Only in Teambuilder and Intro Bots. Still exciting though!

Patch notes are out:  Patch 4.19 notes | League of Legends

You expected a substantial patch a week before the season ends?

So this is on pbe..

and it occurs to me that the map roll out is supposed to start AFTER the end of season.. hurm...

I don't know about that.  You had to buy wards instead of getting a ward item so it was a lot more expensive to combat them a few seasons back, but they also had a more difficult jungle to work with.  Back when everyone had to start pots/armor cloth to survive and many couldn't gank till six, they were far less felt than now.  We've got jungle sustain items that make backs a matter of needing to spend money.

I wouldn't say they run games though, he probably doesn't understand map awareness and warding...

That quote was from Morello. The Lead Game Designer who has been around from day 1. You don't have to agree with him on everything, but he probably has a firm understanding of the concepts of map awareness and warding.

That's not quite true. Season 2 they wanted the jungle to be accessible to more than just Warwick, Nunu, Udyr, allowing more "carry junglers". The problem with that was that it was TOO easy and so everyone poached the jungle, causing them to actually get less gold. But, there were way more junglers. Not to mention, the "Oracle Monkey" strategy that become a necessity at high level play made the junglers extremely extremely important. Additionally, at this time jungle tanks were pretty much immortal to mages and bruisers, due to how ridiculous end-game ADCs were. Sure, they got 4-shot by the ADC, but that's what ADCs did to everyone back then.

Season 3, they wanted to make the jungle harder, and prevent laners from poaching everything... allowing more "carry junglers". They did this by increasing the difficult of the jungle and introducing extremely slot-efficient items. There was also the brief months of League of Cleavers and League of Warmogs, which was a great time to be a jungler. This backfired because laners just bought the slot-efficient items (Blue Ezreal, Vladimir). This was also the "Assassin" Season, which somewhat warped the good junglers. You pretty much HAD to be someone who could consistently and effectively gank midlane, because whoever won midlane would transition just so much better while the other one ballsnowed.

Season 4, they wanted to refine the jungle items... allowing more "carry junglers". They tweaked the stats of the jungle items around so that laners couldn't really buy it, due to the Conservation mechanic. They also introduced Feral Flare. Thus began the dark days of the "Jungle Carry". Junglers were coming out of laning phases extremely powerful, and it was difficult to stop them because their gold was so safe. They were dealing immense amounts of damage with just SotEL and a Brutalizer. Then there was Jungle Yi. So, they nerfed them. All of them.

While i agree that, historically, Junglers have not been as strong as a role as whatever-the-strongest-lane was that season... is that really an awful thing? We say what happened earlier this season: It is difficult to deny a jungler their farm, without consistently doing 3-man plays. It would seem odd for a lower-gold position to be stronger than others.

i really feel that it's unfair to say that they haven't accomplished a part of their goals for each season. They usually did, but it backfired because they did it ... too well?

And while i also agree that Jungle is probably one of the weaker roles if you're not playing the very top junglers, you "can". i also feel like you don't play a lot of "3 minute gankers", other than Panthenon. For this reason, i just don't feel like your playstyle is going to be as dramatically impacted because they are trying to shift AWAY from the "3 minute gankers". i feel like junglers who will be able to accurately time ganks and manuever into position are going to be really stronger, rather than this season's "Trinity" junglers who always had access to extremely effective ganks, regardless of vision.

The real goal, i feel, for them this season is not to "allow more carry junglers", for once. Rather it is it to "allow a more diverse set of junglers". That means if you happen to always play whatever is strongest, you'll feel weaker because they are reducing the strength of THAT set of junglers. But everyone else should feel enabled, once they smooth out the kinks.

Well, part of the problem here is that Morello can't even identify exactly what makes a top jungler.  Its not all about early ganking.  Junglers have to be good gankers eventually, and early ganking might help, but its not all that necessary.  After all, WW has high playrate and winrate (usually an indicator of a good champion), but he notoriously sucks at early ganking.

No, the key to being a good jungler, ESPECIALLY in competitive play, is to have a good combination of ganking at some point in the game and to be able to build offensive items well.  There are like one or two exceptions to this in solo (Rammus basically, who doesn't build offensive items), but the key is that the big time junglers like offensive items because defensive items have just been destroyed primarily by Morello.  Historical junglers have liked defensive items primarily, but that doesn't work well right now.

