If the gold advantage the jungler over the other roles lasted for 7 to 10 minutes, it seems that the XP advantage closes much more rapidly for the solo lanes, while existing nearly indefinitely for the duo lane. Indeed, the XP gap with mid closes nearly immediately (ahead for 1 minute), while the gap top lasts just a tad longer (2 mins). This means that except for a cheesy gank at minute 3, the midlane will always hold an XP advantage against the jungler. On the other hand, there is a 2 minute window during which the toplaner is behind in XP on the jungler, which coincidentally closes about 30s after the jungler has finished his first jungle clear (for meta jungling champions), and makes the toplane a great target for a first gank. On the other hand, there is no XP pressure on the jungler to gank bot, which means that the jungler can use more opportunistic strategies for the botlane compared to the toplane.

Total Gold per Level

We’ve seen what the gold and XP progression were. We can now combine them to see how much gold should one expect when reaching a certain level.

Average Total Gold when reaching level X (level 10–11 were not included for support and ADC as they happen after 20')

This table is particularly useful for Theorycraft, as it gives you a reasonable piggy bank size for your builds. And, as anyone can see, there are massive differences in terms of how much gold you can expect from each role, with the poorest role for each level being the solo lanes. This is naturally due to the fact that they are faster at gaining levels than the other roles and have therefore less time to accrue gold.

Cost of Idleness

This section aims at answering the question of the cost of a gank. This is slightly more iffy than the rest, because it relies a bit more on derived data. We’ll suppose that a gank intervention lasts 15 seconds — including time to walk to the lane, which is on the lower end of the spectrum in my opinion. If a gank succeeds, the rewards are obvious, +300g for the killer, plus some gold for the assisting participants, and some XP. If a gank fails, with one of the gankers getting killed instead, the cost is also obvious. However, if a gank simply fizzles out, where the jungler comes, waits a few seconds, and then leaves, how much was lost?

Note that if you believe the average time taken by a gank is closer to 30s, you can simply double the calculated cost that we’ll expand on below.

XP Cost of Idleness

The first metric we’ll look at is the XP cost of idleness. To represent that, we could just graph 0.25 * XPPM / TotalXP for each role, which would give us how much XP we lost (or more accurately didn’t gain) during the 15 seconds. However, we, as players, are not used to manipulating raw XP values. So we converted the TotalXP into the corresponding level for each minute, and then calculated how much of the XP needed to reach the next level did 0.25 * XPPM represent.