EPT
.Jungling Basics
As a nearly essential part of every strong team, a jungler provides a second solo lane, mobility in the form of coverage and ganks, and dragon/buff/map control. Most champions are capable of jungling with smite. Although almost every champion can jungle, there are a few standout junglers which I consider to be superior to the rest for ease of use and general power levels. If you are new to jungling, your first champion is Warwick. If you have a basic grasp of creep spawn timing and mechanics, move up to a harder champion like Rammus/Amumu/Fiddle/Udyr. Once you get them down, move on to more risky junglers like Olaf, Evelyn, Master Yi or even someone as crazy as Morgana/Twitch/Trist.
Whatever you do, *TAKE SMITE*.
In general, there are two types of junglers: Tank junglers and Gank junglers. Tank junglers build essentially pure tank items and rely on their skills to support, get kills and/or set kills up for their team. Examples of this are Amumu, Rammus, Malphite, Udyr, Nunu, Shen, Gragas, Cho and Mundo. Gank junglers rely heavily on items to help them jungle, primarily Madred's Razors and the two items that build from it, Madred's Bloodrazors and Wriggle's Lantern. Warwick, Yi, Evelyn, Pantheon, Akali, Olaf, Shaco, Tryndamere, and others fall under this category. Some champs, like Warwick, are great at doing both at the same time.
Getting Started
Runes/Masteries/Summoner Spells/Builds
There are a couple of ways to jungle on different champions, but for my purposes, I always run 1/8/21 with max points in Improved Smite, Strength of Spirit, Good Hands, Improved Ghost, Awareness, Greed, Meditation, Utility Mastery, Quickness, Intelligence and Presence of the Master. There are many other ways to run a jungle champion's masteries, but this is my personal favorite for the improved cooldowns on summoner spells and abilities, movespeed, and enough points to max everything in the tree that you want. The other most common mastery setup for jungling is 1/14/15 for champions that really want the extra survivability.
As far as runes go, there are different pages for different champs, but the extremely useful pages generally run attackspeed. Each champion is nuanced and requires tweaking of a runepage, but as far as DPS go, you generally want attackspeed reds and quints, at the least. Other useful runes to have are movespeed quints, flat armor yellows, MR/lv yellows and blues, attackspeed yellows and blues and flat cdr blues. Examples: on Udyr, I run MS Quints, aspd reds/blues and flat armor or MR/lv yellows. On Yi, I run full attackspeed.
Your summoner spells are basically non-negotiable. Take ghost and take smite.
In general, on tanks you want to open either HoG or Sunfire with merc treads and on auto-attackers you want to build razors into lantern or bloodrazors. Each champ's specific build is different, but for tanks if they have a lot of physical get HoG->Sunfire->Omen and diverge while against magic-heavy comps you want to go HoG into double Negatron. Make those into Veils/FoNs/QSSs later.
I pretty much always try to open with cloth armor and the least amount of potions I need to finish my first run. On some champs, that means I can start with a ward, but if I'm confident about my map awareness and good at counting creeps, I can skip this and get a faster HoG/longsword depending on the champ I play. Opening Cloth + 5 pots on champions like Yi will force you to spend for boots instead of a longsword on your first buy unless you sell a potion. If you were just going to sell it, why'd you even buy it?
Paths
There are tons of ways to jungle, but most champions do one of 3 things: start at blue, start at stone golems, or start at wraiths. Know your matchup and where their optimal starting point is, and count their creeps to assure yourself of where they are. If they get 2 creep kills off the bat, they started at stone golems. If they don't get one for quite a while then suddenly get 3 then 6, they started at Blue buff. If they begin with 4 off the bat, they were at wraiths, and you can judge which way they went from there.
The two most effective base paths are starting at stone golems or starting at blue buff.
More on this later...
Wards
For the first 15-20 minutes, it is the jungler's job to keep the dragon warded. I like to say it's the jungler's job to keep everything warded, but it's nice to have some ward support from your team. Placed in the right spots, they will allow you vision of incoming ganks, potential buff jack opportunities, potential gank opportunities, dragon and jungle raid opportunities, champion position and allow you to safely push towers.
