patch 11.10 drastically shifted the jungle meta, and with such big shifts, meta routes
and playstyles tend to adapt as well.
We at skillcapped painstakingly went through the top 50 players of the korean challenger
ladder, and went through all of their games on the recent patch to find out what kind
of routes they were preferring, and key patterns now that catchup xp and camp respawns have
been changed.
For a great example of why this is so important now, lets just show a side by side of a game
on the recent patch.
The map gets split, and one jungler full clears, the other does significantly less camps and
ends up being 3 camps behind after the first recall.
On a previous patch, this would pretty much spell doom, as youre now a full level behind
with very little way to catch back up.
however, with changes to spawn timers, rumble now just doesnt have anything to do.
even though hes massively ahead, none of his bot side camps are up, and this is time that
kindred can start to get back into the game.
he wanders around for a full minute, and isnt able to achieve much.
lo and behold, kindred is now even level with rumble, even being down tons of camps, catchup
xp just means that theyre even level now, and obviously, this doesnt look too good for
our full clearing friend here.
kindred goes on to dominate the rest of the game, and even ends being down 20 cs, but
up 2 levels.
So its quite obvious from this that the old school plan of getting ahead through camps
just doesnt really work anymore.
Theres a lot more focus on ganks, and snowballing the game in other ways.
the top korean players have been using 3 main routes that we'll be teaching you today.
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below.
the first thing you need to know is how a jungle route is defined.
we could easily say that full clearing, or doing 5 camps is a jungle path, but, theres
one main issue with this.
It stops you from having to think.
There WILL be games where full clearing is the best option available, or where going
red to top immediately is the best.
It all depends on the map state, and learning to read that is whats super important.
There are no cookie cutter "best" jungle routes.
Imagine if you were playing chess, and set out with the first 6 moves pre planned youll
be checkmated.
not thinking about what the enemy is doing, or reacting to it at all is extremely dangerous.
The best players will change their pathing based on enemy moves.
Routes that we'll be discussing today involve a couple of camps, and then the adaptations
and variations that you can make afterwards.
flexibility is way more important now than ever due to the champs being played, when
everyone is full clearing, it becomes a bit less risky to not pay attention, but now,
theres a lot more thought that needs to go into your decisions, and thats what we'll
be getting at today.
Our first route is simply red to raptors, but there are a ton of really cool adaptations
that happen after this.
after this opening, you need to scan the map and look to see how fast ganks will become
available.
The worst feeling when jungling is just sitting in a bush for 40 seconds.
To be time efficient, we want to line up our gank with the ending of a camp, so, once lee
sin finishes raptors, he needs to figure out what adaptation to make, of which there are
a couple of options.
if he immediately sees that a gank is highly likely, and just wants to get level 3 and
go, going to gromp from raptors is the new best way of getting level 3 as fast as possible.
Previously, players would do red blue gromp, however, with longer respawn timers, its now
more important than ever to take smaller camps off of the map.
If you dont, there will just be way too much downtime before your camps respawn, and youll
be left with nothing to do additionally, youll leave raptors up for someone to come and take
if you make a play on the other side of the map
Whats really nice about this route is that you have about 7 seconds to scan the map and
think here, as you dont have to decide what to do until getting to this point here.
you can opt into the gromp route that we just mentioned, or just do your wolves and wait
for some more time to gather information.
again, its important to just read the map, and see what looks good.
lee sin decides that available ganks arent likely yet and opts into wolves.
After finishing them, he needs to scan the map again, and decide on his next step.
heres where a major change has occured, players are now doing gromp before their blue
lee sin does this in our example, and this has a few major benefits.
One, you cycle a lot of your minor camps, leaving only krugs up, and, you do them all
in a nice line.
If you stop to do blue first, the next time you clear, there will be around 10 to 15 seconds
where youre sitting here waiting for your gromp to come up.
If ganks look extremely unlikely here, you can just pivot into your blue after gromp,
and then go to crab. however, if you want to be on map a bit faster, going to a gank
right away definitely works.
