The jungle is without a doubt one of the more daunting roles to pick up, especially if you're newer to League of Legends. Every other role sits in a single lane for half of the game, making them very easy to pick up. Meanwhile, junglers will have a ton of choices to make while having the responsibility of helping others and securing objectives. My name's Saurabh, and Welcome back to another ModLegends guide. This can definitely be overwhelming, especially if you're a newer player, but jungle is extremely rewarding to play and is one of if not the single best role to carry most games on. You have the ability to single-handedly win the entire map, and believe us when we say it's not nearly as hard as you think it might be.
In this guide, we will simplify jungling so you'll be able to start playing it instantly. Not only that, but we'll cover some of the best strategies you can implement to have success immediately. We'll be covering some of the best starting junglers, how to clear your camps, routes, ganking objectives, and more.
The Ultimate Beginner's JUNGLE Guide for SEASON 14
- Picking a Champion
All right, now, first things first: What champion do you pick? Whatever you enjoy or find interesting. That's always the fastest way to improve. That being said, if you're completely new, then you probably don't know what you even like yet. So here are some recommendations on what you might enjoy:
If you're a tank type of player who likes frontlining for their team, then you should look to pick either Amumu or Rammus. They're both extremely easy-to-play tanks that have tons of crowd control and are very rewarding to play.
If you're more of a fighter and enjoy more brawly type of characters, then we'd recommend either Xin Zhao or Hecarim as easy pickups.
Or if you enjoy looking for solo kills and assassinating targets, then an easy champion to choose is Nocturne. He's probably the simplest assassin in the game to pick up and start dominating with. His long-range engage is extremely effective, especially when you're playing against other beginners.
And if you're concerned that a beginner champion wouldn't be good in this game, don't worry. In League of Legends, a champion being easy does not mean they're any less strong than any other champion. In fact, it's usually the opposite. As a jungler, you'll have to spend a lot of time killing monster camps around the map. These characters have very simple kits that let you do that easily. Likewise, their kits are very straightforward. You will more than likely just run straight at a target and kill them. They are extremely effective for how simple they are to pilot.
- Jungle Pets
Cool, so you picked up your champion. Before loading into a game, make sure you pick the Smite Summoner spell. The game usually does this for you automatically if you choose to Jungle, but just make sure you have it anyways. You literally can't clear the jungle without it. Once you're in-game, this will then let you buy one of three jungle pets. Don't get overwhelmed; these are all exactly the same thing. Which one you pick will change almost nothing in how you play. The difference is a tiny buff they'll give you: blue gives movement speed, red gives a bit of damage, and green gives a shield. Which one you pick is mostly preference, so just mess around with them to see which buff you like the most.
So, what's the actual purpose behind these cute little pets? Well, they're mostly there to help you clear the jungle. As you kill monsters, they will restore your health and mana, which makes it so you don't have to go back to your base all the time. Likewise, they will even deal a bit of damage to the camp as well, speeding up the process. Almost everything the pets do is automatic, so you don't have to think about it. That being said, there is one thing you may want to track: their evolution.
Your pets grow stronger with time. You'll notice the first time you buy one of them that the item will start with 40 charges in your item slots. Whenever you kill a jungle camp, it will feed your pet one stack. Once you get your stacks down to 20, your pet evolves, which upgrades your Smite. Now it's going to do 900 damage to monster camps. Not only that, but you can now use it on enemy champions for a little bit of damage and a slow. Once you get your item to zero stacks, your pet fully evolves. Your monster damage will now cap out at 1,200.
The best part about reaching this point though is that your pet will now give you one of the previous buffs we talked about. This is a pretty big spike in the game for any jungler, so make sure to keep an eye out for when your pet is fully evolving. Finally, don't overthink this mechanic. A lot of players will hear this and think they need to spend the whole game clearing camps to rush these evolutions. If you spend a lot of time not clearing your camps, then you just slowly build up a few treats. This small buff makes it so each jungle camp will give you stacks depending on how many you have. Don't overthink feeding your pets. Play the game as you think you should, and your pets will naturally evolve over time.
