[2023] Preseason 2023 - Jungle Changes

Originally posted by adek13sz

Jungle companion damage triggers Viego Q's passive every time it damages jungle monster after using his Q (and maybe W) and applying passive to monster.
Buy new jungle companion item. Take Q, Use Q on jungle monster, consume stack by aa-ing the monster, next instance of damage from companion will apply stack on jungle monster which can be consumed (by stack I mean Viego Q's passive).

Originally posted by MMACheerpuppy

Hi GM here.

Problems:

There are a few reasons the combination of ward tracking and patience changes encourage us to play without teams and not with them, contrary to your goals and objectives. This is mainly because the combination of patience removal (jungle timing variance) and ward tracking (needing the support to do their job) just makes it way easier for SoloQ players to play in almost complete isolation.

Camp timings become almost entirely predictable and this is a problem. You could trick a marketing team into thinking these changes are low elo friendly but you're going to make the game more frustrating to play for those players (because why do we need to play with the jungler if we have perfect omniscience on camp timings, and why do we need to play with the support if junglers have perfect omniscience of ward timings, and how do you now gank your opponents). In competitive league, you have to leverage greater understanding to win and if there's nothing more understand than your opponents because of what you can see on the screen, you can't win, and players want to win.

Great give players in their roles the tools they need to communicate but the patience change alone encourages more of the toxic 'mute all and focus why are you communicating' mentality we don't want to have. Low ELO players are thrilled when I ping away the top because I know exactly when a Hecarim is likely to pop out across a range and I'm computing based on the fact he didn't show he must have done a clear poorly or differently. That itself is skill expression now removed. I think you are encouraging players to play less as a team with some of these changes by removing role identity and not more and maybe you really have to understand the LAN experience and SoloQ experience to see the ins and outs of this.

I respect the want to remove third party tools but if you're going to make the jungle so linear why would a new third party tool not comes out which says "Vi is probably done clearing!". Without this a Yuumi can probably just dance around champions with ward pings and F keys to map the enemy fog of war while keeping an excel spreadsheet open on when every jungler has to be finished doing their clears. Indirectly giving core gameplay players the same omniscience of those cheats changes the system in a way which is worse for everyone.

Solutions

• Extend the range of camp patience marginally so it's less pixel oriented.
• Not revert changes but tweak camp XP so we get back some more varied pathing for Junglers to consider. Throw back to early seasons without patience where the reward in jungle was less in how you cleared but how you planned your clears what/where/when, applicable because there were more options to consider.
• Go hard on cheaters. Issue temporary bans for 3rd party tools which do Direct X rendering. This exploit makes actual cheats and scripts undetectable anyway because you let tools draw directly in the client without any security. Why?
• JUST improve the tutorial and not gate smite :/ I mentioned below it's enough to climb by just clearing well. That already brings bad silver junglers up to mid gold 'okay' junglers.

Just don't do what you're doing now and not do any of these things.

More feedback and detailed points:

