[2022] Zhonya's Hourglass being a core item on tank junglers in pro play really shows how insane the damage levels have become in this game. Tank stats can't compete with Stasis effect.

Just to devil's advocate, from solo queue data Zhonya's performs pretty weakly on every jungler I've checked. It's very hard to check this exclusively in high-MMR since there aren't that many samples (880 games of Zhonya's second on J4 in D2+ over the last month for example). Again, this is fairly clumsy since intuitively stronger players would be better at using active items but as a direct comparison, Frozen Heart is cheaper and appears to win +4.5% of the time over Zhonya's but this is low confidence because of low sample.

I'm personally unconvinced as an analyst that Zhonya's is actually correct. It feels good, I'm sure. But so does spending 2600g on not just a Chain Vest. I don't really believe it's correct to spend 1.5k on just a repeating stasis when there are much better options out there.

Remember, this is the same pro play that forgot about Censor meta for the entire year. I just don't trust them on this one.

Circling back to the point of damage, I agree. I believe offensive itemization has gotten much more powerful over League's lifetime. I think back to Renekton builds from years ago where the only realistic offensive item was Brutalizer and otherwise he built full tank. Cooldown reduction for mages was tough to buy; it was often Nashor's or Frozen Heart or nothing. So I do think the game has gotten deadlier but some of it is player behavior as well. The Resolve tree has great options for increasing durability on squishies, yet it gets overlooked constantly.

Conditioning and Overgrowth are incredibly performant runes. If they were consistently picked (as I believe they should), the game would probably feel properly deadly. So I do believe some of this lethality is of our own making.

FWIW the average 2nd item completion of a low econ jungler (e.g. Jarvan, Lee) in D2+ is like 20 minutes. For higher-econ junglers like Viego it's more like 19. And this is counting 3k+ items like Death's Dance or Cleaver.

Pro data may be very different and I don't have a way of easily accessing aggregated item data but Gold/Min is easy to find.

The top 5 presence junglers in the season average at 332.8 gold/min, which signals 6656 gold by 20 minutes. If they skip upgraded boots, that's averaging Sunderer + Death's Dance by 20 minutes. 22-23 with upgraded boots.

They're certainly lower-econ, though. The average mid laner in pro sits at around 400 Gold/Min, for example.

Here's some pro play data as food for thought. This is somewhat clumsy as it will be influenced by actual champions played. Here's the gold/min from the top 5 most-picked champions across Jungle for top leagues/tournaments from 2015 to present

• 2015 Jungle: 303, 286, 291, 286, 335 (300 average)
• 2016 Jungle: 347, 340, 336, 362, 382 (353 average)
• 2017 Jungle: 335, 348, 340, 321, 359 (340 average)
• 2018 Jungle: 314, 315, 314, 314, 331 (318 average)
• 2019 Jungle: 314, 324, 314, 338, 321 (322 average)
• 2020 Jungle: 325, 304, 304, 367, 331 (326 average)
• 2021 Jungle: 342, 351, 341, 339, 348 (344 average)
• 2020 Jungle: 324, 334, 341, 344, 321 (333 average)

It's worth noting that mid lane gold/min is pretty close to 400 in every season after 2015. It's 374 for 2015. So it appears 2016 had a big surge of gold everywhere.

Or players are wrong in "discovering" Zhonya's.