Riot Games Wants to Make These League of Legends Champs More Viable in the Jungle

Though League of Legends players could of course take any champion they want into the jungle to try and make it work, only a handful of champs can be the most viable picks at any given time. When Patch 10.4 releases, however, players may end up seeing a few new contenders looking for a place in the jungle. Riot Games said this week that it wants to expand the pool of junglers by changing five different champs in ways that'll help them in that role without making them overpowered where you'd expect to find them.

The plans for widening the jungle pool were outlined in a weekly evaluation on the state of League's gameplay from Riot Scruffy, the lead gameplay designer. The designer began the conversation by highlighting a problem Riot has been faced with recently: Players in lower ranks don't really like playing in the jungle regardless of how important the role might be in the meta.

"When we're digging into our results and follow ups from this year's preseason, we were really struck by a problem in the Jungle role that we'd never been able to fix - throughout League's entire history, low Elo players have preferred the jungle position least of all 5 positions, regardless of whether jungle is strong or weak relative to the other 4 positions," Riot Scruffy said.

Plans for fixing that problem will include both short and long-term changes, and those that'll happen more immediately include making a selection of champs more viable in the jungle so that anyone who plays them can try and pick them up in the role. Those champions are Garen, Diana, Zed, Talon, and Darius.

"We think this will take a variety of changes to fix in the long term, but we want to also do some short-term work to improve jungle appeal," Riot Scruffy said. "In 10.4 we're going to try adding a handful of champs that we (and you) love into the jungle pool. We'd be doing very focused changes that buff these champs' jungle clears but leave their lanes unchanged."

Details on how the champions might be changed were only provided for Garen. The post explained that some "light changes" will be made so that bruiser items are more viable than just those that provide extra attack speed.

Patch 10.3 just came out recently, so we'll have to wait until either the next set of patch notes or another one of these gameplay evaluations to see more specific plans.