• Having a line around jungle camp patience is fine but you could have done it more artfully (honestly I used the pavement as my guide, you could have created paths to do this).
• Removing double camping removes a huge layer of abstraction on what makes a jungle players macro. A macro outplay by managing CS leads and the timing variance on when a champion can clear and when their champion actually cleared is completely gone. It's not just about "I am farming better so I win" which is what this change seems to have in mind, it's about "I see you are farming poorly so I know you're going to come out the jungle later and I'm going to take this chance to set up my counter gank/vision/gank/invade .etc." It turns out to be more about HP and fog of war and timing, and invade potential, not about the clear itself. We didn't used to have double camping but we also had many more paths we were able to use to clear the jungle back in the day.
• You're adding 20 seconds of clear time to almost every champ in the game and shrinking the variance to be much more exact across all MMRs and between MMRs as well.
• From boosting, suggested pathing is probably enough to bring most jungle players right now from silver to Gold, it's a little known fact that you can climb out of silver as a jungler just by actually clearing your camps in a logical order. You don't need more than this to stop players from crying about how hard the role is. Full stop.
• Making jungle so predictable you create a huge buff to laners that actually play the game risks making jungle MORE inaccessible. I'll explain this:
  • One of the hardest parts about Jungle is optimising for ganks, and if you reduce the variance on the time it takes to clear the jungle, which is what you are doing, people won't want to play the role at beginner or experienced levels because it will be so easy for content creators to advertise all the timings in 3 minute YouTube guides and that's all it'll take to digest.
  • For low elo, simplification can trick the marketing team into thinking you made the jungle easier because those players will think "I will finally have an easy answer to shut down enemy tryndameres!", but you will soon learn that is just a naive way of thinking. Really, players who play the game can predict outcomes to such high specifity, jungle gets much weaker and more frustrating as a role to basically win from. It makes me frustrated to just think about pathing now because I will be doing nothing but farming creeps until level 6 waiting for every ward timer I pinged out to expire. I just don't see why I would gank in low elo anymore, it is already hard enough in high elo and the combination of ward timers + removing leashing are going to produce huge tells to players at every skill level (or content creators will monetise it and produce the meta).
  • For high elo I'd be surprised if even Canyon could even gank me in this. If you're starting bot side and I'm a top laner I literally will just not push for 3:10 minutes each game or whatever the spreadsheet of clear times happens to be jungle-champ because I already know every jungler will complete their clears at the same time because there's literally no skill in it anymore (so everyone clears at the same time) and there's no incentive to do anything but level 4 clear and ward scuttle, and then ping the top lanes ward and just not push until that ward expires. Junglers might as well spawn at 3:30 on scuttle crab.
  • The claim is this lowers the skill floor. This doesn't even really lower the skill floor, it just lowers the skill ceiling so new junglers not knowing what they're doing can't get stomped as hard out the gate, but thanks to less timer variance and ward tracking lanes will control the jungle in mid range MMRs and not the junglers themselves. So everything gets harder. I don't mean "playing with", I mean "control", because there's no wiggle room to separate the good and bad junglers anymore or ways junglers can get an edge over lanes, let alone good and great.
  • League is a team game but the answer is not forcing everyone to play together, it's giving us the tools to play together and letting the community decide how they use them which makes the experience of playing competitively fun for everyone. Take a lecture from counter strike, a game that didn't change in 10 years, and is still just as popular to this day. So simple, basic, and so beautiful.
  • There are all sorts of other implications to the game like invades and ranges that I just can't cover without a whiteboard but are well covered here https://youtu.be/MxwleJIBUXs?t=209
• We just can't talk about leashing and patience in isolation from ward tracking because these concepts operate together:
  • Ward tracking is the kind of script people pay money for as it influences the role of effective support shot calling and again managing fog of war is a huge part of Support roles identity and this removes their personality and responsibility to do that. I would have much rather seen a support item that lets you tag and time wards artfully on the map. But instead, the system changes so now players don't really need to play with supports anymore to manage the fog of war. Cool, the role is just a CC bot now, which is less fun in LANs as well as SoloQ. So as a jungler, why would we have support players manage the fog of war for us when the system has changed so there is less cumulative work across the team if everyone just does the supports role for them? Again, the claim is it is a 'team game' and you want to promote that, fine, but you're making it way less about playing as a team and more removing or simplifying role identity so I can play without it. Cool for my boosting career I guess.
• Just update the tutorial and make Smite available at early levels if you want new players to join and be on par with everyone else. Have the developers encourage Neace or something, or even watch Neace because I am getting concerned at every season your development team is so far removed from the game they don't understand it without ever playing or coaching a high level, but have the ego to think they do.
• So I think we deserve a bit more explanation and thought process. There's so much happening because of the patience change alone you don't credit or don't understand. Pick one.
• Lastly, for humour there's more skill expression involved in Wild Rift than there is in the core League KB+M experience now but okay (double Camping is still available on Wild Rift https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhtprFJ68jQ), feels off to me.

Originally posted by Lunariz

Master player here. Have only played one game so far, so wanted to give my first impressions before I get used to things.

On jungle item stacking:

• The effects of a fully stacked jungle item are exciting and seem like they're worth acquiring and playing around. The tooltip could still be refined a bit however, as I initially assumed that the unique bonuses would become active at 20 stacks
• It's completely unclear to me when and why I get 'cookies'. I thought 1 jungle camp = 1 stack, but I get cookies from nowhere, and then the next camp gives me more stacks and +15g per cookie? The game is not telling me the details of this system anywhere.
• Dragon and Herald seem to give 4(?) stacks each - this info is missing from tooltip
• I'm unsure whether stacking works like Kindred (must assist in killing camp) or whether I'm required to get the killing blow.
• It appears the jungle item still gives mana regen, but this information is missing from the tooltip as well
• It annoys me a bit that the new jungle item sits in my inventory so long. The live one frees up its slot pretty quickly, but the new one sits there for a good 20 minutes.

On clearing:

• Leashing ranges will take getting used to, but unlike most people I don't mind the change. It seems camps show their range when you first engage them, but I'm most interested in seeing this range as I finish the camp and move to another. Perhaps the range could glow as the monster reaches the edge?
• Compared to the burn of live jungle items, the pet attacks feel much more clunky and unpredictable. I have trouble estimating whether my pet will manage to finish clearing the camp as I move to the next one, compared to the ease of tracking burn rate.
• It seems pets attack in a small aoe(?) around their model location(?), which makes its damage feel even more random, especially on camps with multiple units. Very noticeable on raptors: previously, an aoe spell + burn might take out all small raptors or at least bring them all to the same health. Now, some die and some don't, at different times. I understand part of the goal was to make jungling less reliant on aoe, but I assume making raptors more annoying to take was not intended

/u/RiotTriptoid hope this feedback helps, I'll probably update later as I play around with it more!

