League of Legends pre-season 3 jungle changes

Statikk, assistant game designer for League of Legends, made a few comments about the upcoming changes to the jungle for pre-season 3.  The main concern revolves around how jungleing changed in season 2.  Since the jungle became so much easier to navigate, the characters with AOE damage abilities could clear faster with little negatives.  How easy the jungle is also allowed for many more early ganks.  This made certain characters less desirable to play in lane since they need to be close to minions to farm well.  Characters like Karthus can farm at range without being in much danger from bush ganks.

Riot’s answer to these issues is to make the jungle harder again.  By increasing the damage of jungle mobs, high sustain champions such as Warwick and Fiddlesticks will become far more viable again.  Also, new jungle item specific items are going to be added to make junglers have an easier time locking in their roll a bit more.  The monsters will increase in difficulty more so to keep up with the junglers.

Statikk says these changes will occur to the jungle:

• Jungle monsters now attack the nearest target rather than attempting to chase their original attacker to make their behavior more consistent
• Wraith camp gold rewards have been reduced and golem and wolf camp gold rewards have been increased to better match their respective difficulty and convenience
• The wraiths have reduced attack range and the large wraith has been repositioned within the camp to force mid laners to commit more when farming them for extra gold
• The golem camps monsters have increased movement speed to make them less vulnerable to kiting, especially early on by the blue side bottom lane

This sounds like the end of leashing blue early game.  Either that, or leashing will have to change altogether.  Over all, it sounds like the junglers are going to have a harder time and players in lane will have slightly less to worry about at all times.

[LeagueOfLegends]

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