Now you are right that you can try and play the couple of junglers that actually can be dominant like assassin Rengar and Kha.  But while they give you the opportunity to dominate, they actually lose a lot of games.  They don't work in team comps unless your whole team plays at a really high level.  You are likely going to be playing an all squishy team comp if you play those junglers, which usually doesn't work at our skill level.  This is why those junglers don't have very high win rates despite being pretty strong.

Morello can talk about opening things up to more options all he wants, but because he doesn't recognize the primary problems - mobility creep murdering a lot of junglers, defensive item nerfs murdering a lot of junglers, etc - it doesn't matter.  People are still going to gravitate to the junglers who build most efficiently, which means mobility and damage right now.  Oh, I suppose that Riot could try and fix the problem by making the defensive jungle items incredibly OP compared to the rest, but I doubt we will see that.

Yeah, he's actually only a Silver level player. But when it's, you know, his job, and has access to hundreds of competitive-level games a year, i doubt he is balancing off of his own player experiences. He is almost certainly using a mixture of skill-based player aggregation and deep analysis of competitive play. 

And that's an extremely difficult problem. You yourself just said that what is good in competitive level play (Rengar and ) isn't always good in soloqueue. It's also important to note that many damage junglers (Wukong, Panthenon, Kha'zix) have all had dramatically high overall win rates at some point during their peak, so they aren't always "actuallly losing a lot of games".

Yes, that's true, but that's also what they are changing. They are reworking a bunch of the defensive items for next season. They are probably going to miss the mark for the first few months (again, League of Cleavers and League of Warmogs). i think the best way to look at it is compare it to midlane. In the past few months, there has been a lot of equally viable archetypes:

- assassins are coming back again. Espiecally safe assassins like Zed and Ahri. But they aren't overwhelming, either

- you have your utility mages, especially Orianna and previously Lulu.

- AD mids are still good, although not as big as they were before with Riven/Lee Sin/J4 mid. Yasuo and Talon were huge right before nerfs.

- ranged burst mages are still good. Syndra and Ziggs being the big two.

These guys all exist organically, and they all feel pretty balanced when you compare role-to-role. i believe that is what Riot is trying to accomplish this season rather than "make carry jungler viable". They did that.

Well, Morello has had to apologize for the state of jungle after literally every season.  So I don't really give him credit for it after like the 4th time.  And the thing is that hes actually getting worse at doing these things.  He wants to increase diversity, and diversity becomes worse than ever.  He has an explicit goal of farming junglers, and its probably worse than ever at many levels.  At some point you have to just say that whoever is in charge of this at Riot is just not competent at balancing jungle.

Anyway, I'm not against the itemization changes.  The current jungle itemization is hardly good, so it will probably be an improvement.  I don't have real confidence that the supposed additional levers will help them with balance though.  I mean, Cassiopeia was redesigned with the explicit goal that her new kit would give them more levels to better balance her.  How's that going?  Same with other champs that got dumpstered worse than ever like Skarner.

But the problem is the early game nerfs to junglers that are incoming.  The old deal with jungle is that junglers don't get a lot of gold, but they get a lot of control over the early flow of the game.  That sounds like a fair trade.  But, if they "knee cap" their early game control, what is the point any more?  Oh, now junglers can screw each other over with counter jungling?  Yeah, its still a gold starved role that can't do anything other than screw over the other gold starved person on the other team.

But I don't think that Morello really gets this.  If you take away the one thing that junglers get, you have to give them something HUGE in return.  But I really doubt junglers are going to see big gold increases this season (junglers rarely do).  So junglers might very well just end up as gimped carries.  So why no just play a carry in lane?

What needs to happen if they actually want to fix things is they need to identify the real problems and actually address them.  More items are fine, because they do give more levers, but more levers don't mean anything if you haven't spotted the real problems.  For example, lets talk about diversity.  Why don't you have diversity:

The biggest problem right now for most junglers is defensive itemization.  You simply can't play a lot of junglers because building the items that they want is dumb. Those defensive items suck compared to the offensive items.  A damage dealer with Zhonya's will survive almost as long in a teamfight due to the active AND deal a lot of damage.  People ask me why I build damage on Amumu.  BECAUSE BUILDING TANK IS STUPID.  Its really bad because you just don't survive for long anyway - but toss+ult+Zhonya's is really strong.  I mean, Sejuani has become kind of popular in higher levels of play.  You know why?  Because people stopped building her tank and went AP assassin.