- How to Jungle Clear
Okay, we've spent quite a bit of time talking about how you're going to be killing monster camps, so let's discuss how you're going to actually do that. Killing the camps themselves is actually very simple. Some camps have one monster by itself, but some have multiple creatures to kill. Regardless of what type of camp it is, you should always focus fire on the big monster. This is because your jungle pet will automatically deal area of effect damage to the camp as you fight it. It will naturally take care of the little monsters for you while you focus most of your spells and auto attacks on the big one.
Another thing you should look to do is kite between your spells. While everything you have is on cooldown, you can kite the monster around to minimize the damage you take while your spells come back up. You don't have to do this, but it does save you a bit of health in the long run, which can potentially add up over time. And we have an amazing course on our website that will teach you everything you need to clear like a pro if you want to learn more.
Anyways, killing the individual camps is not at all the hard part of jungling. It's really easy to do. The tricky part is knowing the order in which you kill each camp. So let's break down some jungle routes to help get you easily started.
- Beginner Jungle Routes
If you're a complete and total beginner, then we'd recommend going into your settings, go to game, and then check "display recommended jungle path". This setting will use data from the millions of players clearing the jungle on your specific Champion to show you exactly what camps to clear and in what order. At the start of the game, it's honestly pretty decent if you have no idea what you're doing, and it will let you start jungling instantly without any hassle.
That being said, you don't want to rely on that forever. At the very least, you should learn the following beginner routes that are very easy to learn while being quite effective. Okay, so on your side of the jungle, there are six total camps. The map is split down the middle, so there are three camps on each side. To understand your route, you only need to know about two of the camps: the blue Sentinel and the red Brambleback. These two camps give you powerful Buffs that will help you tremendously throughout a game.
The blue Sentinel gives you effectively infinite Mana regeneration and makes your spells come back up a bit faster. The Brambleback will give you red buff, which enhances your auto-attacks. Each auto will apply slow and deal extra damage. Needless to say, these Buffs are very nice, and you'll want to get them in your opening routes. So let's begin with one of the most basic and effective routes: the fast level three.
For this route, you will do blue, the Gromp (which is the fat frog next to it), and the red buff. You can, of course, also do the reverse. The purpose of this route is fairly simple: this gives you the fastest level three in the game while everyone else is still probably level two. This is a very aggressive route. The point is to get on the map as quickly as possible to start fighting and ganking the lanes. By the way, if you're not aware, ganking is the term for when a jungler goes into a lane to kill an enemy laner. This is your second biggest job as a jungler.
There's another quick level three route which simply involves killing one quadrant of your jungle. So you can do either blue, Grump, and wolves, or you can do the red, Krugs, and Raptors. Doing either set of camps will give you level three and let you gank just like your previous route. The only difference is that you only have one of the two powerful Buffs, but that can be okay. One of the more common applications of this route is the following: you can clear one quadrant of the Jungle, then pass through mid lane. You can gank or just apply a bit of pressure. It simply depends on what's happening in that lane. This can be a very smooth transition where you apply pressure but then cleanly re-enter your own jungle to continue clearing camps.
Which brings us to our final beginner route: the full clear. It's exactly what it sounds like. You simply start on one of the Buffs on either side of your jungle, then you kill all the camps in order. This route maximizes the gold and experience you get, earning you a very quick level four. We'll be honest, despite how simple this sounds, it should likely be your default route in most games as a beginner. It's probably the most consistent thing you can do. You still get both Buffs, letting you gank or fight afterwards while also maximizing your own income.
