At the start of the Season, the Jungle received a plethora of changes that many felt weakened it and put it in a state of limbo in terms of its carry potential. But, as the weeks went on and adjustments were made, it became very clear thanks to the early impact of Rift Herald and the win-con of Dragon Soul, that having a good Jungler was vital to turning any game in your favor.

So, now that it seems we’ve settled down with the alterations to the Jungle itself, and the move going forward by Riot seems to be under the plan of adapting more Champions to the Jungle itself, let’s break down the basic routes that’ll help you find success should you be a newcomer to the Jungle or a veteran with habits from previous seasons.

But, before I break down any of the major routes, I want to break down a concept that I do not see employed in Solo-Queue enough that is very effective for all styles of Jungler, the Ward Trick.

The Ward Trick

The Ward Trick is a tactic utilized by High ELO players to help establish their early game route and give themselves information of the pathing of the enemy Jungler. And any Jungler from Iron to Diamond can easily employ this tip to great success.

So, how does it work? Well, at the start of the game you’ll buy your first items and a yellow trinket. Easy enough. But, what we’ll do with our trinket is that we’ll rush to the enemy’s Red Buff and either ward the buff itself, or the Raptor camp alley.

This ward will give us the knowledge of our opponents starting line, and from there we can make decisions and adjustments to our routes based off where it is they are pathing to. If you’re playing an aggressive Jungler like Xin-Zhao or Warwick, with this information you can elect to invade or pressure early ganks. Or, if you’re a farming Jungler like Karthus or Shyvana, you can adjust your path to avoid high-risk Skuttle fight, in favor of the opposite safer Skuttle.

But, we're not just dropping a ward and leaving, we're backing and picking up our Oracle Lens to be our primary trinket for the game. Lens will help us approach our ganks and clear for vision around our Skuttle pick-ups. So, its selection directly impacts the success of our goals regardless of routes and having it from the go only on increases our map presence through vision denial.

The Ward Trick is an excellent tactic to any Jungler’s repertoire, and the moment that you start to use it and utilize its information, you start gearing yourself into a mindset of winning and domination that you definitely need coming from the Jungle.

The One Quadrant Clear

Blue Side: Blue-Gromp-Wolves-Gank-Skuttle

Red Side: Red-Krugs-Raptors-Gank-Skuttle

The one-sided clear takes advantage of the Jungle changes from the start of the season and pushes us to level 3 from a complete clear of one quadrant of the jungle. This gives us access to our full kit rather quickly and allows us to pull off high impact ganks quickly. After this initial route, you have several options based off of lane states and your knowledge and prediction of the enemy Jungler. (This is where the Ward Trick comes to play.)

If you took an early gank your level 3 gank, and your opponent did not. You can guess two scenarios from this. Either they’re electing to hard clear their camps or, they’ve invaded your second quadrant and starting clearing your camps while you were initiating your first gank.

Your adjustment to this could be to immediately start Vertical Jungling by moving to the enemy’s second quadrant and clearing it for yourself. Or, if your other lanes are not in gankable states, you can elect to hit the second Skuttle for that ever important Double-Skuttle lead before transitioning into clear the remainder of your camps before a reset.

What you do is dependent on the who the enemy Jungler is playing, where you spotted or didn’t spot them out with your early Ward Trick technique, and the state of your laners Health, Mana, and Gankability.

And I’ll say that’s where the weakness of the route comes into play. This route is about adaptability. Meaning you’ll be thinking of a bigger picture following your first path, so you’ll need to make on the fly-adjustments based off your information on hand and the state of your lanes. If you’re a very one-track-minded player that wants a simple to execute goal or plays well around mid-to-late game macro, I’ve got routes that will facilitate this!

The Aggressive Ganker

Blue Side: Red-Krugs-Blue-Gank-Skuttle

Red Side: Blue-Gromp-Red-Gank-Skuttle

This route is for all the high impact and early aggression Junglers out there. So, you folks that enjoy playing Elise, Xin-Zhao, Pantheon, and Jarvan.

The clear of this route pushes an extremely fast level 3 by focusing on clearing the major buffs and immediately transitioning into ganking equipped with double-buff and full-kit pressure. This clear equips you to have the deadliest duels and ganks possible, while crossing the map to your preferred side as quickly as possible.

And the post-gank adjustments are easier to execute. Following our first Gank-into-Skuttle, we can Transition Gank another lane from the river, or immediately flow back into farming our nearest camps before proceeding across the map to clear in the opposite fashion. So, if you went from Bot to Top, you’ll want to go from Top to Bot, to finish out your clear before a reset.

