We’ve all been in games that quickly became a total disaster. Games where the enemy Yasuo finds five kills in as many minutes. Games where your bottom lane gets double killed the moment the enemy lane hits level two. It’s normal. It happens to us all. And because it happens to us all, we all know who’s to blame for it.
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The jungler, of course!
Wrong.
Despite what everyone seems to think, the jungler’s role is not to camp your lane. In fact, the jungler’s role isn’t to camp any lane whatsoever. The role of a jungler is to apply pressure around the map, and there are more ways to do that than ganks that might or might not yield anything.
Jungling has often been compared to playing a game of Chess against the enemy team, and it’s a very fair comparison. Chess is a game that asks a player to juggle quite a bit of information and make snap decisions that will have an impact ten moves down the line. Jungling is no different from that. Junglers make decisions that will impact the flow of the game from the moment they step onto Summoner’s Rift. Don’t believe me? Consider the last time you saw a jungler gank the top lane first when they started on that side of the map. The very first decision a jungler need to make is where they’ll start and end their first jungle clear, and that decision usually dictates which enemy lane they’ll gank first.
But ganking isn’t the whole equation. There’s a very good reason why early game ganks are far less frequent in professional level play than they are in Gold solo queue. That reason is information. Getting counterganked is a death sentence for most junglers, especially if the counterganking jungler had time to plan their approach ahead of time. Information is the commodity that junglers live or die by, and it’s not one that you can earn simply by running out of the tribush and hoping for the best. If a jungler wants to succeed in a gank they need to ensure that they haven’t been caught by enemy vision and that they themselves have some idea of where the enemy jungler is. Failing to do this can result in catastrophe.
Furthermore, there’s an entire class of jungler that isn’t intended to gank whatsoever. The highest win rate jungler in the game at the moment is Nunu, and you don’t gank lanes with Nunu. Control junglers, of which Nunu is one, don’t focus on ganking lanes at all, and instead, rely on their laners to not die while they attack the enemy jungler. Laners might not understand just how devastating having your second Raptor camp stole can be, but junglers understand that having a couple camps poached can easily result in a multiple level deficit.
To summarize: junglers are not gank bots. Junglers are responsible for getting early vision, for reading the moves of the enemy jungler in order to warn lanes of potential ganks, for controlling neutral objectives, for farming jungle camps to keep up in experience, and finally for ganking. All of those things are equally important, and focusing too much on any one of them is a mistake including ganking. I’m not defending the jungle who sits in the jungle and gets more CS than his laners while ignoring the fact that the enemy jungler is tearing the map apart. Farming to excess is just as bad as ganking to excess. Just remember the next time that you complain about your jungler not ganking your lane that your jungler is almost certainly doing something, and odds are that something is just as important.
