Hi everyone! This is my jungle guide, updated to preseason! I appreciate all criticism, so any that you might leave is really appreciated.

Jungling is an extremely important role on the rift. It may seem very daunting to most people, and when you get filled to the role, you may do badly, and get flamed non-stop. Other times you may pop off and do well. Other times, your game may just be mediocre and boring because nothing happens. Or, you may be wanting to main this role, and be totally unaware of all the information and techniques you can learn to pop off really hard. And quite frankly, jungling is a role that needs experience more than mechanics, and if you’re just starting to play League of Legends, I don’t recommend starting in the jungle.

Quick question, do you know how to cs? Great. By the way, you don’t need to do that in the jungle. Did you learn how to kite? If yes, good. If not, that's okay, but it really helps you speed up your clear. I’ll be introducing a lot of things to you that you may have never done before, like ganking, counterjungling, first clears, objective priority, and camping. Are you ready to get flamed 'n' blamed? Yes? Then let’s begin.

P.S.A: /mute all will be your best friend in the jungle. In my experience, when something goes wrong your team will find a way to blame anyone else save themselves, and a lot of the time that just happens to be the jungler, unfortunately. To save your mental health, I suggest muting everyone and their pings at lower ranks, and leaving their pings unmuted the higher rank you get, unless they're griefing you with them.

Your first clear is exactly that. The first clear of all your jungle camps. Since you are in the jungle, you don’t get to kill minions, and you have a set of 6 different “camps”. These camps respawn at set intervals, and we will cover pathing in a later chapter. Your camps are your two buffs, your Brambleback and your Sentinel, colloquially called red and blue buffs respectively. On red side, you have your Raptors, called by some the Chickens, and your Krugs. On blue side, you have your Gromp, and your wolves. And in the river between each side, there is something known as the Rift Scuttler, also known simply as The Crab. Since patch 8.10, only one crab will spawn at a time once both crabs have been killed, making them a hotly contested resource.

You want your first clear to be efficient, fast, and healthy. Often, you will get a “leash” from your lanes. A leash is when some of your teammates help you to clear your first buff. Depending where you start, it might be from your top lane, or your bottom lane. This will make your clear much healthier and give you something like a boost at the start like you see in some racing games. This however doesn’t necessarily mean that you will clear faster than the other jungler. Some junglers like Camille, Xin Zhao, Pantheon and Udyr have strong level 2 dueling potential, so they want to start ganking as soon as possible after clearing one or two camps. A gank is when a teammate, usually the jungler, comes to give a particular teammate a number advantage in lane, or to match an opponent's gank, in whats called a countergank. This will be covered in more depth later on in the guide. Other junglers want to farm up for higher levels because their early power isn't too strong. Junglers like these include the likes of Shyvana, Fiddlesticks, Evelynn and Zac. These junglers tend to have much later gank times, so your first clear is important here. Theyre often known as "Level 6 junglers" because that's their first major powerspike.

An advantage to having an efficient first clear is that you can gank right after your first clear if your champion is the type that has a strong level 2 or 3 gank. Most games, lanes will push a certain way right from the start. That’s why it’s important to know lane matchups, which we will talk about in a later chapter. Because you have a healthy clear, you can now easily gank your first lane. This will often come after you take a Rift Scuttler, if its still there. This lane will often be a side lane, and less commonly, mid lane. Knowing which lane to gank is also reliant on your map awareness, another thing we will talk about later.

During your first clear, you are usually pretty weak. Most junglers tend not be very strong level 1, and often get a “leash” from their teammates in a side lane. This just means that the laners help kill the first camp so you can level up. However, most junglers don’t actually need a leash to clear the first camp. Now you may be thinking, “what are you going on about? I’ll just die to my buffs!” And you’re right, if you don’t “kite” properly. This isn't exactly necessary, seeing as some champs want to be low health in the jungle, namely Olaf, who's passive makes him stronger at low healths. “Kiting” refers to attacking your camp then walking away from it so it follows you. When the camp is running at you, it can’t attack you, while your ability timers are cooling down.

For example, Hecarim doesn’t need a leash to do a full clear with nearly full health the full time. Hecarim needed to start blue because his mana costs were ridiculous, but he’s been helped with the 8.10 jungle changes to the Hunter’s Talisman. This means that Hecarim can actually start on red side without a leash now. If Hecarim stands in front of the blue buff autoattacking it like a dodo and lets it hit him, he’ll never be able to get a full clear done. What the Hecarim does to avoid damage is he “autos” the camp, and q’s it, and walks away towards the river while the camp follows him. This means that his q gets cooled down and the buff isn’t attacking him. If he does this effectively (keep in mind this is ridiculously hard to do and takes practice), Hecarim can do a full clear at around 3:30, with full health, and Level 4 and ready to gank.

