The preseason is here and with it come a whole slew of annual changes to League of Legends. The most notorious part of pre-season 11 is the overhaul of items and the item system, but the tradition of changing the jungle hasn’t been skipped.

Jungle Camp Changes

Riot is/will be making changes to the jungle camps throughout the preseason to make them all “uniform”. What they mean by “uniform” is that the camps resistances will be equal - 20 armor and 20 scaling magic resistance - along with reworks to the HP bars of all camps to reach a “middle ground of durability”. Finally, all camps received a slight move speed buff in order to reduce the “power of kiting”.

"Quick Reference" for camps not specifically talked about here (via Riot's Patch 10.23 notes)

The main camp/monster changes are:

Krugs

The Krug camp is often largely left alone due to the greater time it takes to clear without a great enough benefit. Riot has reduced the Krug’s health significantly (specifically nerfing the large Krug HP from 1250-2188 to 1050-1785 (scaling with level)). As well as shifting some gold and XP from the medium Krugs to the small Krugs to make clearing the full camp a priority. The total gold and XP seems to still be the same, just the numbers gained from the individual Krugs has been shifted around.

Gromp

The Gromp has lost its attack speed and damage buffs on its first 3 attacks, along with an overall damage tweak - Gromp’s base AD is up from 70 to 80 and the AD scaling is to 1x to 3.16x (scaling levels 1 to 18) as opposed to the old 1x to 3.7x. The nerf to the camp’s scaling comes from the fact that it deals magic damage and was viewed as scaling “too well” comparatively. Finally, Gromp now heals and restores mana to it’s killer (similar to what the Scuttle used to do).

Scuttle Crab

Scuttle Crab has always had a “hidden” mechanic where CCing it would reduce its resistances, but now that mechanic is very visible. Scuttle is now visibly shielded for 60% of its max HP (rather than 60 armor and 60 magic resistance), upon being CC’d it loses the shield (or you can simply damage it away). The Scuttle has also given up its healing and mana restoration powers to the Gromp camp.

The overall goal of these tweaks seem to be in order to make more jungle paths viable and make the jungle easier for newcomers. This would allow for more freedom/flexibility and less punishment for taking different routes. Because the standard jungle route(s) are often much more gold and XP efficient, in order to pull off a different path a player would need to net a kill, objective or some type of camp steal to consider it worthwhile.

Jungler Item Changes

Riot has once again made changes to the items that junglers need to do their job. However, this time junglers may be pleasantly surprised - All the jungle items have been replaced by the Emberkinfe and Hailblade.

Both items cost 350, similar to machete and/or Talisman, and serve as the starting jungle items. They both share the following traits:

- Grants 12% omnivamp (converts a percentage of physical, magic and true damage into healing) against monsters.
- Unique passive Sear: Damaging monsters burns them for 60 (scaling with AP, AD and bonus HP) magic damage over 5 seconds. Basic attacks also apply a tick on-hit.
- Huntsman passive: Bonus XP and gold on monster kills with reduced XP and gold from lane minions (removed at 20 minutes)
- Recoup passive: Regenerate up to 8 - 10 (based on level) mana per second in the jungle or river.

The most unique change is after using Smite 5 times the items will be consumed and your Smite will be converted to Challenging or Chilling Smite respectively. Junglers no longer need to keep a jungle item in their slot all game AND don’t need to sink roughly 2,000 gold into an item specifically for a smite change.

This means that junglers will be able to build "real" items as quickly as their lane counterparts. So junglers can expect to be on the same power level as the solo lane champions in early to mid game fights and will surely increase champion viability in the jungle. With the introduction of the Mythic item system, as long as a champion has a decent clear or gank potential they could be played in the jungle and hit their item spikes at a reasonable pace.