Wards are super important, so don't neglect them, even if you have a lantern.
The Gank
The Jungle Gank is an essential part of any successful jungler's playbook. You should know exactly when you can gank, how strong your gank is, how dangerous your gank is, how deep you can dive, what weaknesses your gank has, where the other team has warded, what summoner spells they have, what happens after you gank, and when the situation is right, you gank.
If your gank is successful, farm and push the lane super hard. Level off of the creep experience and try to take down the tower. If it was unsuccessful, push the wave so it can't be counterpushed too fast and retreat. I usually know just by looking whether or not my gank will result in a kill. If I'm unsure, sometimes I try anyway. If I know it won't work, I cover the lane instead.
Covering Lanes
Another important part of a jungler's job is covering lanes. Usually you're nowhere near the place that needs to be covered, so try to anticipate it when you're nearby and tell them, hey, want me to cover while you heal? If you get into the habit of helping your teammates before they're within dive range it will greatly decrease the number of stupid deaths your team has overall.
When you're covering a lane, try not to push too hard unless there are no champions to gain exp from it. You want to zone your opponent, and you want to save the experience for your lane champ, but you also want to let nothing go to waste, so last hit the shit out of those creeps. Play it as if you were in the lane, and leave when your champ comes back unless he's going for a gank. If you're good with your lane control you can hold a lane and jungle at the same time, especially in mid and near stone golems.
(Here ends the basics.)
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Advanced Strategy
One day, you will be jungling with a champion, starting at blue, finishing it and making your way to your stone golems when you come across a chilling realization: your wraiths are missing. You continue on to stone golems, and you don't hit 4 off of them. What do you do? You panic, not wanting to waste time, and decide to attempt red at level 3. You end up feeding to the lizard and losing your blue buff. Upon checking the champion scoreboard, you notice while you have 8 creeps, the enemy jungler has... 24.
What the hell.
The Wraith Jack
My name is 5HITCOMBO, and I am the king of all wraith jacks. This is the first of many things that will set you apart from every other jungler. Your team comes to blue to defend you, and you're sitting in the grass together, waiting for something to come. Minions spawn, but instead of waiting the extra 25 seconds for your blue buff, you go straight to their wraiths, smite the big one and kill the small ones. Depending on who you are, you will have different paths. Here's my two favorites that work with basically any standard jungling champ:
Their wraiths -> your wolves -> your wraiths (smite should be off cd as soon as you get there--use it here or save it for...) -> stone golems -> bluepill -> blue buff -> wolves -> wraiths -> stone golems -> bluepill -> red buff -> gank
Alternatively, you can try to really deny them:
Their wraiths-> your wolves -> your wraiths -> their wraiths -> bluepill -> their wraiths -> blue buff -> wolves -> wraiths -> stone golems -> bluepill -> red buff -> gank
The beauty about wraith jack is that it forces them into the position where they can commit horrendous mistakes while increasing your creep score. Blue buff is worth more in terms of experience and utility but with the wraith jack, you deny your opponent part of his farm and experience while taking it for yourself. I've had many Amumu players suicide themselves to lizard because they don't know what to do without the wraiths there. Other players will bluepill, find that they don't have enough for razors, buy boots, run back out and be way behind on farm, as I'm still jungling at full speed while they have delayed their razor for minutes.
The wraith jack is such an amazingly effective tool for disrupting an opponent's jungling. There have been games where I have had 48 creep kills when my opponent had 12 because when I went for the second jack I found him there and killed him and just snowballed out of control from it.
Obviously, do not attempt this if the enemy team comes to gank you. Do not feel the need to kill all of the wraiths if an enemy shows up. Smite the big one and gtfo. Head over to those wolves and work your way down to stone golems.
This is a dangerous game, but in higher skilled games you want to exploit every little edge that you can.
Topics I still want to cover
Subterfuge
Buff Steals
Counterwarding
Tracking
General Tips
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Got some nice jungle tutorials, thanks to Brambled for the links:
Eve -
Xin -
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Please discuss any criticism or comments in a civil manner
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