Hey everyone.
This week we want to talk about a simple style of jungling that is highly effective and incredible
for climbing low elo.
And just for the record, whenever we say low elo in this guide, we mean Diamond and below.
So, we'll be learning from Hector once more, and this will be a complete contrast to that
selfless jungle guide he was a part of, where he was playing jungle Lulu.
In that video it was all about how to play for absolutely nothing but your teammates,
and why that can be very effective.
The problem with that style of jungling is that it can actually be very hard to pull
off.
You need to have a lot of knowledge about all the lane match ups in the game, jungle
awareness, primary win conditions, etc.
Unless done properly, it can be very difficult to have results with a selfless style of jungle.
Instead, for this guide we'll be looking at a very simple, almost mindless type of jungling.
It's so easy Hector was just watching Netflix the whole time playing completely distracted.
There was no 200 IQ jungle tracking going on, no big brain win conditions being executed,
just mindless pathing being carried by basic fundamentals.
You may ask, why you'd want to learn to play that way.
Well, we're not telling you to turn your brain off, but instead focus on the basic fundamentals
he follows that can have such great results in low elo.
And with that, let's get into it.
Fundamental #1 is to play a 1v9 champion.
Now this isn't exclusive to hyper carry DPS champions, don't worry.
We'll show you how there's a ton of picks with multiple styles that could be considered
1v9 champions.
Fundamental #2 is to do nothing that doesn't immediately benefit you.
In other words, be selfish.
More on why and how to do this in a bit And lastly, we'll be reserving our final fundamental
for towards the end of the video.
It will make sense why, once we get to it.
It's a whole section on its own.
First things first.
Let's clarify what we mean by a 1v9 champion.
It's not just super high dps, giga scaling champions.
As long as your champion meets both of the following 2 criteria, they can be considered
a 1v9 champion for jungle: One, you need to be able to power farm.
Plenty of junglers clear super fast, so this criteria is usually easily met
Just don't pick something with super slow clears like Rammus or Amumu who struggle to
clear single target camps, or Elise and Camille who struggle at doing
AoE camps Two, the champion needs to scale into late
game in some way You can scale to late game in different styles.
You could just be so strong that you run over everyone you encounter
Or, go the assassin route, where you have so much kill potential on champions like Nocturne,
Rengar, or Kha'zix that you just kill isolated targets over, and over, and over, and over
again.
Even some tanks like Dr. Mundo and Zac can 1v9 games.
Once they have Cinderhulk their clear speed becomes top tier, along with the fact that
they both do either very good single target damage like Mundo or insane AoE damage like
Zac.
On top of the fact that at some point both of them become un-killable team fighting machines.
They can just soak everything up to set their teams up to kill everyone, while doing good
damage themselves in the process.
With the correct champion picked, on to fundamental #2.
Try your best to avoid situations that don't have immediate positive pay off for you.
Let's paint a hypothetical situation.
Imagine you're near Gromp, and you notice that the enemy bot lane is pushing sort of
aggressively.
Would you just start full clearing your jungle, or would you detour to gank bottom?
Let's consider the gank option.
There's a lot of variables that could go into it.
For example, when you walk down there, you could possibly be spotted by a bunch of wards.
The enemy duo could then just easily back off in response to your gank
Or, maybe you're being baited into a counter-gank from the enemy jungler
Even if those possibilities aren't the case, sometimes the best case scenario is that you
burn the enemy's flash, and they just get away and live.
But isn't getting a flash worth it?
Yes...and no.
The problem with burning the enemy's flash is that you're just passing the baton over
to your teammates.
It's going to be up to them to punish the enemy's flash being on cooldown by themselves,
or ideally they'd set up a lane state so you can re-gank.
Hector knows all too well why this is a terrible game plan to strive for in low elo.
See, we tasked Hector to acquire clips for a Nimbus Cloak & Hextech Flash combo video
we were planning to make.
The idea behind it was simple.
You burn your opponent's flash with your own, then come back to re-gank with Hextech flash
and Nimbus Cloak.
Unfortunately, he tilted out of his mind playing this combo.
The problem lied in the fact that you're playing a linear champion like Udyr or Xin Zhao who
*need* to get ahead early, and can't just power farm and 1v9 later.
This game, he got Annie's flash with his own.
Instead, of letting the wave bounce back to him so Hector could re-gank, Yasuo decided
to spam shove the wave until he got ganked himself.
Playing around your teammates and hoping they execute correctly around your pressure is
perhaps not the best way to climb elo.
With that in mind, in that previous example, you're better off just going on with your
usual full clear instead of wasting 20 to 30 seconds to potentially get a flash, which
you'll *maybe* capitalize on later.
This may leave you with an immediate concern.
Wouldn't your teammates just get ganked and die, if you're never helping them?
First of all, if they die, that's totally okay.
