League of Legends Jungle Guide – Perfect Your First Clear & Dominate Early Game
Hello, Guys, It’s Librarian Husky. For a jungler, the early game in League of Legends is crucial, offering the most significant opportunity to impact the game’s outcome. Here to share strategies to optimize your first clear and set the stage for success.
The Importance of the Early Game for Junglers
Step one involves crafting a pregame plan to secure early kills and navigate towards the side of the map with the most potential action. Before diving into execution, it’s essential to eliminate distractions post-champion select. Focus is key – close unnecessary tabs, disconnect from external conversations, and prepare to strategize effectively. Identifying high-kill opportunities is paramount. Consider VGM – Volatility, Gank Setup, and Mobility – to pinpoint optimal ganking paths.
Volatility assessment is vital. Champions with high damage, limited sustain, and potent abilities create volatile matchups. For instance, Zerith versus Bran or Blitz versus Pike are volatile due to their burst potential. Conversely, matchups like Saraphene versus Sona, characterized by sustained damage and healing, are less volatile. Analyzing runes and summoner spells can also reveal a lane’s volatility level. Learn from experience and post-game reflections to refine your understanding.
Gank setup evaluation focuses on team crowd control abilities. The simplicity and reliability of CC spells determine the effectiveness of ganks. Abilities like Annie‘s stun exemplify reliable setups that increase gank success rates. Understanding and leveraging your team’s CC potential is crucial for successful jungle interventions.
Understanding Ability Reliability
It’s crucial to evaluate the reliability of abilities in gameplay. While Zerith stun can be inconsistent, a predictable skill shot offers a more reliable option, even if it travels slowly. Sometimes, unexpected outcomes occur, leading to missed opportunities or mistakes in a gank. It’s essential not to form biased opinions based on isolated incidents but approach each new game objectively.
When assessing mobility, factor in the opponent’s movement capabilities. Consider if they possess dashes, blinks, or speed enhancements. Champions with limited mobility are easier targets for elimination. For instance, a Zed with his W ability active presents a significant challenge to catch, unlike a Syndra in a similar vulnerable position. Additionally, remember to account for summoner spells which can significantly impact the target’s survivability.
Addressing the concept of priority in the early game strategy is vital. While prioritizing pathing towards lanes with advantageous wave positions seems logical, its significance is often exaggerated, especially in lower-ranking matches. Predicting lane priority and movement can be erratic and unreliable in lower skill levels. However, acknowledging and respecting priority becomes crucial as game knowledge and Understanding of matchups improve. Adapting your pathing based on priority can prevent unnecessary risks and potential setbacks in the early game.
Consider the jungle matchup and the potential for invasions. Assess your ability to invade the enemy jungle and anticipate potential invades from the opponent. Preparedness is key to dealing with jungle invasions effectively. Understanding common invasion strategies at different levels, such as level 1, 2, and 3 invades, is essential for strategic decision-making and counterplay. Be mindful of late invades on enemy camps at level one and the tactical responses to such situations. Strategically planning invades from level two onwards can provide opportunities for map control and resource denial.
Early Jungle Strategies
The intention is to either kill the enemy jungler while he’s on gromp or to steal blue and gromp together. Defenders counter, warding the river bush or enemy raptors at 1 minute. Make sure to not smite blue and save it for gromp. If you see the enemy jungler early, skip grump and move straight to wolves and continue pathing down making sure to pull the wolves towards mid. Even though you lose a camp, you are farming efficiently while the enemy jungler has to run back and forth.
And lastly, the level three, three redside camp to enemy blue or red invade. This is done by doing your own red kugs raptors for level three and then meeting the enemy jungler on his blue or red with the intention to kill the enemy jungler. Defenders counter. If you start blue, skip red by doing raptors into kugs and then ward over the bush. This way, the enemy jungler will again be farming inefficiently, having only done three camps while you have done five. Then, if he starts the red, you can ping your laners to collapse and fight him. If you still don’t feel confident or your laners are not responding,
it’s okay to give up the red. Now, if you’re starting your red and you’re pathing towards your blue side, the same response applies. Skip and ward your blue as that is the timer the enemy jungler will be looking to strike. Do the gromp instead and pull it upward. This one is more tricky as the enemy jungler has different angles to jump on you compared to the red side. Note, when it comes to jungle 1 v1 ones and invades, the rule is whoever starts the buff loses. The reason for this is because they are the ones tanking the buff using their spells and the other jungler gets the first hit.