Lee sin has practically zero downtime when looking for this play, and unfortunately it
gets countered by the enemy kindred.
However, we just want to highlight that the timing at which he made this happen, and the
amount of camps he did, made it extremely efficient, even if it didnt work out.
We'll get back to how kindred managed this counter gank when we talk about another route.
The fact that you can pivot at two different places, one after your raptors, and again
after wolves, makes this path one of the most flexible and aggressive routes.
If you want to gank early, red raptors is a great start.
Lets showcase one more example of this before we move on.
Kindred uses the red raptors route, and seeing that no ganks are immediately available, opts
to go for the slower wolves clear instead of gromp.
After wolves, she pivots again and goes for 5 camps instead of 4.
Note that it is ok to do blue before gromp, but only if youre going to do them together.
From this position, kindred is free to gank bot, mid or go for crab, and the timing all
lines up really well.
kindred opts for a bot gank in this game and once again the enemy jungler shows up to skirmish.
Don't worry, we'll talk about how and why this happens when we get to our other sections,
but know that this is just good play from both junglers to be here at this time, it
just happens to work out in viegos favor.
Our next route is also a red start, but this time youll be going to do red krugs and then
raptors.
Note that in all the games we watched, these 3 were always done together if krugs was touched
at all.
Overall, this better for champions with good aoe and fast clears.
If theres a chance youll have to end up full clearing, then youll be able to do it before
crab spawns, but, we still have a lot of adaptations to make after raptors once again.
This game is a taliyah vs viego matchup.
Taliyah doesnt get information on viego at level one, since both the enemy bot and top
lanes are in lane, not leashing.
So, she has to assume the worst, and account for viego pathing both towards top as well
as bottom in order to not get caught off guard.
Because of this, she makes a really great adaptation.
If youre pathing into the same side as the enemy jungler, or simply just dont know where
they are, going to blue and gromp, while skipping wolves is amazing.
The old 5 camp route was usually wolves into blue and then crab, however, doing this route
gives you extra experience and gold as gromp is just worth more than wolves.
Once again, youll see taliyah doing blue before gromp but only because her q's hit both at
the end, and this is a slight optimization for her clear.
from this position, taliyah is able to either go to the top side crab, or make a pivot,
pathing down towards wolves to do them, and then go for bottom crab
This has a few different benefits.
If youre doing a standard full clear, the enemy jungler would be able to invade you
on your gromp at this time.
Wolves, are located much closer to mid lane, and give you a shorter route to safety.
Theyre just harder for the enemy jungler to mess with you on, and requires them to go
out of their way to do so.
additionally, youre just closer to the middle of the map, making it easier to pivot to one
side or the other, and decide on what crab you want to get as late as possible.
If you path the normal way, doing a full clear, youre really far away from the opposite side
crab, and its hard to want to path all the way back to go grab it.
This new 5 camp clear is great for junglers that cant full clear and meet the 3:15 timer
for scuttles.
And an additional benefit is that you can make another pivot right after finishing raptors
to just go gank, or do something on the map if you wanted.
Having 2 spots to pivot in make this route extremely flexible just like the red to raptors
route, but its a bit more defensive and slower to get on the map. so, if your champion isnt
as strong a skirmisher at level 3, or you just arent likely to find a gank, this is
going to be better for you than red to raptors. at the first pivot location after raptors,
a fairly common scenario will be to just full clear, just because full clears dont get you
as ahead as before just by blazing through camps, it doesnt mean that they arent viable
In our next example weve got a lee sin into olaf
A lot of players dont know that you can actually meet the 3:15 timer on lee with a bit of optimization
and by taking e earlier than normal.
because of this, it becomes viable to actually just full clear right as he gets to his wolves,
top is already dead, so the need to be on map quickly is nonexistent and lee can take
the opportunity to clean out all of his camps.
This is a decision that is made at the first pivot location, not at the start of the game.
