Setting up effective jungle ganks depends on both the jungler and the laners to work together and understand each other’s timers. This guide will cover what you can do as a jungler to figure out when you have a good gank timer, how to set up an effective gank from a jungler’s perspective, and finally how to set up a gank from a laner’s perspective and how those two roles work together.

Understanding When to Clear vs. When to Gank

This is a very important skill, especially for champions such as Lillia and Graves who really want to clear their camps as consistently as possible. On your first clear, you generally want to do anywhere from four-to-six camps before you look for ganks, and you definitely want to try and be Level 3 so you have access to all of your skills. Some junglers such as Xin Zhao and Jarvan IV can gank at Level 2, but those tend to be difficult to pull off unless the lane they’re ganking for has made a grave error in their positioning in the first wave that allows them to get killed. I personally am a fan of doing a five camp clear if I have no early gank opportunities after the first three-to-four camps and then going for either a lane gank or a scuttle crab. Sometimes lanes that you are clearing towards can’t get priority in lane, but you can make up for it by going for a gank in their lane if they have good set up/follow up on a gank, and if the gank is successful, you will generally have enough pressure to still get the scuttle crab even though your laners would have normally had a tough time moving to crab.

After your first clear, you have a few ways you can look for ganks while still trying to clear. One example can be shown just from this minimap from a recent solo queue game of mine.

I had just reset after clearing five of my camps, securing a crab and getting some mid lane farm since my mid laner had died. I had skipped my Krugs so they were still up, and my Raptors are just respawning. I can just go into a rhythm where I continue to full clear until I hit Level 6, but I notice that the enemy Wukong is trying to slow push a wave so he can get a good reset off. Instead of going to clear, what ends up happening is that I go to first gank him, with the result being that he either gets frozen on and has to take a bad recall or we kill him, and either result ends up making Wukong’s lane much harder for him to play. In general, when recalling as the jungler, you want to pan over each of your laner’s wave states and figure out which way to path into them to help figure out your pathing for ganks, which can result in kills like it did for my team in this example.

If you want to clear and gank at the end of your path, often times what you want to do is either get your laners to hold a freeze while you clear to them, and the other option is that you can tell your laners to build a slow push and crash two or three stacked waves into the enemy tower while you clear from the opposite side of the map down to them. What happens is that you create a slow push back into your lane when you properly stack waves and crash them into towers, and the enemy can’t do much to stop it other than try to desperately crash their stacked waves into your team’s tower before you show up. Oftentimes what you want to do is constantly look at the wave state and figure out how many camps you can do and still get there before the enemy crashes their waves into the tower, as that is your optimal gank timer, especially if they are stuck beyond the halfway point in the lane and towards your team’s side of the lane. If you need help explaining this to your laners, a good way to do so is to explain it like you would explain the effect of a cheater recall, in which you stack your first three waves, get a reset off while the enemy has to clear the stacked waves under their tower, and then you can freeze the lane around the fourth to fifth wave and make them vulnerable to ganks.

This is very complicated to pull off in a solo queue game however, and it is a pretty advanced concept, so one more tip I can give that is much more basic is to just F-key/pan to your lanes during your clears. If you see your laner start to hold a freeze against the enemy laner, you can afford to skip camps if it means that you can effectively ruin the enemy’s lane, especially if it is a volatile matchup that a single kill can decide how the rest of the lane plays out. Similarly, if you think that your teammates can be ganked and you are on their side of the map, it doesn’t hurt to spend a few seconds in anticipation of a counter gank, as the rewards are high if it turns out they are being ganked and you are able to respond before the gank is successful.

How to Help Set Up an Effective Gank as a Jungler

Thus far we have covered how to look for gank opportunities, but sometimes ganks require set-up both on the jungler and laner’s parts. First, we will look at it from a jungle perspective - you want to clear out any vision in your own jungle and in the river, as it is generally easier for you to access it than it is for your laners to dip that far out of their lanes. Once you clear any vision that is in the way of your gank path, you want to figure out the best angle that provides you the most success for your ganks.

Using the same screenshot from the Lillia example from before, here are some good examples of mid lane paths you can take as a red side jungler - the green arrows are the paths that I often see other junglers take, and the red arrows are paths that I think tend to be more effective when ganking these lanes if they aren’t hitting the tower. Why do these red arrows tend to work better? Two reasons - the first being that if you have river control, you can often get away with this pathing because you can avoid the wards in the line bushes if you are able to skirt across the fog of war and wrap around on the enemy lane, and the second being that because you would be so far behind the blue side laner in this case that it becomes incredibly difficult for them to escape without having to burn cooldowns such as Flash, which then opens timers down the line where you can punish them not having flash for easy kills.

Of course, this is just one lane out of three that you can gank for, but it is the easiest to understand how important vision control is and how that vision control can change how you gank to make your paths more aggressive, and therefore more successful. It is important, however, to also understand that if the enemy has control of your pathing, it also becomes easier for them to dodge or respond to your ganks if they see you coming and are able to react in time, so be sure that when doing these aggressive setups that you are able to hold them for when you actually execute the play so that they don’t go awry.

How to Set Up an Effective Gank as a Laner

There is more to this from a laner’s perspective, since you oftentimes are the one granting access to your jungler’s attempts to gank, and there are a few steps you can take to help your jungler out in making their ganks more successful. The first and easiest thing you can do is tell your jungler where the enemy has wards and try to clear them out if you are safely able to do so. If you cannot clear but you know there is a path your jungler can sneak by, be sure to ping or type it out to them so that they can path through the area where the enemy doesn’t have vision. Laners can often get cocky with their positioning in lane because they think they’re safe, and if your jungler is able to catch them off guard it can really mess with someone’s mental which may make them tilt and die to more ganks, as well as making your lane easier to play.

Another important step to helping set up effective ganks is understanding how to manage your wave. I mentioned earlier the slow push setup, and that is one way to go about it, but in general you want to have your waves near your tower but not under them, and you also want to make sure the wave isn’t big enough that you or your jungler can potentially lose a 1v2 due to minions doing too much damage. I see a lot of players complain about how their jungler never ganks them, only for them to constantly have their lane pushed into the enemy’s side of the lane. While that can be effective for potential counter ganks, it is oftentimes hard for your jungler to make a proactive gank if the enemy can simply hide under their tower and stall for time until their team moves to counter your gank.

Finally, if you are able to trade well and get the enemy low and see your jungler pathing towards them, you should be spam pinging and saying in chat that you want to dive your laner. Sometimes all it takes for an effective gank is trading better than your opponent, because while it is true that you generally want to have the minion waves towards your side of the lane, crashing a wave of 10+ minions into the enemy tower and quickly executing a dive that denies an enemy a kill’s worth of gold while securing yourself gold and potentially tower plates/the tower itself is also a huge play to make that I think is incredibly effective, but requires good communication and understanding your limits that enable potential dives. While some junglers can understand when a good dive is, a lot of the time they won’t know the limits/damage capability of your champion, and so it is up to you as a laner to know when those plays are possible and let your jungler know that you are certain it can work.

Conclusion

These are a few ways junglers and laners both can work individually and together on how to set up effective jungle ganks, and ultimately what it comes down to is understanding your role within the setup stages, and then having the ability to coordinate plays with your teammates in order to make them work. If nothing else, take away from this article that communication is always key to making a successful play work, and that you are playing a team game - meaning that if your teamwork does not falter, you will always have a great chance of plays succeeding, whether they be ganks or something else altogether.

As always, best of luck on the Rift, and stay safe out there!