5v5: How to reserve jungle farm for junglers, not laners

There are two main people who discussed this with me, @Gatorrex and @TooNub
I am mostly condensing our conversation (in the SEMF discord server) into some interesting points. I think there were some interesting ideas brought up in this conversation that I wanted to share and get more opinions on.

Problem Space

Junglers get barely any Jungle in 5v5. Two thirds of your jungle are generally regularly stolen by laners (Treants and Red/Blue buff). The other two camps are often taken by mid laners to create an artificial lane advantage. This is a very strong tactic and can lead to easy snowballs, but is also incredibly unfun for the jungler. In soloQ especially, junglers can feel like they’re fighting against their own team for money. The majority of a junglers gold comes from kills and stealing the enemy treants (and sometimes taxing lanes). Junglers can often have the same amount or less gold than the Captain, and it’s demoralising and unfun, especially when you’re losing (you’re essentially exponentially behind).

Early Solutions
  • Faster respawns on your money makers (Gold Treant and standard mobs)
    It would probably be farmed even more by the mid laner, making the problem even worse.
  • Force people to stay in lane longer
    But how?
  • Jungler exclusive items (for clearing)
    It could work, but it needs a lot more than just items
  • More mobs (deeper in the jungle, away from the lanes
    It doesn’t solve the problem of mid laners taking jungle to get an artificial lead
  • Making the mobs stronger (both defence and damage)
    Could restrict the number of possible junglers
Solution 1: Jungle Rework

Firstly, make each jungle mob much more difficult to kill, and make them hit much harder. Giving buff mobs / gold to… treant special attacks similar to the treant would be cool too.
Secondly, make unique jungling items. Make them cheap enough to buy the components at level 1. Currently, SGB is the only item that serves this purpose, but other items that can help you clear mobs would be good too.
Thirdly, allow those items to build into real items. Something cheaper than a full damage item, but also having weaker stats. Currently, the perfect example of this is Spellsword. Cheaper and with weaker stats, but useful for junglers who don’t have enough money to go down a full damage route.

Positives

  • Laners cannot jungle effectively until late game.
  • Junglers have items that are well suited to them (Junglers have difficulty getting to full build in most matches)
  • MORE ITEMS

Negatives

  • Pushes away some potential off meta junglers
  • Jungle items would likely need their own tab
Solution 2: Lane rework

Firstly, flask will be removed from the game, and halcyon potions will be re-introduced.
Secondly, lane minions will be easier to clear early game.

Positives

  • The REMOVAL OF FLASK. Flask had a cooldown of 120 seconds, and due to how powerful it is, one team not having it on one or two members is a real disadvantage. This encourages stalling out objectives till your whole team has flask.
  • The re-introduction of potions increases lane sustain, making taking treant not nearly as essential as it is now. It’s also handy to be able to sustain safely in soloQ, as teams will often leave certain lanes without assistance for large amounts of time.
  • Makes it more punishing to leave lane to farm jungle, as lanes can be pushed easily and your opponent will be in lane for longer.

Negatives

  • Messing with waveclear can have massive unintended concequences
  • It could just… NOT work

NOTE: These aren’t changes for all modes. These are changes exclusively for 5v5. One of SEMC’s greatest mistakes between 3v3 and 5v5 was trying to keep as many things from 3v3 as consistent as possible, but that’s just NOT how game design works. Prime example is the 2D -> 3D jump that Sonic made. When in 3D, if you want Sonic to go fast, you have to make SO MUCH LEVEL compared to his 2D games, and it can be unrealistic to expect that out of a normal games budget. Point is, keep 5v5 and 3v3 different. We want the best experience out of both these modes, instead of two mediocre modes with a strange mix of things that work in each.

11 Likes

I feel like you’re the one doing this, not SEMC… It sounds like your critique of the 5v5 jungle experience is based on expectations derived from 3v3 play. Why should it be a rule that the 5v5 jungle is reserved for the jungler? The map opportunities in the 3v3 game made this true of that mode (barring some highly coordinated hyper carry strats), but it promoted casual farming rotations that are kind of strategically one-dimensional. In 5v5, I think the jungler role is an interesting and dynamic position that’s defined by opportunity (ganking and stealing enemy camps), rather than complacency (casual farming rotations on your side of the map). Basically, I’m not sure your problem space is actually a problem in gameplay design, but rather, an issue with player perception and what people picture the role to be versus what it actually is.

That said, I do think your suggestions are really interesting, and fun to think about. It sounds like most of them are fundamentally anti-snowball changes, which makes sense since that feels like the biggest pain-point for most players right now. Overly effective laners promote funneling resources to them instead of the junglers, making the jungler role more about denying enemy resources than gaining their own. I don’t see that as a bad thing, necessarily, but I see where other people might. Making the jungle harder to farm might be good for requiring better jungle coordination, and sounds a bit like the anti-snowballing efforts put in back in… 2.0, I think?

Also, you might want a title edit… yours makes it sound like junglers are refusing to farm their own jungle, where I think you mean “how to reserve jungle farm for junglers, not laners”

1 Like

I think the jingling items would be the best way to go, with the stronger jungle camps. I could see, however, laners picking up the jungle item to get that extra gold/exp, so it might have to be decently expensive, maybe 500-600 gold to prevent that. But if it is so expensive, it would have to REALLY help the junglers, or build into a very good item. But again, it can’t be too good because laners would just pick it up anyways, similar to what happened to League of Legends when they did their jungle overhaul.

I’m not disagreeing with you here, but IMO, game design should be to give you what is the most fun over the longest possible amount of time. Maybe Junglers ARE meant to be second captains, but they haven’t really made it look like they’re supposed to be. Plus, there are a decent number of people who enjoy jungling because it’s a role where you can do damage while not having to lane. When you bring that expectation in from 3v3 into 5v5 and then spend games with very little gold, it’s frustrating and unfun. Even if SEMC communicated to us that junglers were meant to be gankers and counterjunglers, it wouldn’t solve the issues of being exponentially behind when you’re losing, or the loss of variety for when you want to do damage but not lane, which is restrictive game design. From what I can sense, it doesn’t matter which path you go down, there is something fundementally unfun about jungle right now.

Allowing junglers to be able to fall back onto farming their jungle when behind or get more gold in general is the most easy to see solution to this. This opens up options for more expensive junglers and so that your farm wasn’t so limited on the abilities and whims of your laners. IDK though, this is just based on my definition of what’s fun to play (and the other two, somewhat).

Honestly if a jungler is rotating properly and being in the right spots they should be at least half level ahead. I played jungle as wp skye, with one laner stealing my jungle part of the game. In that situation i went and killed off only the enemy healing treant leaving the bear so the heal treant doesn’t spawn back. I also took it upon myself to push lanes when heros are dead and my captain is busy. Add ganking exp to all that you should be good

You can say that, but you can also say if the laner is rotating properly, they will always get the jungle camps as well. The main issue that I can see here is that it’s far too easy for laners to get these camps, even the buffs are able to be solo’d by even the squishiest of laners leaving the jungles to be, essentially nothing more than a captain that builds damage.