A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming an Efficient Jungler in LoL

No one thinks of Jungler as a role that can turn the tides of a game. Junglers are often just assigned two tasks; farming and ganking. But, a good jungler can play an effective role in a match and completely alter the possible outcomes. What people often forget is that junglers are blessed with the ability to control the map. Their job is to make sure the enemy carries can’t stay in their lanes safely. Junglers can also help their carries secure objectives early on in the game. A jungler can easily influence the outcome of a game and therefor we’ve out together a beginner’s guide to becoming an efficient jungler in LoL.

But, there’s a few things you need to know before you can carry your team to victory. We’ve explained all those things down below:

Proficient Pathing

Pathing refers to the route you take while farming from camp to camp. In early ranks, people often ignore pathing and go wherever they want. But, pathing efficiently can be a huge advantage. This doesn’t just apply to when you’re ganking, but also to farming. Taking the right paths means that you’ll be going from one camp to the other much quicker – Meaning that you’ll take our camps much faster and be on your way to the next one. This can get you a huge gold advantage as compared to a jungler that doesn’t know anything about efficient pathing.

When farming, clean the camps in a linear fashion to reduce the time it takes to walk from one jungle to the other. This slight efficiency will help you snowball into the late game.

When it comes to ganking, you need efficient pathing to ensure that you walk in the blind spots of enemy wards. Otherwise, they’re going to know you’re coming. This is only possible when you also have wards and know when the enemy is warding. Also, you need to let your team know the path you’re taking before executing a gank.

Camp to Gank

If you’re going to be ganking frequently, then pathing matters in that too. Make sure that when you go to a lane to help your team, you take the camp next to the lane last. If you take that camp first, you’ll spend a lot of time running from that camp to the lane. But, keep in mind that as a jungler, both ganking and securing camps is important. Otherwise, you might fall behind in experience and gold.

Countering the Enemy Jungler

A jungler also has to be aware of the enemy jungler because that’s who they’re facing. You need to make sure that you don’t lose any camps to the opponent team because that could set you back up a bit. If the jungler frequently takes a certain camp, remember his play style and take that camp first when the spawns come in.

Picking the Right Camp

Not every champion can clear every camp in early stages of the game. That’s why you should remember which hero can take a certain camp. For instance, champions that have strong auto attacks should try to go for Brambleback and the ones with AOE abilities should pick Raptors first. This slight efficiency is also helpful because you won’t be wasting your time hitting camps that are really difficult for you to clear out. Instead, you’ll be clearing camps that are easy for your hero to secure, in turn increasing XP and gold efficiency to the maximum.

Another benefit of learning this is that you can also predict where the enemy jungler will be. With good knowledge of the enemy jungler and their abilities, you can pinpoint where the jungler will be at a certain time.

Warding

Wards are the best way to keep track of the enemy jungler. By getting vision at the crucial spots, you can not only compare your farm to theirs, you’ll also be able to make sure you don’t lose any camps and are right there to harass them if they try that.

Ganking

As we said earlier, a major part of a jungler’s role is to gank the laners. But, just diving towers and dying isn’t called ganking. You need to keep track of the enemy team’s mana and cooldowns and make sure there isn’t any support lurking around in the backlines. If you eventually learn how to gank properly, you’ll be winning most matches because the XP from those early kills is something that’ll put the opponents at a great deficit.

Kiting Camps

Kiting jungle camps is something not that many people know about in early ranks. Pros always kite to make sure they get hit the least amount of times possible. Basically, when you kite a camp, you’re moving away to wait for a certain ability that’ll help you clean out the camp quicker. You won’t be wasting time sitting next to the camp and getting harassed. Kiting doesn’t exactly help a lot mid game because you’re probably tanky enough to survive the assault from these camps. However, in the early game, it can be a game changer because you will be saving those few vital hit points that you have in your arsenal.

However, you have to make sure that you don’t move too far away. Each camp has a Patience bar. If you move too far and that bar empties, the camp will regain health and you’ll have to take it out again.

Adapt to the Current Scenarios

Jungler is a highly versatile role that will require you to constantly change your play style to keep your time from losing. A good jungler knows this and is willing to focus his energies accordingly rather than just farming half the game. To do this, you’ll need to coordinate with your team. Let them know what style you’re playing; gank-heavy, farm-heavy or a bit of both. Work with them execute successful ganks and if there are champions in the other team, then focus on farming and don’t waste time running after kills that you’re not going to be able to get. Address the current situation and try to figure out which champion in the opposite team will snowball late game and try to disrupt their farm.

If you do all of the above, there’s a chance that you won’t just be a farmer and will carry your team to a glorious victory.

Conclusion

Jungling is a highly conceptual role and you’ll have to have a deep understanding of the game to be able to call yourself a good jungler. This will require premium map awareness, pathing efficiency and decision making. If you lack any one of the above, you’re pretty much screwed. So, don’t be a weight on your carry’s shoulders, outclass your opponents by following our guide.