It doesn't matter if your teammates die to ganks or solo kills.
Just go to catch the lane farm and accelerate yourself to late game even faster
And two, we are absolutely not telling you that you should never help your teammates
or gank.
In that previous hypothetical there was around a 10 to 20% chance that you get a kill by
ganking bottom.
When you want immediate benefits for yourself, those are terrible odds.
It only happens if your opponent horribly misplays, and/or you get lucky.
But there's plenty of circumstances where going for a gank is really easy.
Let's take a look at this Graves game.
Hector is just clearing and taking his red.
Then we look at mid.
This is probably one of the most ideal ganks you will ever find.
One, she is super over extended as an immobile mage trying to get this turret plate.
Two, Fizz is coming back into lane with ultimate up, which is a super reliable and powerful
engage.
And the icing on the cake is that even if this gank fails, it is on the way to the scuttle,
gromp and wolves on bottom side of the map So not only is this a super high percentage
gank, it's really efficient to path through here anyways.
So of course he ganks and gets the kill Now of course, he can change his initial plan
and look to invade instead, since he has both mid and top priority now.
Thus, he can look to put some counter jungling pressure
The most important bit here is that while you initially will be unable to go for low
percentage plays, you're opening yourself up to being able to help your team more in
the long run.
By accelerating and focusing on yourself those 20/30 ganks turn into 60/70s and eventually
they turn into 90/100s where you're just so strong that any fight you take is almost always
going to result in a kill.
So, yes, you will eventually be able to help your team, by just feeding yourself
Now the most important part.
The biggest issue low elo players face is having the mentality that they should always
be doing and caring way too much about objectives.
It's basically ingrained in everyone's minds at this point.
"Objectives over kills" "Group and do Dragon" "Group and Siege Mid" "Get Vision Control
with Your Team", etc.
Almost any guide that tells you on how to get better will almost always tell you that
you should focus on objectives or something of the sort.
If you're a veteran of the site, you should know that Hector is our go to smurfer for
almost every role, and he thinks this is the biggest issue in low elo by far.
The problem is that players are going and forcing objectives without really asking themselves
*why* they're doing them in the first place.
Let's go through the objectives first.
Take Rift Herald.
Why do you think it's such a powerful objective in high elo?
Well, if you've watched gameplay of any competitive game, or just a high elo streamer, you'll
find that very often they will drop herald for their teammate and leave, so most of the
gold gets funneled onto 1 person The reason why is because of how itemization scales in
League.
You want to funnel your gold into one person, because items in League scale off one another.
Let's give you a hyperbolic example.
Would you rather have a level 18 Vladimir with 6 items, but he has 4 level 1 teammates,
or 5 level 13 players but each of them only has 3 items.
Even in this *ridiculously* extreme example, you can argue that the single Vladimir is
more useful than those 5 players combined.
That's because all his items are scaling off each other.
His Rabadon's Deathcap is scaling even harder from all the AP he's bought.
The more AP he buys, the more relevant the CDR he's building becomes.
The more health he has, the more time he has in fights to cast his powerful abilities.
This is why junglers very often just give the fruits of their hard labor over to their
laners.
They want their hyper scaling teammates to become gods with all that funneled gold, well,
unless the Leona wants to share it of course.
So, if that's the main reason to get herald in high elo, ask yourself this question.
Do you really want to funnel gold onto your platinum Zed who is going to throw his lead
anyways?
Yea...
Well, couldn't you just use herald to snowball yourself then?
Yes, but it is very unlikely and conditional on multiple things.
The point of Herald is *ideally* for solo gold, but for that to happen as a jungler
your laner can't be in lane.
You can't just walk up to someone's lane and say "hey bud mind leaving while I cash out
real quick?
k thx" The most likely scenario in which your laner
isn't in lane is usually if they're just dead.
And if your laner is dead, well...you can't really Herald the lane because their lane
opponent is probably pushing it or something.
We're not saying that it's impossible to funnel yourself with gold using Herald, it's just
a bit inconsistent.
Don't get us wrong, you should take free heralds, but in low elo the priority of taking it shouldn't
be too high.
It's okay if your opponent wastes time to take it.
Okay, so what about dragons?
We think that Dragons in season 10 are a completely pointless objective.
We want you to genuinely think about the last time one of your games was decided off a Dragon
Soul.
If it was, were you going to win or lose that game anyways?
Typically if your opponent was strong enough to have 3 uncontested dragons in the first
place it just means you were already losing and couldn't fight them anyways.
Hector hates this objective so much in low elo we could probably make a montage of him
muting his teammates whenever they ping or call to take it.
The problem lies with the Dragon System in the first place.
All the buffs from the individual dragons are pointless.
*Absolutely* pointless.
Which means that the objective is only relevant when you get 4 of them.
In an ideal world, maybe you take the first Dragon at 5 minutes, then 10, then 15, then
20.
