One thing that most League of Legends players are familiar with is helping the jungler in the early game, usually at the Blue Buff or Red Buff camps. The goal is to add extra damage and help the jungler lose less health while farming, opening up more opportunities for ganks after reaching level 3.
However, this playstyle has a deadly weakness: it reveals your team’s jungle path, allowing opponents to guess where your jungler started just by observing your team’s lane timings. In lower ranks, such as Gold and below, this doesn’t have much impact, but even in Platinum and above, opponents know how to gather information and can even devise counter-gank strategies based on your jungle route.
This becomes even more dangerous in professional play where information is crucial. Therefore, in recent weeks, Jankos from G2 Esports has discovered a new jungle route to conceal this essential information. The video below, created by Riot expert Shakarez, explains in detail why Jankos has adopted this approach.
As shown in the video, Jankos starts his jungle route at the Wolves camp, then moves to the Birds camp and then to the Golem camp. With the experience buff in patch 10.3, the jungler still reaches level 3 as usual and loses significantly less health. However, farming is only half of the issue; the other half lies in Jankos’ teammates, specifically the top and bottom lanes, who do not need to help the jungle and can head to their lanes early.
When both side lanes of a team push at the same time, it means that the opponents will have no information about where your jungler will start. At this point, the opposing jungler will find it difficult to spot gank opportunities; without information on the enemy, they won’t know where the opponents are, and the chances of being counter-ganked and dying increase significantly.
Along with this, the ability for the two side lanes to push ahead of their opponents allows this area to set up the most favorable lane control depending on the team’s strategy. You can choose to slow push and look for turret dives, fast push and invade the enemy jungle, or freeze the wave to try to secure a tower shield early. In summary, the initiative belongs to you, while the opponents will be extremely passive in controlling both lanes and jungle.
At this point, many may ask – isn’t this too disadvantageous for the jungler? Skipping buffs means falling behind in gold and level. The truth is, not necessarily; when you clear those camps early, they respawn much sooner than starting with buffs. The Birds and Golem camps, after being buffed, still give a lot of gold and experience, so you can rest assured that whether you skip or slowly farm buffs, you won’t fall behind at all.
So, which champions are most suitable for this strategy? The answer is that professional players use this method with champions like Rek’Sai, Pantheon, Gragas, and Zac. The special feature of these champions is that they can gank effectively without needing buffs, so in addition to fast farming, the champion must also be capable of strong fights even without Blue/Red Buffs.
Essentially, this playstyle is applied to conceal the jungler’s information and find ways to obliterate an enemy lane by diving early. If you are facing champions that are strong in the late game and need to be shut down early, this is the most effective playstyle.