New Jungle, New Items, New Masteries

You can go online and find a number of resources outlining the new items and new masteries. They're beefing up the jungle as well while also pumping the gold/xp payout for them. The really interesting thing is the types of junglers that will be spawned by two items:

Hunters Machete (300gold) - 10% more damage to monsters, +10 true damage on basic attacks to neutral monsters

and

Crystalline Flask (225) - 3 charges of 100hp/40mana regeneration. Rechargable every time you visit a shop

It seems to me that the champions WITHOUT sustain (think Amumu, Alistair, etc) will go 14 points into the new utility tree to start with +50 gold and buy both of the above.

The champions WITH sustain (Warwick, Fiddlesticks, Vlad, etc) will go Hunters Machete and either save for boots or (probably more likely) buy a ward and (if they use mana) a mana pot.

What's interesting is then how those two champions evolve. The latter group will get their boots first and have a little more money long term from not having "wasted" the money on the flask. On the other hand, the former group is going to have better sustain early on and may feel more willing to engage in earlyish (sub lvl 6) ganks.

It'll be interesting to see how the meta moves to accommodate the Flask. It's too expensive to go boots/flask so characters in lanes will have a real decision (vs. the situation now where if you watch top pros it's always boots + 3x health pot except for the support which buys boots, pot, ward.

Crystalline Flask doesn't build into anything and sells back for less than half of what it cost. The Machete builds into one of three items. Two of them are essentially perma versions of the red and blue buffs. I can't remember what the other one is.

There's also an item that works like the flask that drops wards. It's somewhat expensive (700gp i think) and has 4 charges and 100 health. It lets you have 2 wards simultaneously (so you can't use charges 3 & 4 until charges 1 & 2 are gone or you're willing to kill those wards off). It has an upgrade to 5 charges, 3 wards and 300 health. I'll be interested to see how that one works out. It seems weak to me but maybe it works if you buy it early (you have to play 7 wards to get it to payoff).

So if you're looking to jungle, the Winter patch (supposed to happen December 11th at the earliest) should be interesting for you.