So, now that we’ve completed the pregame plan and all of the necessary information has been considered, we can now move on to step two, the jungle clear goal. Based on the information in your game, which path is going to give you the most gold and XP? The three general clears that you will be picking from are three camp into gank. This is done by clearing your three raid side camps and looking for an early gank. This path can be highly effective on champions such as Rexi, Elise, and Noo-Noo as they have abilities in their kits that make a gank high percentage. Deciding when to three camp gank will be explained further in the guide. Level one, two, or three invades. As just discussed, you can choose one of these invades in your first clear. For the sake of keeping this guide concise, we are going to keep invades and counter invades to an introductory level. There are many different scenarios that can happen with invades, which we will not have time for in this guide. And lastly, we have full clear. This is done by clearing all six camps as fast as you can. In general, this path is highly effective on every jungler. However, especially with champions that farm fast, want level six ASAP, or a mixture of both.
Raptor Start
Raptor start. This is done by starting raptors as your first camp, then skipping red and heading to krugs in order to maintain these camps spawning in a cycle together. This will be important as you will see later. After kugs, we do our red and head to wolves, gromp, blue, and scuttle if possible. Comparing to the other clears where you would maybe look to gank and then base, this clear actually continues by cross ganking mid and heading back to raptors and kugs, which will give you level five and a much better buy.
This is because by starting raptors, they will spawn at around 4 minutes, which makes all of these timings work out very well. So, when should we be looking to do the raptor start? We should look to be doing this path in games we think both top and bot are going to be unlikely for us to get a kill. Additionally, starting raptors is a very farm-focused path as we kill our raptors and kugs twice in the first clear. So, champions who love killing AoE camps early may look to benefit from this clear. For example, if we are playing a champion like Zach, Amumu, or Diana and have concluded that pathing standard to top or bot is unlikely enough to get a kill, the raptor path is a selfish way to get ahead early when there’s not much going on.
Note, before we move on, there are some important concepts we need to cover that will give us the tools and knowledge for step three. League of Legends is not a black or white game. There is no secret formula saying do this, do that, and you will win. Just because you are playing a champion like Lilia, who typically will play to her strength and full clear mean that you are locked in to that full clear. The same way as Noo-Noo, you are not locked in to maybe ganking level three despite having an insanely strong level three gank threat. So even though in a majority of games, Ailia will full clear, does not mean we should miss opportunities for early kills, given they are high percentage, meaning likely to result in a kill. Likewise, for a Noo-Noo, who in a majority of games will look for a level three gank, does not mean we should never full clear and just force ganks even when they are unlikely to result in a kill.
To summarize, not all gank percentages are made equal. A level three gank for a Noo-Noo could be 90% likely to result in a kill, whereas the exact same gank for Ailia is more like 30%. This is where you’ll need to start understanding your champion’s identity, as well as the information the map is giving you. Naturally, there will be times where we decide to go for a low percentage gank and it fails. What’s important is we learn from those mistakes and build on our champion mastery and experience. You may be wondering why am I saying all of this? What is so bad about failing a gank? Your time as a jungler is a resource and quite a valuable one at that.
Understanding Spare Tempo and Regular Tempo
You may not see it in the moment, but every failed gank, every misstep, every helping hand you give to losing lanes will have a butterfly effect on the map, resulting in missed opportunities elsewhere that would have actually been impactful to your team winning.
Spare tempo versus regular tempo. This concept is a great way to view if you should or should not gank something. The basic idea is that you should only gank in your regular tempo if you are 95% sure it will be successful, meaning a kill. So, what is it? At the end of a clear, you will have something called spare tempo, meaning you have free time while you are waiting for your next cycle of camps to spawn. Assuming we just full cleared this starting with either your gromp or kugs.