We just want to reiterate that these players are always adapting, and that in this case
the full clear IS the adaptation, not the default.
Notice once again, that he does blue and gromp together, and this is something youll be seeing
a lot of from high level players.
full clears are good in a couple of different situations, but in almost all cases, you need
to be able to meet the 3:15 mark if youre going to do it.
a exception is when youre pathing opposite side of the other jungler and there arent
any available ganks.
so, even if your champion is slow to clear, it wont matter if the enemy jungler is on
the other side of the map. an additional pivot that we should note is
right after raptors.
If a same side gank looks good, you can definitely go for it, although it is much better if the
enemy jungler is pathing towards the side that you want to gank, as you wont risk giving
up your entire opposite side to counterjungling. this 3 camp to gank route is usually better
than blue gromp red since you cycle more of your minor camps, and in this patch, thats
become pretty important.
There are obviously a ton of factors to think about, and a lot of pivots that you can make
during the game, but youll rarely see people deviate from either, before raptors.
Again, its possible that they do, but in 99% of the games we looked at, if the jungler
started at red, they either did red to raptors, and then adapted, or did red krugs raptors,
and carried on from there.
so, that was 2 of the 3 routes, and that leaves us with just one more
Blue into gromp and wolves.
You may be wondering why theres not a 4th route in this video, but thats just because
doing blue gromp and leaving the quadrant really isnt seen anymore.
Because you only cycle gromp, your second rotation of camps will be low value, and its
extremely high risk is just not something most top korean players are willing to take.
You CAN do blue gromp wolves and gank the same side, similar to the route from before,
starting at red, but youll lack red buff, so the gank isnt as likely to work out.
if youre planning on going top in 3 camps on blue side for example, you should just
do the red raptors gromp we talked about earlier.
obviously there are going to be times where the unexpected happen and you need to do it,
but like we said, its rare, and you just need to read the map. we didnt see it a single
time in our research, but that doesnt mean that it doesnt exist, its just not meta at
the moment The most common route starting at blue explains
exactly how our first two junglers got their ganks countered.
like we mentioned earlier, every jungler clears out the entire blue side before exiting to
the other side of the map, and then does 1 of 3 pivots
The first, is doing a 4 camp into a gank or counter gank.
This is the most aggressive route, and the one that players use when theyre expecting
a gank to work, or wanting to counter one.
kindred looks at the map right before getting raptors and sees that her bot lane is slow
stacking waves into the turret.
Seeing this, she makes a great prediction that lee will try to gank on this timer, and
because of it, skips her raptors and wants to get red buff and get on the map as soon
as possible this is a perfect example of how reading the map and adapting leads to great
outcomes In the viego vs kindred game, viego does the
exact same thing, he reads the map, predicts that his bot lane will be especially volatile
after the wave bounces, and shows up right as they start fighting, turning the game in
his favor.
Of course, there are a couple of other variations on this route, the next is a simple 5 camp.
after reading the map before his raptors, he decides that its unlikely for anything
to happen while hes doing his camps, and opts to instead fight for crab instead of looking
for a gank Starting on blue buff, lee sins clear is a bit slower, so he only has time
to do 5 camps before he needs to be on crab on time.
Again, if you cant clear by the 3:15 mark, a full clear is off limits unless you know
that the enemy jungler is pathing into the opposite side.
This allows him to secure double scuttle and get a large lead over nidalee right off the
bat Last but not least, weve got the full clear,
which really didnt occur that much starting at blue.
most likely because blue buff starts tend to be slower for a lot of champions.
However, if you dont have any ganks, and the enemy jungler is on the opposite side, then
theres no reason to not just clean your jungle out
The blue start adaptations definitely arent as cool and exciting as the red ones, but
theyre important to know nonetheless.
And that brings us to the end of the 3rd and final route.
remember, that these were just the most common ones that we saw while analyzing korean solo
queue, at the end of the day, you really have to just think, and account for enemy possibilities,
adapting on the fly will always give you the best result instead of looking for copy paste
solutions.
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