League of Legends is trying to making jungling easier

Jungling is a powerful but thankless role in League of Legends. Anyone who has done it knows the difficulty and skill it requires to truly master the position.

One of the goals in the upcoming season for League of Legends is trying to make jungling more accessible. In Riot’s recent dev update, we got a rundown of some of the new champions and gameplay changes coming in Preseason 2023.

One of the major focal points is jungling, which was expanded upon in an accompanying blog post. Riot is exploring ways to make jungling a more accessible role in League of Legends. Note, that I said accessible as Riot was sure to point out they are not dumbing down the jungle role or removing some of the gameplay elements that truly show off your mastering of the role.

Changes range in everything from optimal jungle path recommendations to new items to pets. Yes, pets, but more on that later.

One of the changes mentioned in the blog is jungling path aids. This was compared to recommended items in that it would recommend how to do your first clear.

Riot is also exploring adjusting how camps leash, including their ranges and reset rules. The goal with this is to make camp leashing less finicky and generally more forgivable, as well as more approachable with a variety of champions. With these changes, Roit hopes more champions can be played in the jungle, effectively opening up the meta. Riot notes:

"Skill should be rewarded across the roster of champs, not only on the select few that can effectively clear the current jungle. Some amount of the skill expression around clearing your jungle will be lost with these changes, but that means we can move some of the jungle’s complexity and skill away from clear optimization toward other places. We think this’ll be a good tradeoff for the jungle overall."

Riot is also looking at ways to help junglers by improving buff sharing. We all know how important it is to donate buffs to your laners, but right now it sucks to lose the gold, experience and bonuses. While Riot is exploring ways to make this less painless for junglers, one option being floated is the buff leaving behind a smaller friend that also has a buff.

Another big change being teased are jungle pets. While this feature is still a work in progress, the idea behind pets are to help you with simple jungle tasks, like clearing or taking down epic monsters. But then there’s this intriguing detail:

"As you jungle, you slowly raise and feed your pet until they’ve grown up enough to be able to empower you."

All of this is currently a work in progress and Riot is keeping a lot of the details under wraps for now until they’ve locked down exactly how powerful they want this to be.

All in all, these are some very exciting and promising changes coming to the jungle role in the 2023 Preseason. As always, Riot will monitor feedback and data and adjust things accordingly.