The beginner routes themselves are fairly easy to learn, but we haven't even talked about the most important thing when it comes to your opening route. You always want to think about where you're going to end up. Think about the previous routes like this: in the quick level three route, you start on the top side of the map on Blue, then you end up on the bottom side at Red. In a single quadrant start, you start on top and end in top. In a full clear route, you start in bottom, but you end in top, and so on. This is the important part. You want to pick your route based on where you want to end up, which depends on which lane you want to gank first, which brings us to the biggest issue: you've got to figure out.
- Which Lane to Gank?
How are you even supposed to know who to gank first? There are over 160 unique champions in the game as of now, and that means that the amount of unique matchups possible in a lane are almost endless. Even players who play all day every day don't know how every lane matchup is supposed to go. So how are you, as a new player, supposed to know what lane to pass to and gank?
The answer is actually extremely simple. All League champions can be categorized easily into one of two types: a Champion is either melee or ranged. You don't need to know what half the cast of characters do as long as you figure out which one of these two basic categories they fall under. Here's why: melee Champions have a big problem during the lane phase where they are forced to walk up to kill and last hit minions constantly.
One of the easiest things to look out for when deciding what lane to gank is a melee versus melee matchup. This means that both players will have to walk up to the wave to last hit, which very likely results in constant fighting happening because they have to come face to face with each other all the time. If both sides are constantly fighting, this means they'll either be low on health or in the middle of a fight, making it very likely you score a kill when you pass to these matchups.
On the other hand, if you have two ranged champions in a lane, neither side has to get that close to the wave to farm the minions. These lanes are far less volatile and can be harder to gank. What about when you have a ranged versus melee matchup? Well, in most lanes like this, the range Champion is very likely zoning the melee off last hits and farm while the melee player tries to survive all the harass early on.
Usually, this results in the range player pushing the wave very aggressively towards their opponent's side of the lane. So the answer is simple: if you have the melee teammate versus the enemy ranged one, then you should almost always path towards them. Ranged characters are typically very squishy and have low mobility, so by overextending, they are leaving themselves very vulnerable.
And on the other hand, melee Champions usually have some sort of gap closer or crowd control ability. This makes their follow-up to your gank very effective. Basically, pathing to a lane where you have a melee teammate versus a ranged opponent is very often going to result in a kill.
But what about bot lane? There's like four different champions down there. How do you know what to do then? When looking at a bot matchup, a simple thing to do is to only focus on the support players since both AD carries are typically going to be Marksmen. The way the matchup goes is usually dictated by the support picks. So, in this example, if Nocturne has a Pyke support, that is a melee Champion, versus Yuumi, a ranged Champion, therefore, it made sense to path down there since the enemy lane was likely going to play aggressively and leave themselves vulnerable to a gank.
Again, these guidelines aren't perfect, but they'll give you at least a decent idea for what to do every game. Now that you know how to path early on and which lane to gank.
- Ganking Tips
All that's left is how to actually execute the gank properly to likely score a kill. The first thing you want to look for is pushing waves before heading into a lane. Take a quick look at the state of the wave. If the minion wave is too close to the enemy tower, a gank is very unlikely to work unless your opponent is already low on health. But if the wave is far away from the safety of their tower, then this will obviously be a great opportunity to go in.
The next step is to cut them off. Newer players will instinctively run directly towards their opponent, but this is wrong. When an enemy player sees you come into a lane, they are very likely going to retreat to safety immediately, usually meaning running to their tower. Your goal should be to cut off their escape instead, rather than running directly at them. This will force them to go through you to get to safety, increasing your chances of scoring a kill.
Next up, go into your settings and enable show timestamps. This adds a game timer for when something was said in chat. Flash is a summoner spell that is taken by laners nearly 100% of the time, and it's a great defensive tool to get away from your ganks. When someone escapes you this way, press Tab and left-click their summoner spell. This will time it in the chat. Flash has a 5-minute cooldown, so you will now know the precise timing you have to punish that player for having their flash down.
