If we pay a little attention to professional League of Legends tournaments, it is easy to see that the jungle has been revolving around just four names: Lee Sin, Rek’Sai, Gragas, and Elise. These champions are the strongest and most perfect for both farming and ganking objectives. Even in solo queue, these four names appear the most, with Jarvan IV making occasional appearances, but he cannot compare to the power of the aforementioned champions.
Therefore, Riot Games had to come up with a plan to expand the champion pool for the jungle and increase the diversity of this role; otherwise, players would only use those perfect champions and ignore other options. The first move they made was to add jungle capabilities to 7 new champions: Darius, Garen, Mordekaiser, Gnar, Zed, Talon, and Diana.
However, only one name – Diana – proved effective, while the other 6 champions had results ranging from poor to very poor. For instance, Gnar has only a 35% win rate in the jungle, while Mordekaiser, Garen, and Talon slightly better at 37%. This indicates that these Fighters or Assassins are not suited for the jungle role. Perhaps Riot Games should consider other methods or grant potential champions a true path to becoming viable junglers.
Riot’s first attempt was somewhat of a failure, but the second “trick” of buffing the Bami’s Cinder and the Fire Demon item was a resounding success. Immediately, a slew of tank junglers like Zac, Nunu & Willump, Rammus, and Sejuani saw a significant increase in their win rates. They all gained about 2-3% win rate when patch 10.4 was released. In fact, Nunu & Willump jumped to the number one spot with a win rate of 53.31%, while Zac became one of the strongest junglers.
The reason for this strong resurgence lies in the passive of the Fire Demon item interacting too strongly with the new Sacrifice effect of Bami’s Cinder. Remember that the damage from this effect interacts strongly with bonus health and crowd control, while the passive of this item adds an additional 15% health. Additionally, tank junglers all have some hard crowd control skills which easily activate this effect.
So now, when you have tank junglers in your team composition, you will have a reliable shield and not worry about lacking damage with the new effect of the Fire Demon item. In fact, these tank junglers are proving to be superior to traditional “carnivore” champions, as their damage is not too inferior, but their versatility and crowd control are significantly better.
The increasing presence of tank champions has led to the return of a counter to these tanks, which is Trundle. With just one R ability targeting an enemy tank, Trundle becomes stronger and allows his teammates to easily deal with those troublesome champions.
In conclusion, the jungle meta has become much more diverse than before; however, the champions directly buffed by Riot are mostly ineffective in their new roles. The jungle champion pool has expanded as tank champions have been empowered and given the chance to shine. With this momentum, it’s only a matter of time before the jungle becomes the “League of Fire Demons.”