Learn How to Play Graves Jungle With Advice From DIG eXyu
It's the End of the Line of this season. Time to learn Graves jungle from Dignitas jungler, eXyu.
It’s ‘The End of the Line’ for the 2022 season, so it’s a great time to pick up a new jungle Champion to main for the coming year. Lawrence Lin ‘eXyu’ Xu takes us through ‘The Outlaw’ lifestyle that is Graves jungle!
Note to reader: This interview was conducted on Friday, November 11th, 2022, a few days before the preseason changes went live.
When is the Right Time to Pick Graves?
One of the biggest reasons to pick up Graves as soon as possible is how flexible he can be in every game state. Flexibility generally means consistency and reliability. If you want to make sure you can climb, it’s crucial to learn to play Champions that will be able to adapt and thrive in any situation you find yourself in. Right now, Graves is that Champion in the jungle!
With the many changes coming to the game, many players want consistency and certainly want to minimize their bad matchups. Of course, in solo queue, an added problem junglers encounter is when they are picking early in Champion Select and can’t trade with a teammate, forcing them to blind pick. This predicament is obviously going to happen fifty percent of the time so it’s a common challenge to encounter. One way to bypass this problem is to pick a Champion you are consistent with. Alternatively, you can pick a Champion that is consistent on its own. When you’re an early pick, you don’t necessarily know what kind of composition your team is going to wind up with. So, picking a consistent and adaptable Champion is critical.
Right now, Graves is pretty broken so it’s definitely blind pickable and first pickable. Graves doesn’t really like to play into long-range mages because he’s kind of a short-ranged burst ADC. You don’t want to play against such long ranges because you can’t hit them. And you definitely don’t want to play against Kindred. Use your ban on Kindred.
When we refer to this blind pickability, and first pickability, it’s referencing how adaptable this Champion really is. It’s not necessarily to say that Graves is an unstoppable force that should be picked or banned every game (even though he kind of is), it’s more so pointing to the fact that the typical counters to Graves are defeatable with early pressure and proactivity. It’s certainly tricky, but not impossible.
One of the perks of solo queue is that you are guaranteed one ban. Technically, you can go your entire climb without playing against one specific Champion if you want. If you’re playing Graves, that ban is valuable and should be used on Kindred. Without going too deep into the matchup, Kindred outranges, outscales, and inhibits Graves’ adaptability. Against squishier team compositions, Graves can thrive with a lethality build and play for a high damage combo from range. Of course, Kindred can use Lamb’s Respite and negate that entire combo rendering Graves pretty much useless afterward. Aside from Kindred, Graves’ matchups are definitely winnable!
Don’t play against Kindred. Graves doesn’t really have many guaranteed wins or losses. Which is why I think a lot of people like him because you always feel like you have a fighting chance. If on paper it’s a hard matchup, it’s because you need to put pressure on them early and punish them which can be hard for most people, but it’s not doomed.
Teammate Synergies
When you’re looking to build an advantage from early game pressure, especially in tougher matchups, it’s crucial to have some synergy with your mid laner. Mid laners that can gain priority pre-level 6 make the world of a difference! They can help you invade, use their priority to get vision in the enemy jungle for you to then invade or just track the matchup better, and they can even apply pressure in other lanes to give you larger windows to invade and play aggressively!
Sylas, Sydra, or Azir are great examples. Anything that can win the push or win the fight is really good. Galio and Leblanc are also great picks. Viktor isn’t ideal for example. Graves definitely wants a reliable setup and some decent damage.
Runes
An added perk to Graves jungle right now is that he has a few options for Rune setups. Depending on the drafting phase, Graves can choose to go with the more standard Fleet Footwork setup or go for a more feast-or-famine, early game hypercarry option in Dark Harvest. With Graves’s relatively low cooldown dash, he can already be an overwhelming Champion to slip away from. If necessary, Graves can swap Runes away from Flash and towards other (traditionally considered unorthodox) options like Ghost, Ignite, or sometimes Exhaust.
There’s definitely a time and place (for Dark Harvest). Fleet is better overall. If the team is really squishy and you know you want to go the lethality build, go Dark Harvest. The nice part of the Fleet Footwork option is you can still do both builds. If you’re against a squishy team and all you want to do is Q and R them, Dark Harvest is good.
Summoner Spell Options
When selecting your Summoner Spells on Graves, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the types of Champions you’re up against. In general, Flash is better against Champions with dashes or when the enemy team has high-value skill shots that you must dodge at all costs! Alternatively, Ghost is better when the enemies are either fast and you need to stick to them, or if they don’t have any dashes and must use their Flash to gain space. In this case, the worst case scenario is you trade Ghost for Flash which is obviously worth it because of the lower cooldown! When playing with the Ghost setup, it’s generally a better idea to play more drain-tank core items because you’ll need to dive past the front line if you want to deal damage and chase down the backline carries!
In a game against Vi, Sylas, and Yone, I took Flash because they have really impactful skillshots where, if I can dodge it, I can win the fight. Another game, against Udyr, Malzahar, Ezreal, and Blitzcrank, I went Ghost because Udyr is really fast and I need to match. Ezreal has one dash with a longer cooldown than mine.