Originally posted by Lunariz

From further testing, it seems I get a cookie exactly once per minute. I noticed this at 3:09, 4:09, 5:09 etc. I presume the :09 timing comes from when I bought the jungle item, and that should probably not be the case.

Originally posted by arekban

I started playing the game 2-3 years ago, and one of my first roles was jungle, back when I was about level 15. I did not kite camps. The concept of kiting a camp didn't exist to me when I was level 15, not until I saw other players doing it and started to emulate. At that point in my League of Legends journey, the leash range of a camp could've been 200 units and I would've never triggered it.

When I learned to kite camps and clear more healthily, I felt great! I felt absolutely amazing being able to transition between camps smoothly and path more efficiently. I still wasn't a good player then, not by any means, but the progression still felt immensely satisfying.

When I saw players taking blue buff and gromp at the same time, it IMMEDIATELY became a goalpost for me. 'How do they do that? That's so cool!' was what I'd think when I saw a player managing to keep both camps on them at the same time and take them both at once. When I learned to do it I felt ecstatic. It took some tries but it wasn't too difficult in the end, I just had to get used to standing relatively still once I was in place.

Now that I could clear near-optimally on a couple of champs, jungling felt exciting. I'd time myself as I moved between camps, use the time to watch the map, feel the micro aspects becoming more intuitive and opening my thoughts up to more time spent thinking about ganking and paths.

Clearing on a champion like Amumu, by contrast with a champ like Graves or Rengar, felt incredibly boring. Just standing still and headbutting the camp with my mummy head over and over until it died. Occasionally pressing E. I guess clearing raptors fast was minorly enjoyable. I decided I'd never play Amumu despite quick success with him, simply because the gameplay patterns were so boring to me. Fighting on Amumu felt incredibly linear with very little deviation, and the clear was stationary and dull.

Fast forward to now. I tried several paths on several champions on the PBE today, and every clear felt like Amumu's clear. I can't die to camps. I do the most DPS by standing still, autoing, and pressing my buttons. The only priority I can give my abilities during my clear is 'hit the large monster more'.

Forget skill expression for a moment and entertain the fact that these changes feel boring. With all respect due to Riot for everything else they've brought about this preseason, (most of which seems really fun!) this jungling patience/leash range in particular feels SO sluggish and repetitive in how I'm expected to clear on every champion from now on that I don't want to play jungle anymore if this goes through in its current iteration. The PVE element of the jungle feels completely uninteractive and each camp feels the exact same. 'Kill the small raptors first' is the ONLY remaining camp strategy that I can think of.

Scuttles don't even have a shield anymore. While I'm less miffed about this than other changes, as historically scuttle didn't have a shield, it was at least an interactive element within the jungle. Removing smite healing feels like it removes outplay potential also, especially during fights for camps during invades or defense from invades, but it seems as if to counterbalance this it's been made so it's almost impossible to have an unhealthy clear on nearly any jungler, removing the necessity of proper smite usage to conserve HP.

I'm an average player. I'm not high elo, my opinion is less refined then that of the skilled players posting above me, but I'd say surely that makes me a part of Riot's core demographic? I won't quit League over this if it goes through, but I won't play jungle anymore either. I think a lot of people won't want to after this, as every game will feel so samey.

Also, the inconsistency of jungle companions attacking camps makes it very hard to walk away from a camp as it should be dying to burn, which adds seconds to my clear. Sometimes my companion seems not to attack basically at all, especially if I kite, hence why standing still and AFK auto-attacking camps seems to be the most beneficial strategy.

Okay, sorry for writing a book. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this. I appreciate any thoughts or comments

Originally posted by plutrichor

Just tested in Practice Tool -- the new jungle items appear to not have the penalty for farming lane minions early in the game (the anti-funnel mechanic). Is this an oversight?

Originally posted by UnknownfromME

The pets continue to feel clunky even though I can tell you've tweaked the AI a bit since the initial release. Pets regularly do not hide in the brush with you or, if they do, lag behind and fumble about getting into the bush. This is a huge liability.

The red and green pet benefits could stand to have trackers that tell how much damage was dealt or shielded as a QoL. Blue could have a tracker for number of seconds sped up.

In all honesty I'm still not sold on the current implementation of pets and they feel like they're detracting from my game rather than adding to it. I know I'm not alone in this. Another poster mentioned the pets only spawning or becoming visible when you actively have aggro from a jungle camp and I think that's an idea that has merit. It would also solve the undesired interactions with champions like Evelyn and Shaco and reduce clutter in PvP fights (which is something you should strongly consider as the game is already very busy visually).