Along with kiting effectively, you also need to use your abilities intelligently to heal up when you can. Kayn’s e, for example, lets him go through walls and heals Kayn for a certain amount. This effect is manifold as it decreases his clear time and gives him “sustain”. Master Yi’s q lets him dodge attacks from buffs while his w lets him heal for a certain amount. Udyr has an ability that lets him heal when he attacks, every 3rd attack, along with an ability that stuns buffs when he attacks them. Xin Zhao heals himself a small amount every third auto, so auto resets with his q are very important. Using these abilities along with kiting means that you can be much more oppressive towards the enemy, and make your presence known much earlier.

IM CURRENTLY EDITING FROM THIS POINT ONWARDS... THIS IS A NOTE TO MYSELF!

I won’t say much on this topic because paths throughout the game are so nuanced and multifarious that it would be pointless for me to try and list all the possible ways to go about getting strong in the jungle. What you do want to do is you want to make sure your pathing is efficient. That means not spending too much time walking from camp to camp. This means taking the shortest route possible when doing your full clear. For example, say you just got a double kill bot lane, and you still have full health because you read my guide. It would be a waste to just recall on full health unless you have an overabundance of gold, so you go take blue -> gromp -> wolves -> chickens -> red and then maybe krugs. In other words, you want to spend the least amount of time getting as strong as possible.

Another huge part of jungling is performing what are known as “ganks”. To gank a lane is to attack it. That’s it. When you gank a lane, you go with goals. You want to try and get a kill onto the enemy, you want them to burn their summoner spells, or you want to secure an objective like a tower, dragon, or a Rift Herald. As a jungler, you also need to know the priority of the objectives, which we will talk about later. As a jungler ganking a lane, you must be aware of your laner’s cooldowns. Often I’ve tried to gank a lane while ignoring the fact that my laners weren’t prepared to go all in. Again, other times, I’ve had phenomenal ganks wherein my laners were ready for the gank and they used all the cooldowns to win the skirmish, which we followed up with an objective.

Certain champions have very flexible gank paths, as many of them can go over walls to come at the enemy from unexpected directions. For example, Kayn can gank while simply ignoring walls. Shaco can q over walls and backstab you when you least expect it because he’s invisible. So can Kha’Zix, who can, like Rengar, jump on you from a million clicks away while being invisible. This means that you have to think about where you want to attack the enemy from. Are you going to attack them from the back while your laner attacks them from the front? Are you going to simply run up at them from behind your laner and kill them before they react?

Some common gank pathing going to toplane from blue side are from the river, a lane gank, and from the tribush near their tower. Common paths to gank mid from blue side are from the river on either side, and from the jungle beside the towers on either side of the map. Thee sort of ganks are best made when your enemy has been baited into using their spells with long cooldowns on your ally. From bot lane, common ganks are essentially the same as for toplane ganks, except reversed. Other junglers like Kayn (really just Kayn) can ignore these paths and gank right from the walls. He can gank from tribush into the wall and out onto the enemy in both top lane and bottom lane, can gank through the other tribush into the wall onto the enemy in both toplane and bottom lane, and through any of the walls in the midlane.

The best times to gank are when you know you can secure an advantage over the enemy that you’re ganking. Some of these opportunities include when your ultimate is ready, when your allies’ ultimate is ready, when you’ve roamed down to a lane with your support or midlaner, or when your laners have forced the enemy to use their summoner spells. The next best opportunity is when the enemy has used their dash/escape without knowing that you’re there. The easiest times to gank a lane are when they’re pushing towards your tower, or you have an ability that can pull them away from their tower.

Other times, ganking a lane is rather hard, as the enemy has protected themselves well. As a jungler, you also want to keep in mind where the minion wave is. I like to call this the wave advantage, because with the season 8 changes to minions and minion aggro mean that you can take a lot of damage from minions if you fight the enemy when they’re in their lane.