Core Build Options
As Graves you have a lot of options in the early game. His healthy clear and early game damage gives an overwhelming number of options that can be challenging for newer players to make the right call. For simplicity, you’ll probably find the most success fully clearing and looking to influence the lanes in your first clear before recalling for a Serrated Dirk, unless you’re into these tougher matchups on paper. Then you should start looking at options to apply some pressure in the first clear to stay one step ahead of your opponent.
The biggest thing is, on your first base, if you can, you want to make sure you get a Serrated Dirk! A double long-sword and boots first buy is fine, too. But, if you’re opting to not go potions, then you’re pretty much guaranteeing you’re going to fully clear. I think an alternative is a pink ward and one potion just in case, but you’re not using it on your clear and the pink ward to guarantee you get a gank somewhere to some extent.
With the early leads generated, you don’t want to take your foot off the gas and keep applying pressure! Rushing Umbral Glaive is a fantastic Legendary Item that can help your damage and vision denial. This also gives you more time before you need to build your Mythic Item and commit to playing the Goredrinker build, or the Eclipse build.
The Goredrinker games are generally when they have more melees and I’m playing more of a bruiser build. The Eclipse build is generally against a bunch of squishies like Vayne, Evelynn, Pyke, Kai’sa, or when I played against Annie, Heimerdinger, Ezreal, Kindred. Those champions are hard for me to auto attack so I build lethality, Q and R and hope I one-shot them!
The Early Game and First Clear
The early game with Graves can be challenging. But one thing’s for sure. You want to recall when you’ve got the gold to reach each early game power spike like Serrated Dirk and Umbral Glaive! This could be a simple three camp clear into an invade, or a full clear. Remember though, early game pressure is important, and necessary to build a lead!
Usually, you want to try to get a kill on your first clear because it lets you base for the Serrated Dirk. Once you get that you can really start snowballing the game. A lot of the time my clear will be Red>Raptors>Gromp or Blue>Gromp>Wolves>Red and then I’ll look for opportunities to invade the enemy jungle, looking to influence lanes, ensuring I get a crab.
Transitioning to the Mid Game
A common question junglers will ask themselves in the early game is whether to prioritize Dragons or Rift Heralds. While Dragon stacking helps with consistent growth towards the late game and provides you with a win condition, the early game pressure and gold injection from Rift Herald is undeniably powerful on Champions like Graves!
I usually prioritize Rift Herald as Graves because it’s more money. Dragons are the play for the team, Herald is the play for yourself. When you’re Graves, you kind of want to play for yourself. When Graves gets a Rift Herald early he can start snowballing and once he hits Umbral Glaive and Goredrinker, if you hit those two items before anyone else you can kind of take over the game so Herald is pretty OP. The second Herald is really good for breaking a Tier 2 tower, which is great for Graves because it’s a lot of gold. When you get those two items, you can kind of brute-force your way into their jungle and constantly pressure their jungler and lanes because you can pretty much one-shot the camps, too. There are very few junglers that can match you at that point so, as long as you play well and don’t get caught, you can constantly take their camps, pressure them, and then eventually drop the second Rift Herald and break their Tier 2 tower.
With Graves being a unique Champion because of his area-of-effect basic attacks and reloading passive, many players complain about the complexity of clearing and unorthodox feel to the Champion. While this is unavoidable, it’s something that you can definitely get used to and incorporate into your gameplay.
Maintain Early Pressure and Push to the Victory
At this point in the game, the hard part is over and there should be some sort of lead to work with. If not, you’ll need to continue attempting to apply pressure in side lanes because your short cooldown dash allows you to chase down the enemies and you have enough damage to secure them with some crowd-control.
With the lead however, you need to practically claim their jungle as your own and minimize their gold income!
I think overall, just be as aggressive as you can because you’ll learn your limits like that. Graves is a champion that really teeters on the edge of inting and being a god! So, you just have to experiment with it, learn what you’re capable of and once you figure it out you’ll be able to punish your opponents to the max!
Quick Tips and Tricks
There aren’t many Graves tips and tricks, but one thing that newer Graves players forget is that you can use both your Quickdraw and Collateral Damage as dashes to either escape, or close the gap on the enemy. This also comes in handy when trying to steal a neutral objective. This way, you can Quickdraw into the pit, Smite and use your ultimate to both attempt to steal the objective AND escape!
I think the two big ones for clearing are to cancel the E animation by using it into a thick wall so you don’t move, and the second is to Q and E at the same time in the reload animation because if you’re chasing someone then they will get caught off guard with it. You can use that in your clear, too! Usually your clear will be auto, Q>E, auto, auto to start. Besides that, you want to kite the camps so your auto spray hits as many of the Wolves, Raptors, or Krugs as possible to stay efficient.
Conclusion
Graves is one of those Champions that will fall in and out of the meta in pro play, but will always have a place in the solo queue environment. His early game power and healthy clears makes for a reliable Champion to main and commit your time and effort to for your climb as we head into a brand new season!
We’d like to thank eXyu for taking the time to sit down with us and create a Graves jungle guide! You can keep up with eXyu in the upcoming season on:
