When playing LoL, especially in the jungle position, the most frustrating feeling is when you’re farming the jungle but your teammates keep pinging for dragon, pinging for ganks… Of course, they need you to intervene to ping, but you may not be in a ready position (low health, in the middle of farming a camp), leading to a frustrating mindset within the team. The best solution is to improve your own jungle efficiency so you can move around more freely. Here are four tips that Challenger players use to speed up their jungle farming.
Kiting Jungle Camps
This is the biggest difference between inexperienced LoL players and high-level players, as most low-ranked players tend to stand still and farm jungle camps. However, this will cause you to waste a lot of time moving in the jungle, lose a lot of health while farming, and make you always lag behind the enemy jungler.
Always move and kite the jungle camp you are farming towards the next location you plan to go to. This not only saves movement time but also helps you take less damage while farming. The easiest camp to do this with is the Blue Buff since it has relatively low attack speed, allowing you to hit the camp while moving towards the nearby Frog pit. This will save you a significant amount of time moving between camps.
Using Mobility Skills Wisely
Most of the popular junglers right now (Lee Sin, Jarvan IV, Elise…) have skills that allow them to jump over walls and engage targets. Using these abilities wisely is a great way to save movement time. Many players think that dealing all their skill damage to jungle monsters is the best way to farm the jungle, but the truth is that sometimes it deals less damage than a few auto attacks.
Therefore, if the jungle monster is low on health, it is best to use other skills or auto attacks to finish them off in order to save your wall-jumping skills for more flexible movement in the jungle. Remember that the terrain in LoL’s jungle is very unique; you will waste a lot of time if you walk normally, which can lead to falling behind the opponent in terms of movement.
Utilize Jungle Item Damage on Monsters
There is an effect that we often overlook when using jungle items, which is that they deal damage over time to jungle monsters, and this effect can trigger multiple times on different monsters. We often have a habit of killing the larger monsters first before moving to the smaller ones. However, the best way to save time is to attack all the monsters in the camp with auto attacks and prioritize killing the smaller ones first.
The reason is that the smaller monsters have lower health but similar damage to the larger monsters. For example, if you are farming the bird camp, you might dive in to attack the large bird and put yourself in a position to be attacked by the smaller birds. Thus, you not only waste more time killing the large bird but also take more damage from the smaller birds. To counter this, utilizing the jungle item damage on monsters and attacking all the small monsters first is the best approach.
Do Not Smite the Red Buff
One thing that few people notice is that the Red Buff has negative armor, meaning that auto-attacking it will be more effective than usual. However, the damage dealt by Smite is true damage, which has the advantage of dealing direct damage to health, but it is not amplified when used on low-armor targets like the Red Buff.
Instead of using Smite on the Red Buff, you should use it on the Golem camp, as they have armor stats making the true damage of this summoner spell much more effective. By investing a bit of time at the Red Buff camp, you can farm the Golem camp extremely quickly with Smite, saving a lot of time as the Golem camp takes a significant amount of time to clear.
If you are a jungler who deals magic damage, the above theory will be reversed, as the Red Buff has magic resistance while the Golem has negative magic resistance. Therefore, in the case of using Fiddlesticks, Evelynn…. you should Smite the Red Buff instead.