League of Legends Jungling

Chapter 4: The Jungle

If you are an aspiring jungle player then this should be your bible. This chapter will be split into three parts one detailing early game jungling another going more in-depth as to what you should do after your first initial clear and what the jungle actually is.

Part 1 What is the jungle.

Memorization is key to playing the jungler for the every camp spawns after a set amount of time after killing it. Buff camps such as red and blue spawn, or Lizards and Ancient Golem on the map, first at the 1 minute and 55 second mark and spawn 5 minutes after death and give enough experience to ensure level 2 at level 1 as long as you don't split experience with anyone. Blue buff gives increased magic regeneration and red buff applies damage over time and slows. The smaller camps, Wraiths, Wolves, And the Big Golem, spawn at the 2 minutes and 5 second mark and spawn every 50 seconds after death. The Epic Monsters are on opposite sides of the map and give global experience to everyone on the team that kills it. The dragon provides every ally on the map with 190 gold and a lot of experience that is almost equivalent to a tower and spawns at the 2 minute and 30 second mark and respawns every 6 minutes after death. Baron Nashor on the other side of the map provides your team with 300 global gold and gives every a global buff that increases regeneration. Baron Nashor spawns every 7 minutes while the Baron Nashor buff lasts 5 minutes or until you die. Junglers are almost required to have smite and if you do not jungle with smite you will be considered a troll. Smite provides safe jungle clears and allows for objective control such as Baron and Dragon. ALWAYS RUN SMITE ON JUNGLERS.

Part 2 The Initial Clear

Junglers usually have very standard routes but some of the more versatile have many different paths. The usual path is to go from blue to red and use your smite on the red. This allows for many gank paths such as ganking the enemy mid laner or your bot lane.The other route is much like the previous except its from red to blue and you use smite on blue. This route is if you want to gank your bot lane and you are on the purple side or if you want to gank your top lane and you are on blue side. For more versatile junglers you can start red and try to secure the enemies blue therefore denying them a buff or the other way around. As a jungler, you want to gank your lanes as much as possible and should try to gank to kill. If you don't secure a kill you might have helped your lane but this puts you farther behind in gold. Also try to remember that when you die with a red or blue buff you will transfer said buff to the killer.

"The unseen blade is the deadliest." Zed-2013

Part: 3 After Initial Clear

After you have secured your own buffs there are many routes that you can take. You can try to gank your lanes or you can counterjungle the enemy if you know that they are slower Ex.When you are playing a Lee Sin vs. Amumu you can steal his small camps to set him back while he tries to gank a lane. While this favors the fast jungler if you play too agressive and the enemy jungler comes back from his gank he can find you and with help from his teammates he can kill you therefore feeding and losing your buffs. This is not only detrimental to you but also your teammates because a fresh double buff can sway a lane in the enemies' favor. Throughout the mid and late game you want to memorize jungle timers so that your team can be ready when the key objectives come back up. Also, it is important for a jungler to ward to maintain control over not only their buffs but also the enemy buffs and objectives.

Follow this guide and you will eventually master the jungle.