In a completely perfect scenario it takes you 15 minutes to get any value out of an
objective you have to pour time and resources into.
And you better hope it isn't Cloud Soul.
If those conditions are met, you were winning that game anyways.
More often than not it takes around 25 to 30 minutes to get the dragon soul, because
your opponent is likely to get 1 or 2 dragons throughout the game.
Think about that.
You're allocating precious resources for an objective that won't pay off until 25 to 30
minutes later.
Why...why would you do that?
Let's take a look at the horrible decision making people make around Dragons in low elo.
In this Karthus game Hector goes for a high percentage gank onto bot lane.
They're 2 overextended immobile champions, and he has a Blitzcrank to initiate the gank.
With a few misplays here and there and then the unaccounted for Shen R, it ends up going
2 for 2 with Hector dying.
Let's take a look at Olaf's response.
We can see they're doing dragon, because Diana jumps into the pit on the minimap, and of
course cause they eventually get it.
We consider this a mistake, what do you think a better option for Olaf would have been?
pause 3 sec If you said take Hector's bot side jungle,
you'd be correct.
He even types it on the replay finding it amusing that he wasn't punished for dying.
Instead of leaving Karthus, a champion whose sole purpose is to farm and scale, with barely
anything to farm, Olaf decided to secure 10% ultimate CDR for his team.
Nice Let's observe how this plays out for Olaf
later.
He's done and wasted time on Herald in the mean time and has summoned it mid to do...nothing?
Okay.
Hector walks into the lane, presses E and walks in the direction of the enemy team missing
every Q, but winning the fight regardless.
All because he's been farming the whole game hoarding resources.
What exceptional talent.
The next team fight that happens Olaf is still 4 levels down and the same thing occurs.
Now Hector's team gets Dragon and, oh, the game is over.
The Dragons were completely irrelevant in the outcome of this game.
We're not just cherry picking a single game with a poor performance from the enemy jungler
doing dragon.
This is a very consistent problem.
Let's look at this Nocturne game.
Hector goes into Master Yi's jungle to counter jungle raptors, and then Krugs.
We see this was possible, because Yi was wasting time doing Dragon and then looking for a low
percentage bot lane gank.
This put Hector so far ahead of him in farm that he will still be ahead of Master Yi after
being cheesed at red buff and then rage inting into the enemy team.
At the next 3v3 skirmish around mid, he was still a level ahead of Master Yi.
Sure, it's not the only reason his team won this fight, but it definitely matters.
He would've been even further ahead if he hadn't ran it down out of pure tilt.
Oh, and he gets a free Dragon after the fight, making it unlikely Master Yi's team ever gets
the Dragon Soul, and completely invalidating the Infernal Dragon Yi gave his whole top
side jungle for.
Let's give yet another example.
Hector has nothing to really do at the moment, so he goes for a low percentage gank onto
bot lane.
He overstays his welcome and eventually dies a stupid death near the dragon.
Let's pause it here.
The enemy is going to do dragon.
Notice the time.
Let's see how long it takes them to do this.
Due to Fizz buying time and being annoying, they don't take it until almost 7 minutes
into the game.
So, 3 people had to sit on this dragon for around 35 seconds to take it.
If you add it up, it took a collective 105 seconds of game time to secure this objective
that does absolutely nothing.
Imagine, if they had all just left the dragon.
Gone back to their jungle and lanes, finished clearing the waves or camps, and then all
recalled at the same time.
Now they're all back out on the map on full HP and Mana and are ready to make plays as
a team.
We're not saying that's what would've happened, but that sounds like a pretty solid way of
getting ahead.
This is the major point of the video.
Hector makes a lot of mistakes.
But he is almost never punished.
His opponents waste time making low percentage ganks, or doing objectives that don't matter.
Meanwhile he auto pilot farms to the point where he can eventually just kill anyone in
sight by how strong he becomes.
The simple combination of playing champions that farm super fast and not wasting time
is probably one of the easiest ways to win as a jungler.
And the last thing we want to touch on is that you can still do Dragon in the correct
circumstances.
We've trashed on it for most of this video, but if it's not a major time sink to take
it, then securing it is totally fine.
After like the 12 minute mark or so, you should have enough DPS to where you can easily solo
it quickly, without disrupting your farming too much.
Let's time this dragon capture.
It only took Hector 13 seconds to solo it.
That's nearly a tenth of the game time it took for Jarvan's team to do it in that previous
example.
Or if your teammates are in the area with nothing to do either, then yes, by all means
work together and quickly take it.
This one took around a collective of 30 seconds to do, but that's at least acceptable, since
it's not too much of Kalista and Sona's time.
Alright guys, that's going to wrap up this video.
Don't tunnel vision too hard on the objective or die mentality many low elo players have.
Think carefully about what you're fighting for and why, and use it to make smarter decisions.
Thanks for watching.