The weaknesses of this route comes from the near necessity of a successful first gank and the information you give to your opponents. Should you be matched against the likes of a Master Yi, Shyvana, or Karthus, they can easily adjust their full-clear style to incorporate the camps you skipped on your path. This enables them to reach their item spikes faster and out-scale your early game focused pressure.

But, through use of our Ward Trick we can mitigate the weakness of the route and force a tempo-play against our opposing Jungler. By Mirroring our opponent’s start, we’ll end up on the same side of the map as them when they finish their full-clear. So, when they move to claim the Skuttle, we should be moving from our first gank to do the same. From here, we can make the call for help contesting the Skuttle, and potentially pick up a kill or at least pressure them away from the crab to force an early reset that allows us to pick up the pieces of our Jungle.

The Level-Six Jungler

Blue Side: Red-Krugs-Raptors-Wolves-Blue-Gromp-Skuttle

Red Side: Blue-Gromp-Wolves-Raptors-Red-Krugs-Skuttle

This route is for Champions whose power dramatically increases at level 6. So, this is for you Evelynn, Shyvana, Nocturne, Master Yi and Rengar players out there. This route focuses on maximum experience gain and values safety in our clear. It wants to take a quick reset, pick up the pieces of the Jungle items, before returning to its start point to follow the same path again to push a quick level 6 where these Champion can be felt most in terms of impact.

The Ward Trick is again employed in an adaptive fashion on this route as it allows us to adjust our start and end-points to avoid aggressive duelists or laners that will have high priority when we move for our first Skuttle contest.

Both a strength and weakness of this route is its ability to make the Skuttle Crab ‘unnecessary’. Yes, you want the vision it applies for your team and the experience and gold it gives would be great for you. But, since we clear in such a fast fashion, we’ll undoubtedly claim the second Skuttle spawn, and we’ll undoubtedly be there before our opponent since our clear speed through the Jungle becomes near unmatched as the game progresses.

But, the true weakness of the route rests not in the route itself but instead the Champions that utilize it. Master Yi, Shyvana, and Evelynn for example, all have weak early games that can be abused by aggressive picks and their ganking is extremely sub-par. In most early game cases, they need for their opponents to be mindless monkeys that shove their waves and stay perma-pushed to have successful ganks before their level 6 spikes.

And if your laners are losing their one-vs-ones or, Riot forbid, the enemy Jungler has repeatedly pulled off successful ganks, you can imagine the tilt beginning to set in on your allies with your slow crawling clear and progress.

Five Final Tips and Tricks

Now that we have the major routes down, I’d not be a good educational content maker if I didn’t suggest a little bit more info to sprinkle on top of things. So, before I leave you, I want to list off a few tips that will help you further advance in the Jungle while incorporating the routes from above.

1 - Take What Is Given

Meaning, if your opponent laners are mindlessly pushing for plates or fishing for a kill at low health, gank and kill them. If the enemy Jungler reveals themselves on the opposite side of the map, invade or secure what’s on your side to create an advantage. If waves are crashing into your turrets, and your laners are nowhere around to claim it, pick it up for yourself.

Take what the game gives you. Because those that do will find great success in Solo-Queue.

2 - Abuse Cooldowns

Whenever you pop off a good gank and claim a Summoner Spell, don’t write it off as a victory. Yes, your laners might be able to take advantage of the situation by being able to play aggressively, but you probably pack more crowd-control than they do in most cases, so be looking to rewind and abuse the cool-down you just popped.

And when ganking, look for big ability uses that make laners vulnerable. For example, if a pushing Zed uses his Shadow/Shuriken combo to poke his opponent under tower, that means he has no ability to escape your gank outside of Flash. Wait for big cooldowns like these to increase your gank success.

3 - Pick and Master a Style

I’m all for having a diverse Champion roster and becoming the best all-around player that one can be. But, when focusing on climbing or learning, it’s always better to limit yourself within a small pool or style to increase mastery and facilitate climbing. So, if you’re inclined to gank less, focus on hard farming Champions and perfecting the hard farming route. If you’re a gank focused player, master the efficient clear for gankers and abuse similarly styled Champs for success

4 - Learn to Kite Your Camps

A tactic that I did not break down today was Camp Kiting. Where having a route might get you to your destination and put into motion your game plan, kiting facilitates this process by making sure your clears are healthy and quickly efficient.

With all that said... I have nothing left to give you for this piece! I hope you can adapt the info provided here into Solo-Queue success! Good luck on the Rift and have a wonderful day!