GalaxySmash

I agree the exp system is likely a good place to look, exp is a super super fickle mechanic so I think finding the right balance there is tough, but worth looking into.

I think overloading players with a lot of things to learn is a fast way to overwhelm and potentially scare them off. Slowly trickling new mechanics in is a much safer way of doing it, which I believe is the approach here.

I think you are just missing a lot of context here is all. Jungle isn't nearly as unpopular a role in skilled/elite levels of play, in low elo it is by far the most popular out of all elo brakcets. And bringing proven popular champions into an unpopular role isn't that bizzare to me at all. The buffs are also done in such a way so that they will have a low impact on those champions' pre-existing roles as possible, so they aren't buffed as a whole so much as they are buffed specifically only for jungle. All this is also not to say that we think this is the one and only solution to solving the many problems that exist with the jungle, this is simply one change that is currently being made.

I agree honestly, I think its something that will likely be worth doing in the not so distant future.

Yeah its something that we have considered for sure, I think that jungling might be something a tad too complex for first-time players, but its something thats not off the table.

Haha that could be fun, I wanted Yasuo jungle but no luck :(

Yeah I think those concerns are reasonable callouts and something that we have kept in mind during testing. I think that our conclusions have been that these are acceptable risks that won't manifest themselves too often to be unhealthy to champion/game as a whole. I can't say for sure about Sylas being prone to poach camps, I think it carries some risk but the main risk of Sylas jungle is turning him into one of the aforementioned power-farming hyperscalers. I think something else I forgot to mention before is that Sylas is a bit of a flex pick for both mid and top in pro play, making him a trio flex pick carries some massive risk for furthering how pro-bound he is as a champion, which is also something we generally prefer to avoid.

I do wanna say that first those numbers pushed to PBE were clearly overtuned and have been adjusted and likely will be adjusted further. I think making jungle as a role more appealing rather than adding appealing champions is a good goal to have, though it is decisively harder to accomplish from a goals standpoint as well as workload. Any change we make to the jungle will always have big ripple effects so the rammifications will always be hard to foresee. This change would also likely cause a massive shift in pro so it would have to be reserved for mid-season or pre-season. All that being said I wouldn't count it out as a possibility at some point.

I like the idea, and personally I could see value in us doing this. I think a concern here is how fast it would be depricated because of how often the jungle changes. Putting a lot of time and effort into a high-quality guide and then having it be outdated a year later would feel pretty bad in my opinion.

Can't speak on the team's stance on it, but I can give my personal opinion here. I think bringing Sylas jungle back could be not too bad, but the struggle with making these champions junglers is what we want to do it without buffing their lane. There will always be overlap to some degree, but minimizing that overlap as much as possible is always a goal. Something I feel we also tend to want to avoid is introducing junglers that will just be clear gods AND scale absurdly well, and thus they are incentivized to just powerfarm in the jungle until they scale to late game. This is part of the reason you don't see marksman among the champions we are trying to introduce into the jungle. Also caveat here that of course some champions like this already exist (looking at your Karthus), but they are in the minority and them existing to some degree adds some healthy variety, we just want to avoid that being the overwhelming strategy of junglers.

This sentiment is mostly correct, in general we are looking to increase the popularity of jungle across the board by introducing traditionally popular champions, especially in lower elos.

We aren't looking to remove his jungle viability, so I would expect him to stay viable at the worst, and likely still be a competitive pick.

Ironically I feel like this is the problem with his jungle, he powerfarms to get ahead and just runs you down, with little opportunity to stop him from scaling.

Correct, the change is meant to nerf jungle and buff top lane.

Always a fan of smashing galaxies <3. We don't really want to forcibly enable Gwen jungle, we are fine with it existing but she is primarily a top laner and secondarily a mid laner. Viego can hopefully sustain junglers' desires for a new champion for awhile! He's awesome :D

Haha all that is not to say we don't push broken numbers to live, mistakes happen regardless. The goal of these changes is to broaden the jungle pool by giving champion that are more broadly popular in all elos (especially lower elos) the ability to exist as junglers. Expect these numbers to be tuned as necessary, we want these champions to be playable in the jungle, but won't force them to be S tier.

Not quite. Often content that goes to PBE is completely ready to go to live (think art, assets, etc.) but their tuning states are not necessarily there. To my knowledge we don't use PBE data to tune because the data is very very far off reliable, but the tuning numbers are often not final on item/champion changes by the time they get pushed to PBE.

Fix for this should be in for 11.7!

Yeah really liking what we got coming down the pipeline, I worked closely with Truexy the designer for the Xin Zhao update so I feel extra confident on that. Ofc thanks for the chat as well :)

Indeed, I think there is also this unforunate scenario where a champ that is function and even good design wise like Neeko gets overshadowed by champions that more desperately need work done to keep them up to bar.