Jungle Position Role Guide in League of Legends

Jungler is the red-headed stepchild of League roles, rarely appreciated and often blamed. Leading it to be the least played role.

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Aos Síth

Key Takeaways of Jungle Role Guide:

  • The Jungler drives the tempo (link), but needs help from their lanes to be able to
  • A Jungler needs to know where their relative strengths are and utilize them
  • It is important to play according to your champions identity 
  • Don’t listen too much to what others want you to do
  • Pathing can be complex so keep in mind what goals or win conditions you have

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Role of the Jungler

 In many ways, you are driving the tempo of your team and game. You can link up with your mid laner and support to make bigger plays around the map. You are also the biggest driving factor of snowballing lanes — as it is hard to snowball a lane out of control 1v1 unless there is a massive skill difference.

However, with a Jungler there, you can tower dive, gank and set up a wave state for a return gank, or countergank when the opponent’s Jungler tries to balance out the lane. This will put the opposing laner far enough behind where your laner should have control of the lane in isolation.

Though a Jungler is no one-man army, they still require their lanes to do this work. If no lane has any prio it is very dangerous to even go into the river without escape tools or vision and without prio, your vision will be restricted. You essentially have to take risks to try to get something done unless the opponent’s Jungler shows themselves. Even then you can get collapsed upon by laners if they have vision of you.

If you have 3 losing lanes or are without prio, you want to unlock one of them in some way to get back some control. Without it you are vulnerable to invades and will have a hard time taking objectives. It becomes risky to gank, and very risky to invade yourself.  Trying to break this state of losing everywhere is one of the hardest things to do as a Jungler – and it basically involves outplaying the opponent’s Jungler as they have all the cards. 

Playing According to Your Own Strengths

When picking Junglers — consider what you can do with your champion on the map. Do you have easy gank setups? Do you have good matchups? How are the 1V1s, 2v2s, 3v3s? Identify the advantages and disadvantages you have and make a game plan. Game plans rarely come to fruition in solo queue, but it is good to have a goal to work towards, as sometimes you can’t put out all fires. Instead, it’s better to play towards your win condition.

A mistake Junglers tend to make is to play their style regardless of champion. If you are just full clearing over and over and just going for objectives, it is not ideal to play characters like Xin Zhao and Jarvan. As these are champions that don’t scale and don’t clear that well, but instead excel at ganking and skirmishing.

Either fit the champion to your preferred playstyle or change the playing style according to the champion. Whatever choice you make as a Jungler, you are usually giving up something. If you are farming, you are giving up map presence and advantages for your laners — meaning you have to make up for this if the opponent’s Jungler is getting their laners ahead.

It is also a good idea to play according to your champion in terms of objectives and win conditions — Elise is good at tower diving, and ganking which can then be set up for objectives. Udyr can clear quickly and take objectives on his own and fend for himself. 

Early game champions want to accelerate the game by either getting towers, heralds, or stacking early dragons. Scaling champions want to farm, but not let the opponents accelerate the game, contesting when you are strong or have an advantage and shadowing the opponents’ Jungler.

Playing Your Own Game

As it is the Jungler that dictates the pace and they have the widest array of decision trees, the laners will always question your decisions. In the end, Junglers can’t listen too much to their laners, rather take into consideration what they think they need and decide if it’s worth it. Laners do not always know what they actually want and can be selfish — all Vayne top players think they will carry the game with one gank. 

Similarly, a laner may not appreciate you making a risky play to try to open up one of the lanes, but they are probably not aware of how problematic the map state is. Sometimes you have to make decisions that they may not like and that may direct abuse towards you.  You are not playing for them, you are playing to win the game.

Pathing: Don’t Lose Your Way

Jungle pathing can be complex and can take into account a lot of different information. For example:

  • Where the opponents have or should have vision 
  • How the opponent Jungler should be pathing 
  • How fast your respective champions are clearing 
  • How the lanes should play out, what the lane states are
  • Where the opposing laners expect you to be

Partly due to this, jungling is the role where game knowledge is the most useful– the more you know about the game the better it is. Though one can also play a style that relies more on hands — it doesn’t matter that much that the opponent has pathed better if you can outplay them in a fight.

Junglers have so many possible choices based on many variables that it can be hard to know where to start. Junglers can be at risk of information overload and decision paralysis. To aid against this, one can follow a rough plan or win condition — like focusing on bot because it is a volatile lane or trying to control dragons.

One can also play more free flow and look for opportunities where you can counter-jungle when the Jungler shows themselves, take opportunities when they present themselves to get kills and gank. This is a good way to make yourself strong. 

One common problem with Junglers is putting their blinders on and just continuing farming, only doing something else when they have cleared the entire jungle. But why give up an opportunity for a free kill + assists for the gold of a camp that you can just take a bit later? Or why not take the opponent’s jungle instead of your own when the Jungler shows on the opposite side of the map?  These plays have more variance to them, but they give more and deny the opponent’s resources and force them to respond.