team fighting, and chasing. Be sure to CC it to reduce sits armor/mr.

Also, vision plants tell the enemy where you are, so only use them if you don't plan to gank (ex: you know they have vision of you or the lane isn’t gankable and you want to check for river control)

- Coordination means you both make moves at the right time (laner baiting, or initiating crowd control, etc)

Never use your gap closer to move distance towards your own tower! Always wait for them to run or flash.

- Mechanical setup means you both can execute properly, and do (landing sufficient cc, flashing forward, or making a play to just burn a flash rather than try to get a kill, etc)

If you’re successful, meaning they die, are pushed back and unable to rotate, have to go back to heal, etc, you’re able to chase an objective. Objectives meaning deep vision, stealing jungle camps, dragon, towers, rift.

What you go for depends on your win condition, comparative objective value, and team comp

EX: If you can’t solo dragon, and it’s a low value dragon, you might want to push for first tower rather than first dragon after a kill.

Some things to consider:

• If you can solo dragon, maybe you can snag both though it may be a gamble.
• If you can solo dragon, but it’s a high priority dragon, you may want to focus on securing that with high confidence rather than a tower push.
• Rift is better as you transition to mid game in the 10-15 minute range unless you're going to use it to secure first tower. If not, get it slightly later and use it to secure a tier 2 tower and open up a lane heavily for your team.
• Rift is fairly easy to solo as a jungle at level 8 or 9 as long as you're not behind and can be done fairly easily even earlier with 2 people to share damage.

A few more areas to consider:

Pathing - in a perfect world your lanes are gankable just as you've finished jungle camps on that side of the map. This can be managed via communication (pinging you’re going to a camp or 2

then ganking) but is really hard to execute. It may be worth it to skip a camp if the lane will be gankable. ALWAYS WATCH YOUR LANES!

De-tilting - as jungle, you get harassed a lot. de-tilting is part of the role but that doesn't mean allocate resources to a lost cause. You need to decide if a 0-3 top laner should get a gank with an infernal drake sitting around. It may help to be open about your decision.

Taxing - jungle experience is simply not enough, and remember the amount of stats you get from leveling is worth a LOT. It’s generally fine to tax after a gank. Generally push to tower so the enemy loses minions, you gain experience, and you free up the laner to do something else.

• If you get the kill, let them last hit.
• If they get the kill, take some farm.

Obviously, high kill participation and lots of farm will do wonders, but as a jungle you also need to focus on other things.

Objectives - the difference between good and great often comes down to a few additional categories:

• Damage to objectives/turrets
• Vision score including many wards placed, many wards cleared, wards that spot enemies/objectives, and deep wards. Never forget to grab a control ward!

• Stealing camps and time spent across the river will probably help too.

Itemizing: If you're not a carry jungle, (early game jungle, or tank jg) and you get really fed, you may want to invest in supportive items. A 7-0 rammus is great, but a 0-0-7 vayne is gonna feel bad for your team. If you have the spare gold, it may be worth grabbing supportive items such as:

• Abyssal Mask
• Locket of the Iron Solari
• Zz'Rot Portal (rare but can be the right call)
• Partner items like Knight's Vow or Zeke's Convergence

Most junglers dont have shields/heals so generally avoid shield/heal support items (like redemption) unless you're a jg built around that (ivern). Even if you're super fed, you shouldn't build off champ synergy.

Generally, itemizing is another variable in your win condition, and if you getting fed isn’t contributing really well to that condition, try to itemize in a way that helps fit your role into that win condition.

Smiting: Combine smite with an ability, preferably your strongest one. It's never ideal to wait for dragon/baron HP to hit your smite level, you want to trigger right above it. Use an ability+smite at the same time so you can aim to finish it a bit above the smite level. It should help you secure more effectively.

This is easy if your champ has an execute (%hp dmg like shaco shiv, which could scale up to a large hit on an epic monster) and more challenging on a low damage or damage over time champion (like fiddle or amumu)

As a jungler you have a heavy obligation to pivoting to wherever your team needs you. You have a lot of impact to sway the battle and it's your job to focus on macro play while your laners focus on winning their 1v1s. Pay attention, communicate, dominate.