Why League of Legends' Gold Funneling Strategy Is Getting Nerfed

The gold funneling meta in League of Legends doesn't appear to have much life left in it with Riot Games planning to nerf the strategy and explaining why it's doing so.

A strategy that's been seen lately in professional games and trickled down to normal play, gold funneling involves choosing a champion with hypercarry potential and having the team revolve around them. While comparisons have been drawn to the "protect the Kog'Maw" compositions, this type of gold funneling usually ends up in the rest of a team outside of the chosen champion becoming far less relevant as they give up their resources to bolster the one player. It stagnates lanes and takes other players out of the equation, and that's exactly why Riot's nerfing it.

Riot Games shared an update several days ago with an announcement that gold funneling strategies would be taking a hit. Targeting junglers who take lane farm and laners who take a jungle item first to dip into the neutral farm every now and then, Riot proposed a temporary solution that involves "heavily reduced gold from lane minions if you have a T1 or T2 jungle item and have the most gold on your team." Now, Riot Meddler explains in greater detail why gold funneling is getting nerfed.

"We're hitting funneling because of what it does to both early game interaction and power curves," Riot Meddler said. "It certainly creates some interesting variety of team comps and strategy. It does so by turning mid lane into a low interaction position though, instead of a really active one and by pushing a lot more gold onto champs than they've been balanced around. In some cases that holds up fine, in others it removes too much counterplay from playing against them."

Bot lane is one area where gold's been funneled for quite a while now regardless of whether you have a bruiser, mage, or traditional marksman in the lane. Four or five-man fiestas often happen down there to make sure the damage dealers can get the gold they need, but Riot Meddler said that funneling gold into those champs is a bit different.

"While in both cases there are two champs on one team, with one of them taking all the farm, things are noticeably different. In bot it's one champ getting all of one gold stream, rather than pushing two gold streams onto a single champ. Additionally bot lane still has a lot of interaction going on, with both sides trading/harassing and at least one side generally looking for kill opportunities."

The gold funneling nerfs are scheduled to be implemented in Patch 8.14.