Finally, while knowing what to do is important, knowing what to avoid as a jungler is often just as, if not more, important. The number one thing to look out for is massive waves. Minions deal insane damage early on in the game. Do not overforce ganks when your teammate is at a big minion deficit, or you run the risk of the gank being turned around. A simple guideline you can follow is that you have to respect big waves early on, but you can start ignoring them at around level six or so, once champions have become much stronger.
Of course, there's more to ganking than we can possibly cover in just one beginner guide. But I try to cover most of it.
- Pathing Tips
Okay, so we've thoroughly covered the early levels at this point. But what about after your first clear? What do you do after level five or so, where the game starts becoming chaotic? You will have so many camps to farm, lanes to gank, objectives to take. How do you possibly know what to do all the time as a jungler?
Well, the single most important thing to jungling properly is learning to be efficient. With so many options available on the map, it's easy to get lost and make decisions that don't get you any kills or farm, causing you to fall very far behind. The solution is simpler than you might think. As you proceed through the game, you want to look to impact areas that are near available jungle camps.
For example, let's say you notice that two of the enemy laners are pushing, the enemy top and bot are both playing very aggressively at the same time. All of your top jungle camps are down, whereas the bottom camps are up. Then your answer would be simple: you would path towards the bottom side of the map, as this gives you more options. By going top, if the gank doesn't work, you've got nothing else to do; you're stuck there with nothing to farm, and you'll be sad. But if you go to the bottom side of the map, even if your gank doesn't work, you've still got camps in the area to farm and keep yourself powering up.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the routes you take will naturally repeat. So often, you'll just be redoing what you've already done in the exact same order. Before we show you what we mean, let's explain something quickly. These symbols on the map over your camps give you very useful information. This symbol means that a camp is alive. If it's this grayed-out hourglass, it means that the camp will spawn in under one minute, and if it's yellow, this means that the camp will spawn shortly in under 10 seconds. If you don't see these icons, you can turn them on by clicking "show neutral camps" in the settings. This sometimes turns off randomly, which confuses newer players, so make sure that it's on.
- Objectives
Moving on to objectives, we're only going to cover the ones you can take by yourself early: dragons, void grubs, and the rift herald. Dragon spawns at 5 minutes and can be one of six different elemental dragons. Killing each gives a different buff. An important thing to note about these is that the buffs they provide are fairly minimal; they matter but not really. The real point of securing dragons is to stack up four, which will give you a massive buff based on the random element that happens in that specific game. So, what does this mean for you? Well, as a jungler, you can secure the dragon by yourself fairly easily after level five on most champions.
We'll talk about when you should do this in a moment, but there's not much to the dragon fight. Just keep hitting it, and it will die. Also, don't worry if the enemy jungler takes a dragon. As we said, the individual buffs are decent but not game-breaking. It's fine to concede one or two.
Up next are void grubs. These cute little guys can sound a bit confusing, so we'll try to break them down as simply as possible. Three of these will spawn in this pit at 5 minutes into the game as well. Killing a void grub will give your team extra damage when hitting towers. These have a respawn timer of 5 minutes after you kill them. The damage they give your team will ramp up based on how many of them you kill. After killing five, your entire team will now begin summoning mites when they attack structures. Five gives you one, and six stacks summon two mites. This is obviously very handy for pushing towers.
Fighting them may seem a bit scary when they spawn a million little monsters to hit you, but your jungle pet takes care of those easily, so don't worry about it. It's important to know that some junglers will struggle to kill all three grubs at the same time. This is because killing a grub will give a shield to the others. This fight can quickly get out of hand and is the only early objective that can be difficult to take. If you feel like you're going to struggle in taking this objective, then keep in mind that you don't have to take all three. Only six grubs can spawn per game, and the big spikes happen around five and six stacks. It is completely acceptable to go to the camp, take a single one, and just leave.
At 14 minutes, if all six grubs haven't been slain, they will despawn, and the Rift Herald, AKA Shelly, will take their place. So how to kill her is actually very simple. Auto attack her down and wait for an eye to open up on her back. The following is extremely easy to time properly. You want to wait for her to auto attack you, then loop around to hit the eye, doing a huge chunk of burst. She'll also occasionally do these huge windup swings. They're very easy to avoid. Just rinse and repeat these steps, and you'll take down Shelly easily.
