The following post has been published by AzubuLivingston on Reddit.
I have been playing League of Legends since July 2009 (beta). I have always been a jungle main and I am working on doing some guides for beginners and intermediate players. Season 1 I was platinum (highest you could be), Season 2 I was triple diamond and this season I am diamond 1 division 1. My goal is to release content and tips to the community to help them understand jungling and general gameplay better! So here is a quick writeup about jungling and counter jungling. Leave comments about what you would like to see or what you liked/disliked.
1.) First and foremost, understand team compositions. Counter jungling becomes easier or harder depending on how your lanes match up. Generally when attempting to counter play the enemy jungler you want to have heavy push lanes. This forces the enemy lanes to lose xp and gold when they rotate to you in their jungle.
2.) Understand common ward placements and how to get around them with champions that you play. Jarvan is a great example of a champion who can bypass wards. Timing wards is also important. If you see when a ward is placed, add three minutes to the current time. If you come back 3 minutes and 5 seconds later you can catch the enemy off guard when the ward goes down. It is even possible to catch people attempting to re-ward.
3.) Learn all jungle paths so you can predict the enemy junglers location. Also understand lane ganking. If their bot lane is pushed to your tower, many times their jungler will sneak into the side brush in order to gank when the lane pushes back out. If you understand this than you can predict their gank and counter it.
4.) Many times, counter ganking is more advantageous than ganking. People tend to overextend when they feel comfortable with their jungle there. Take advantage of this “comfort”.
5.) If a lane is losing extremely hard sometimes you just need to forget about them and help others. There are points in some games where a lane loses so badly that even trying to help them will put your team in a worse spot. Try to snowball the other lanes in order to gain some control back and allow the lane that is “lost” to play passive and minimize damage.
6.) Understand how much damage you can receive and deal. This is the most important part about understanding ganks and counter ganks. Know when you can engage properly and effectively and when to just walk away.
7.) Do your best to not make big mistakes early. Allow the other team to do this and capitalize on that. Early tower dives can lose lanes and snowball into losing the game.
8.) Understand objective control. When junglers gank top this leaves open opportunities to do dragons. Understand where the enemy jungler started and get wards on his buffs for when it respawns. Buffs have a 5 minute timer on them therefore after first clear, whichever buff the jungler began on will respawn around 7:10. Have your lanes push to the enemy towers and rotate to the buffs.
9.) Sneaky ganks are not always necessary. Bum rushing through a lane and just showing lane pressure is effective. This pressure will allow your lanes to farm safer then if you showed no pressure at all.
10.) Always click no. Teams throw all the time. Try to stay positive. You will win more often then you think.
Thanks!