Often as a jungler you will be ganking a lane to secure an objective, or to countergank. Other times that you should gank are when the enemy laner is exerting some serious pressure on your teammate. It is in the best interests of the team that you help your teammate relieve some of that pressure. Having pressure like that, especially in the midlane, means that the midlaner can roam, which can lead to a 4v2 in the bottom lane. This is something that you want to avoid, so your job as a jungler is to occasionally remove some pressure on your laners.

Another time you’d step into a lane is when your teammate has recalled to buy and the minions are hitting the tower. You should see this and think of 2 things. First, where’s their mid? The second is to not let all that experience and gold go to waste. This is called holding a lane, and this has a few purposes. The first is that you force the enemy laner to stay in their lane to avoid losing too much experience, and second is that you make the team stronger by absorbing gold and levels that would otherwise be lost.

This is an actual strategy that usually works. What you’re doing is setting up a “camp”, where you repeatedly gank a single lane while leaving the others to their own devices. What this tends to do is it sets your laners ahead while stopping the enemy from getting stronger. This should only be done in two situations. They are if you have a carry that needs to get ahead, or they have a carry that needs to be set behind. Lets take for example a Nasus vs a Darius in the top lane. As you should know, they are both hard scaling monsters with insane amounts of damage. However, the Darius will win the early matchup nearly every time. To help the Nasus out, you want to stick around the top lane and not let it get too fed. We could also look at the mid lane, where we have a Yasuo vs Zed matchup. Your teammate is the Yasuo, and he’s doing okay against the Zed, but he could use a little help to get ahead. You’d repeatedly gank that lane until the Yasuo can get ahead while simultaneously setting the Zed further and further behind.

Sometimes if your allied laners are skilled, they’ll roam around the map. Often this will be your midlaner or your support, but it might be your toplaner as well. If you notice that a laner is going for a roam, you usually want to be there with them. This is because you want to be able to exert every advantage you can over the enemy. Other times you want to be pushing a lane into a tower or stopping the enemy from following the roam. For example, if Aurelion Sol is roaming down to the bottom lane, either you want to be going with him or you want to be stopping the enemy Galio from being able to use his ultimate. The reason you’d go down with your midlaner is if you know that their jungler is on that side of the map. You’d stay and shove the lane if you know that their jungler is on the other side of the map. An added benefit to staying in lane while your laner is roaming is that you can coutergank top if they need it.

Sometimes you need to push down a tower to secure an advantage or even just advance the game. You’re pretty sure you can kill them; the only problem is taking turret aggro. Turret aggro increases with each shot onto you and you only get it after you damage an enemy under tower. The only problem is that this tower needs to go down so you can create pressure and the enemy won’t let you attack the tower. What’s the solution? Ki
ll the enemy under tower and lose the aggro fast.

The best way to do this is to not let the ADC take any aggro, let the support engage, and the jungler or the one who roamed output constant damage. You should also try and clear their minion wave under tower and have the wave advantage before you start a dive. Often a tower dive will lead to the tower falling because the rest of the team is unprepared to deal with the dive because of inadequate wards.

If you’ve ever played jungle, and you found that your buffs or your camps were missing, then the enemy has been counterjungling you. There are several purposes to this, but the main purposes are to set yourself ahead while simultaneously setting your enemy behind. When you do this, you want to make sure that either a) you can kill the enemy or b) you remain undetected. An easy way to do this is by having a sweeper’s lens, which recently became available from level 1.

Another way to check is to hit the scryer’s bloom, which reveals stealthed enemies and wards. The most valuable things to counterjungle are the camps that take the least amount of time, and that give the most amount of gold and experience. You want to keep a special watch on the chickens and the buffs. They are the most valuable for the time you put in. Sometimes you want to call for help from your laners, mainly when you’re trying to secure a buff and you know that the enemy will be going there.

When you counterjungle, you want to do the camps as fast as you can to avoid confrontation. I’ve played games where I was set behind by an invade (gave up first blood) and I ended with a 4 level lead on the enemy jungler. I did this through careful counterjungling and making sure that I took fights that I could win for sure.

If you want to define counterjungling in its purest of terms, it would be defined as stealing the enemy’s farm. By that same definition, invades are counterjungling so your first opportunity to couterjungle is level one for an invade. You want to be careful, because if you fail somewhere your whole team might die. Which is not good. During your level one invade, you want to try and get a kill. However, if you don’t, it’s okay, you get their buff.

Other times when you can counterjungle is when you see where their jungler is. If they show their face in a lane and you can’t get there in time, go take their jungle. Any time you know where they are, punish them for it. If you see them clearing their topside jungle, go take their bottom. If you see them bottom, go take their top. If they gank a lane, go take their jungle. Basically, punish them for playing the game. If they step onto the rift against you, punish them for it.