I haven't seen any major announcements that this is going to be fixed, and I don't see any way that its going to be fixed just by having a defensive jungle item.  If that defensive item is strong enough to try and make up the difference, everybody will just buy that item (like in League of Warmogs days), so it can't happen.

The second problem is mobility creep, which is just death to so many champions.  Immobile champions can work in other locations sometimes because they might have range +damage.  For example, Syndra has extreme range, utility, and damage.  So that makes up for her lack of mobility.  But junglers don't get those things typically, so they just have been screwed by mobility creep.  But Riot is just making mobility creep a million times worse by introducing champions with kite kits (this new adc), slow kits (Braum), or kite+slow kits (Gnar).  So not only is Riot not fixing this problem, but they are willfully making it worse because they want to release cool new champions that don't suck, but can't figure out what to do about mobility creep.

(Of course, professional play is a whole other can of worms with respect to diversity since they have very different requirements for successful junglers).

Anyway, these issues have to be fixed first.  You can't just give junglers more gold.  Otherwise, they will just use them to build more offensive items on champs that don't have problems with mobility.

Um, Skarner is incredibly non fun to play.  Have you played him recently?  He might have been ok for a while, but right now he can't get to enemies well (mobility creep issues), his passive is pretty hard to be use well(mobility creep issues), and his itemization has been nerfed to hell repeatedly.  Its not fun to run at somebody at somebody, not make it because they are too mobile, and die pretty fast because your items are really inefficient.  But hey, you have one move that works every once in a long while (flash+ult).

Skarner is kind of fun against the rare team that is immobile, but you don't get those very often.

And why do junglers care about slot efficiency more than gold efficiency again?  Junglers usually can't come anywhere near to using all their slots (gold poor), and usually are counted on to do some combination of damage and initiation, which requires decent items.  So thats gold efficient items (which is why Riot designers make such a big deal out of creating gold efficient jungle items).

And yes, I agree that if there is too much gold in jungle, you just play the carry in the jungle.  Thats the whole point - there is the trade that you don't have so much gold in the jungle, so junglers get something in return - early game control.  Replacing that with "you can choose to be more of a dick to your opposing jungler if you want" doesn't seem like a good deal to me.  Its a massive nerf to the effect that the role has on the outcome of the game (which is already at historical lows since its all about ADC/mid right now).  I'm not buying the thing about an extra objective because they are also increasing camp spawn times.

#Skarner:

i mean we might have a difference of opinion but... Way back in Season 1, early Season 2 i played Skarner a ton (at least 100 games, nearly as much as Anivia). The only reason i stopped was because of a personal fight with a friend; not because of the nerfs. When the rework happened, i was pretty excited, and honestly it is a lot better when you're playing him. Before he was a one-button champion, with a long ramp-up. His newer kit has a lot more interaction with abilities and while he doesn't have the Philo > HoG > Sheen > Randuins build path that was so effective in S2, he has a lot more build diversity than other junglers, which is fun.

Perhaps "slot efficiency" isn't the best term for it, but when you are 1-2 full items behind you care about slots that are efficient right away, rather than being highly efficient 2-3 items later. Slots that are highly efficient right away are not always gold efficient (Brutalizer and SotEL fall far behind a 6 item ADC). Similarily, items that are gold efficient right away might not be super efficient when immediately completed (pure resistance items like Frozen Heart require a big health item like Warmogs).

My suspicion is that it feels like a local minimum because only 6 months ago, Jungle was at an extreme maximum (except, perhaps the days of the 3:30 double buff toplane level 4 v level 2 ganks in preseason 2, or the Black Cleaver days. But both of those events happened during the preseason). Again, it's not really so bad if you are playing the "top 3" jungle champs. Not everyone wants to that, and that's 100% okay, i'm not saying that you should only play Khazix, etc. But they are trying to reduce the "top 3" playstyle. Not everyone else's. It really sounds like they are trying to shift junglers into a "mid game" character, similar to, again, the 4 mage archetypes who all tend to peak at midgame anyway. But do it in very different ways.

i 100% agree that defensive items are overall underwhelming and they need to fix it, and i think that a lot of what you say about that issue is accurate and provides a lot of insight. Spirit Visage and Perseverance were some of my favorite things, just because it made team fights much longer and they felt more strategic because of it.