You then want to pick up her eye she drops, and it will replace your trinket keybind. Now you can summon her anywhere to push a tower automatically for big damage. You can also ride Shelly and crash into towers yourself, dealing a bit of extra damage and summoning some knights.
- When to secure objectives
The objectives themselves are not that complicated, but what can be tricky is when to actually secure them. Many players believe that junglers are solely responsible for every single objective. This is because you have the summoner spell Smite, since it does a crazy high amount of damage to monsters, it's usually on you to get the last hit on the objective when it's being contested to secure it. However, the responsibility is definitely not yours alone. Objectives are, without a doubt, a team effort.
As a jungler, you will without a doubt experience toxicity around this at some point. Pay them no mind, but there are some things you can do to help secure them a little more consistently. A thing many junglers do is start objectives randomly because they feel pressured into doing them. Trying to secure an objective randomly like that is asking to throw the game away. The objectives themselves aren't hard, but they are fairly tanky. It takes around 20 to 30 seconds to do an objective. If an enemy happens to be in the area, they will easily kill you because you're going to be low on health and cooldowns. Not only are you dying for free, but you're also giving away the objective you were trying to take.
As a general rule, always wait to start an objective until you have some sort of advantage over your opponents. You don't need to kill someone to do an objective; just make sure you have some sort of advantage that you can leverage. For example, if all of your teammates are winning and pushing in their lanes, this means they're free to move and help you do the objective.
Another thing to look for is something known as cross-mapping. This simply means when an opponent makes a play on one side of the map, that you do something on the other side of the map. For example, if the enemy jungler gangs your bot lane, you have a momentary advantage on the top side of the map to take the void grubs.
- Invading
And this finally brings us to our final topic: invading your opponents. Obviously, they have their own side of the jungle as well, and you are allowed to go in there and take some of their camps. This is extremely valuable to do if you can do it. Think about it like this: every camp you take is not only an extra camp for you, but you're denying one from your opponent as well. It's effectively double the value for each camp you manage to steal. It's of course risky to do this, so invading will follow the same rules we outlined for objectives. You simply need an advantage to play off of before you ever invade.
The simplest example would be when you're stronger than your opponent. If you feel confident in your ability to duel them, then go fight them in their jungle to take their camps. The same rules we covered for objectives also apply here. If you have a numbers advantage in the area, then that's a great time to invade. Or if you see the enemy jungler gank your top laner, then you can cross-map and invade their bottom side jungle to take those camps.
Like we said, it's the same rules as before. Just make sure you have some sort of advantage before doing a risky invade.
Conclusion
Mastering the jungle role in League of Legends is a rewarding journey that requires patience, strategy, and adaptability. By following these fundamental tips and strategies, you can confidently navigate the complexities of the jungle, exerting influence across the map and leading your team to victory. Alright, and that will wrap things up here at ModLegends. Want to thank you for reading, and we'll catch you in the next one.
FAQs
How do I decide which jungle route to take?
Consider your champion's strengths, team composition, and potential gank opportunities when choosing your jungle route.
What should I do if my gank fails?
Prioritize farm efficiency and map control, regrouping for future gank opportunities while maintaining vision and objective pressure.
When should I prioritize securing objectives?
Coordinate with your team to secure objectives based on strategic importance and map pressure, prioritizing opportunities that offer significant buffs or map control.
How do I track enemy summoner spell cooldowns?
Enable timestamps in your settings and track enemy summoner spells through chat notifications, allowing you to capitalize on opportunities when opponents' key abilities are on cooldown.
What should I do if I fall behind in the jungle?
Focus on farm efficiency, vision control, and team coordination to regain momentum, prioritizing objectives and opportunities to catch up in experience and gold.