There are many buffs in game, and of course, some have priorities over others. In terms of pure buffs, it goes a little something like this: 2nd Elder Dragon > Baron Nashor > Elder Dragon > Elemental Drakes > buffs. Of course, the drakes’ priority is situational, but most often infernal drake is coveted most for the extra damage. However, think about this. In the toplane, it’s a sustain battle. Often, the one who backs first will return with massive losses. So, what if they had some extra health regeneration? Wouldn’t that give them an advantage over the enemy? This is where an ocean drake would be really helpful. A mountain drake would help you take down towers, Baron, inhibitors and other dragons faster. An air drake would help you move faster out of combat. That’s why you want to not give up any drakes because “they’re not infernal drakes so they don’t matter.” Also, when taking any of these buffs, you get a gold advantage. Why would you give that up? That’s why you want to secure every buff that you can.

If you’ve ever watched a high-ELO jungler’s stream, or you’ve ever seen pro play, you’ll sometimes see the midlaner getting the blue buff. The reason this is done is manifold. One reason is to increase pressure on the enemy. If your team can out-sustain the enemy, you get advantages just from that. The extra mana that a blue buff on your mid could mean more poke onto the enemy. It could also mean a successful roam onto another lane because your mid will have more mana than he might usually. However, this is a buff. Earlier I talked about not wanting to give up any buffs. This includes the blue and red buffs. This means that if your teammate is behind, and getting solo killed often, and he pings for blue, you shouldn’t give it to them. They are likely to die and give over the buff, which would mean that the enemy now has your buff.

Next, your ADC and the red is much of the same concept. If your ADC can get that little bit of extra damage out in the next teamfight or skirmish, you should give it to them. However, much in the same way of protecting your blue buff against an incompetent mid, you want to protect your red from a useless AD. In that case, it may be more useful to give your red over to an assassin midlaner or a fed bruiser top. In the end, you are in control over who gets the buffs, so you should be doing this intelligently and to the benefit of your team.

I want you to imagine this. You’re out in the jungle, hunting a rare prize, the final trophy for your collection. The last time you found your prey, it took out your eye. To make thinks worse, your prey can make themselves invisible. Wouldn’t you want to know where your prey is, even if you can’t see them? Of course, Rengar would too, and that’s why he uses wards. However, the wards aren’t always used to spot the enemy.

In all honesty, you shouldn’t be using wards to spot the enemy itself. Instead, you should be warding to find where the enemy has been, and where he will go next. It’s also possible to guess about where the enemy has been by counting his CS and seeing which buffs he has. If he has 8 CS and 2 buffs, he went buff to buff. If he has 8 CS and one buff, he did buff-camp. If he has 12 CS, he’s likely done a scuttle crab. If he has 16, he has level 3, and has done either a full side clear and a scuttle, or 2 buffs and 2 camps.

You don’t really need to ward the entrance of your lanes, like your river or the tribush to know where the enemy is. This really won’t tell you much information other than where the enemy will be ganking from. What you want to ward are his camps. You want to drop that ward at the camps the enemies will take the most. This means you want to ward on red side the bush by raptors and red buff, or if you can’t that ward, you want to drop it so you can see the raptor camp. On the blue side, you want to ward at the center of the jungle, where you can see gromp, blue, and see the area in front of the wolves.

If your laners have any degree of competency, they should be doing this on their own, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably bronze. That means you must do the dirty work. If you get the rare knowledgeable teammate, they’ll be doing this work as well. This means that you have wards free to ward other places, like the bushes where the enemy is likely to gank from.While I tell you to ward the enemy’s jungle, you must keep in mind that you also need to ward the entrances to your own jungle to protect yourself from counterjungling. You also need to ward objectives like dragons and Baron Nashor.

At a certain point in the game, you really don’t need to watch your own clear all that much, unless you think that a fight will happen over your buffs. That’s why you want to be glancing at the map every few seconds. This will let you notice so much more. If you use your wards effectively to track the enemy, you’ll start to notice that their camps are disappearing, and sometimes you’ll see the enemy path through and you’ll catch sight of them. This gives you the opportunity to notify your teammates of danger, and lets you be ready to counter their every move.
If for example you have an Olaf clearing his blue side and because of a good ward he notices that the enemy Graves is finishing off his raptors and looks like he’ll gank mid, the Olaf can alert his team, and move to counter the enemies move. This may mean setting up a countergank, or initiating a fight in the river or jungle with the preliminary knowledge the mid and jungle pair have.

