We all know laners need help from time to time, to either snowball or to catch up to prevent being snowballed. That's where a jungler comes in handy. The jungler can help out by ganking, and if the gank was successful, you can set pressure on the lane and possibly destroy their turret. But as a jungler you have things to worry about yourself, meaning anything from jungle camps to Dragon/Baron, and that's where this quick guide comes becomes quite useful.





Champion Select

The choices you make in Champion Select could really affect the whole game's outcome, subsequently you should think carefully of which champions would work best with your other teammates choices and best against the enemy's choice of champions. Still you should try to select a champion you're comfortable with, it's quite a big risk to just pick a champion because it fits your team composition or counters theirs. As a jungler, having a quite big champion pool is useful, else (as stated before) your choice might not work out when looking at the rest of your teammates choices.

Early game

The usual jungle path nowadays is either:

Golems -> Red (-> Raptors) -> Wolves/Blue -> Gromp -> Top/Mid gank Gromp -> Blue (-> Wolves) -> Raptors/Red -> Golems -> Bot/Mid gank

Of course there are 'basic' jungle paths, there are way more, some including the ability to gank your top/mid laner at level 2-3, but let's go for the safe pathing to secure the possibility to help out your teammates. As for items, depending on what kind of champion you're playing (Assassin/Bruiser/Mage/Tank), there are different core jungle items to build, you should get those first, with the possibility of buying boots to be mobile.

The most common gank nowadays is the level 3 gank right after getting both Blue and Red buff, with even a chance of both junglers meeting each other on their way toplane, so be careful and warn your toplaner. If you feel like the enemy jungler might counter-jungle you, place wards around the buffs/camps you're about to take, to prevent possibly smite-stealing or even enemies collapsing on you, giving them an easy early game kill.





Timers

As for buffs, well...there are buff times when pressing TAB, so use them and plan ahead on where you're going to farm up or gank next. Don't forget when holding TAB you can now simply click on a buff/Dragon/Baron and the remaining time for it to spawn will appear in your team's chat.

Either way here are the jungle objectives and their timers:

Blue/Red buff: Spawns at 1:40 - takes 5 minutes to respawn

Dragon (Cloud/Infernal/Ocean/Mountain): Spawns at 1:40 - takes 6 minutes to respawn

(Elemental Dragon: Spawns after the 35 minute mark when no remaining Cloud/Infernal/Ocean/Mountain Dragon alive)

Rift Herald: Spawns at 6:00 - doesn't respawn, despawns after the 19:45 mark if not in combat (19:55 if in combat)

Baron: Spawns at 20:00 - takes 7 minutes to respawn

Smite: This isn't an objective but it is still something you have to time perfectly in order to secure buffs like Dragon or Baron. It wouldn't be any good if the enemy jungler were to steal those from you. It could literally turn the game around if you were ahead, or drag you down further if you were already behind.

Objective control

Even as a jungler, you should be warding anything from bushes to jungle camps and don't forget Dragon/Baron. Since you know the timers and therefore know when certain objectives are going to spawn, try to get there ahead of time and ward that area 20-30 seconds before it spawns. Tell your team about it too, in case they don't know. You can't be everywhere, so if you're ganking toplane for example, ask if mid or bot could possibly ward around Dragon if it's spawning soon. You can't always be around upcoming objectives, although you should try to as much as you can.





Mid/Late game

At this point of time you don't really focus on killing jungle camps anymore (besides possibly Blue/Red, which you usually hand over to your midlaner/ADC). You should instead be focused on trying to teamfight and end the game. Having Dragon(s) and/or Baron buff can really help the team out, that's why keeping an eye on its spawn time is important. The chance of teamfights happening around Dragon or Baron is going to increase greatly. In teamfights itself, it depends on what kind of champion you picked, but unless you're a Mage/Assassin, you should probably be peeling for your ADC.



Plan ahead and push out botlane if Baron is spawning soon. It will make the enemy team have to send people to push it back, which greatly increases your chance of getting Baron, or having an advantageous teamfight (5v4, 5v3, ...). Same goes for Dragon, but push out toplane instead. After winning a teamfight you can simply push out mid or go for Dragon or possibly even Baron.





I hope this guide helps with your endeavors while jungling and no matter what happens, always try your hardest because that's what matters in the end! Good luck!

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