The new jungle

The new jungle is hard. There's no two ways about it. My experience is based on NOT having a full rune page or mastery tree so it should get a little bit easier but, at this point, I've only come across one champion that can jungle consistently the way many of the season 2 junglers could. And that's Fiddlesticks because his Drain is particularly ridiculous for this purpose (and synergizes amazingly with Hunter's Machete). I'm going to try Nunu tonight because, I think, he might be solid too.

So let's discuss the "old" standard and what the new standard might look like. The old way to do it optimally was to go Wolves at 1:40, Blue at 2:00, Wraiths, Golems, Red (or, a very few champions could go Red, Golems which made it slightly faster). Generally, the good junglers were doing this with boots making them that little bit faster.

So far, I've found very, very few champions that can go Wolves, Blue, etc. There are a fair number that have spammy attacks that can do Blue, Wolves and on because they then have the mana to make it work. This means you don't start your jungle until the 2 minute mark when blue buff spawns. Throw on top of this that leashing is more difficult now and you have a more difficult environment for lvl 1-3 characters. So what do you do now?

1) Get a leash. Leashing isn't dead, it's just different. Where before it was about tanking, now it's about doing extra damage. So you get a friend to throw some damage down on the wolves so that YOUR kill of the wolves is much quicker. If they can stick around and do Blue with you as well, then you're probably all set. But that does two things, first of all, it probably siphons at least a little bit of xp from the wolves. Second, it keeps them out of lane and they have to rush to top lane (if blue) or bottom lane (if red) to start farming. One interesting option for red is to have the support do the leash so that the AD Carry can continue to farm.

2) Go slower. Anyone (pretty much) can jungle if they go Blue, Wolves, Wraiths, base. This isn't optimal but it is "doable". You'd buy boots on the way back and then race to do golems, Red, Wraiths and then gank. The one plus to this is that you probably don't have to buy Hunter's Machete if you don't want to. This means that your lvl 4 gank (boots, doran's?) will be better than the other team might be expecting. If you have a really good early ganker (Amumu for example) then this might be an option you can do.

3) Counter jungle hard. One, somewhat unexplored option, is to counter jungle hard core. Don't worry about the buffs. Leave them for your teammates. Focus on running a circuit that steals the enemy wraiths often and frequently and looks to steal golems when their jungler shows up on the other side (Wolves are pretty unsafe to steal).

4) Double jungle. This has been floated in some areas. A "top" jungler and "bottom" jungler who also support the lanes. If more aggressive supports (Zyra, Nunu for example) become more common then this might be a really good solution. It does raise interesting questions about the lanes and where the buffs go though. But it opens the option for HYPER aggressive counter jungling. If you have two junglers and they have 1, clearing your jungle by the 2:30 mark and then team ganking the jungler at lvl 3ish at their wraith/golems would be really disastrous (not the least of which it also sets up a lvl 4 lane gank that could truly snowball the team. I think if this becomes a thing, you'll want to see AD junglers differentiated between AP junglers and you'll also see AD vs. Bruiser mismatches in bottom and top because the AD will now want to be near the red buff no matter what. The funny thing about this is that I can't see it working really well against a team with a single jungler. But against a team with NO jungles (where the top/bottom lane are responsible for keeping the jungles farmed) it might struggle. So it's some interesting game theory.