Keeping your eyes on the map can also give you accurate respawn timers for jungle camps which you can exploit. This means counterjungling the camps that respawn while knowing that the enemy is on the other side of the map. This information can also lead to you knowing that an enemy is attempting to start an objective and can set you up for a steal once you know how fast the objective’s health is dropping.

One of the most hyped up plays a jungler can make is a Baron steal. If you’ve ever watched an LCS game, if someone like Xmithie or Akaadian makes a steal, the shoutcasters are positively creaming themselves with excitement. This play is largely centered on the element of surprise and knowing all the participants’ damage. Take for example a Kha’Zix having brief vision of a rapidly falling Baron. He knows he can steal it, and estimates when the baron will be low enough for him to smite it. The only reason that this even can happen is because your team’s jungler (you) is surprised, or not smiting as soon as you can. When you’re stealing, you actually want to go in a little ahead of when you can smite it to make the baron drop slightly faster than expected so you can get the upper hand your smite timing. When you go in, if you have any crowd control, apply it ASAP onto the enemy jungler so that they don’t have a smite to contest with you.

If a Sejuani q’d into the Baron pit with her ult ready, she should immediately use it to stun the enemy jungler. This allows Sejuani to drop the baron to a suitable level and then smite it to steal it.

The timing for entering the Baron or Dragon pit will be slightly different based on the champion you’re playing. If you happen to be playing a tank, you have more leeway as to when you can enter the pit, whereas if you’re playing an assassin, you have very little opportunity to safely get into the pit before you get blown up. This usually ends up being a suicidal mission, as you tend to use up your only dash or flash to get into the pit. Left with no escapes, you’re stuck with 5 enemies that have just been stolen from. You usually die. But it’s all for the good of the team.

Throughout your typical game of League of Legends™ your objectives should and will change based on the state of the game. Generally, you should focus on objectives in this order:
 2nd elder
 baron
 inhibs
 1st elder
 inhib towers
 inner towers
 fire/mountain drake (or ocean in early game)
 outer towers
 cloud/late game ocean drake
 scuttle
 buff camps
 other jungle camps
After a good fight, especially in the late game, you want to try and take objectives closest to their base, and then take objectives further away. For example, you ace their team at 35 minutes, their death timers are 40 seconds or so. You have some choices now. First is going straight to Baron and then recalling. The second option is taking their inhibitor and then taking Baron as well before recalling. You have given yourself a large advantage, because after taking an inhibitor, super minions start to spawn, and if you have baron along with that, it should be enough to win the game. However, if you only can take one, take the one with the higher priority, as outlined by that list. Some of you may be confused at the fact that ocean drake is so high up on the list: Ocean drake is there because it gives your teammates much needed sustain. In toplane, you want to take the least amount of damage while forcing your opponent to recall. With the passive health regen ocean gives you, it helps them just a little bit more.

The reason you’d take 2nd Elder Dragon over Baron is because 2nd Elder gives you so much more. For comparison, taken directly from the League of Legends wiki page:
“Empowered aspect of the dragon: Basic attacks burn the target for 135 + (90 per Elemental Dragon Slain) bonus true damage over 3 seconds. Also increases the strength of all Dragon Slayer buffs by 100%.”

Compared to the buff Baron gives you:
“Hand of Baron: Grants Empowered Recall, 24 - 48 (based on minutes) bonus attack damage and 40 - 80 (based on minutes) ability power and nearby allied minions are greatly empowered.”
Anyone can see that the Empowered aspect of the dragon is much more valuable.

You want to be ready to take an objective around 30 seconds before it spawns. That means your team being in the area, having vision of the surrounding area, having smite ready to secure the objective, knowing where your opponents are, and clearing the enemy’s vision of the objective. Say for sake of argument an infernal drake is spawning. You know its spawning because you’re checking the scoreboard for timers. Around 30 seconds before it spawns, you’re there with at least one other person (unless you know where their jungler is and you can take the objective solo), and you’ve used your pink ward to remove their vision.

Being prepared to take an objective means not being dead. If you die, there’s no chance to secure an objective.

I want to thank Max and Hohak for giving me feedback during the first few drafts of my guide. You can check out my Kayn guide here. Have a nice day!