If you have cleared well, typically you will finish crab in river around 340 and have 30 seconds of spare tempo before your first spawning camp, which will be around 420. There are many ways you can spend this time without it being inefficient or a waste of time compared to if this was your regular tempo where our camps are alive. It would be at the cost of your own gold and XP. So, for example, during our spare tempo, you should be looking to use this time to gank a lane, burn summoner spells, place deep vision on enemy camps, or even help a lane push their wave out. As long as you are back at our first spawning camp and not overusing our spare tempo, unless it’s for a kill, we will be keeping good regular tempo, also known to what’s referred to as on tempo.
Keep in mind, a mistake I commonly see junglers make is prioritizing tempo too much and instantly recalling after they kill scuttle. Not using the free time that they have and just waiting for their first 420 camp to spawn. This is inefficient and low impact. There are times where you can use that 30 seconds on yourself, for example, the raptor start or basing instantly after your six camp as you are unable to contest the scuttle with the intention to attack enemy raptors, kugs or gromp on spawn. This is where we can look to place one or two deep wards on the enemy camps, ideally in the raptor bush and over the wall on kugs as we channel our recall. The information we will get from these wards is quite valuable as it will tell us what the enemy jungler will do in his next clear. For example, if we see him pathing on our ward towards the top side and we are pathing bot, we know with much more certainty to take the dragon or if he goes for any gank, we can ping and warn our team.
Step three, where to stand level one and how to use your first trinket. Goal to gather information on lane states and plan our next move. Now that we finished all of that planning, it’s time to finally get to the fun stuff. You know, kill some jungle monsters, maybe some enemy players. We can take it easy from here, right? Well, kind of. You see, jungle is undoubtedly the most strategic role in the game. So, it makes sense to be a great jungler. We need to be continuously planning our next move. It’s a little bit like playing a game of chess against the enemy jungler where you’re both analyzing the board, the map, and based off that information trying to make a correct move. If you don’t consider or even recognize the information, you’re going to find yourself blundering a bunch of moves. So, how do we gather information?
Decision-Making in Gaming
And how does it allow us to make good decisions? I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where things have been happening all over the map Leading up to a critical point where we need to make a decision. In that exact moment, we feel too overwhelmed by information or lack of and as a result crippled by indecision. The reason this happens is Because A, we haven’t been updating ourselves on the map’s information over the course of its timeline. B, our mental stack is already at max capacity from just clearing camps, and we are unable to gather or digest any information without it being a detriment to our clear. This is why I’m putting such an emphasis on things like the pregame plan. It’s freeing up thinking space.
The next vital fundamental for our mental stack is champion mastery. We need to be able to clear camps effectively, basically just off muscle memory. The way we create muscle memory is by playing and clearing with that same champion over and over and over again. I’m talking at least 100 games. Now, to give our mental stack the best chance and prevent it from being overloaded, I want you to think about a timeline where there are three pieces of information happening throughout your first clear. The first piece of information is as we start our clear when we are on our blue, we see the enemy jungler starting his raptors thanks to our level one ward. This tells us that he will end his clear botside and can potentially contest bot scuttle or bot gank. It also tells us that his raptors will spawn at four minutes.
The second piece of information is we see enemy mid get solo killed as we finish our red, meaning any gank opportunity for either jungler is off the table. And finally, the last piece of information is as we walk to and during killing kugs, we notice the enemy bot ducks into river and are full HP, meaning they place a ward and have prio for bot crab. Leading up to killing the kugs, we make the decision that both bot gank and bot crab are bad options and instead instantly recall to attack the 4-minute spawning raptors and topside crab with an item advantage. Because we are gathering the pieces of information as they happen on a timeline, we are able to maintain our mental stack and plan our move after krugs accordingly.
Whereas if we don’t have the information or try to process it all in 4 seconds, it makes sense that it will be very difficult even for experienced junglers to make the right call. From my experience coaching hundreds of players in the past year, players typically know what the correct play is once they have the information. where they generally fall short is gathering the information and turning it into a plan ahead of time. And yes, this is a difficult skill to master, which is essentially the reason why the ceiling for jungle mastery is so high. Note, before we dive into information gathering further, I want to make it clear that if you are new/ low elo or playing a full clear identity jungler.
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