Five useful Jungle Tips

I see all these tips about specific champions but not for the roles themselves. I'm a Plat 1 Jungle Main and I figure that I would share some tips to those who are picking up the role recently, trying to improve in jungle, or are struggling with the role if being forced onto it with hardly any experience.

-1. Holding Mid Lane.

This tip is actually a very important tip as a jungler believe it or not. When you see your ally mid lane going back and the enemy mid lane is pushing out the wave to the turret, you want to soak up the minions that your ally mid laner cannot get. This way, you stay ahead in gold and xp since the new jungle is a little harsh on both those categories.

-2. Respect the enemy solo laners.

They WILL be ahead of you by one or two levels mid-game (unless you got insanely fed within the first 8-10 minutes of the game), and WILL be ahead of you in items. Learn to respect their power spikes and their damage, because they WILL be beating you in a duel unless they are low/out of mana.

-3. Be smart with your item build.

This tip may sound simple, but it's something that most lower elo players get wrong believe it or not. There are several things to consider when item pathing. Knowing who's fed/who's a threat on the enemy team is important and you should usually be building against that. For your boots, you mainly want to go for ninja tabi, but if they have hard CC, merc treads is fine. (Or if you're playing a tank jungler like Sejuani, you want to build the juggernaut enchantment for tenacity, which then leaves the option to build either ninja tabi or mobility boots.)

Another common question is what jungle item should one be building. At the moment, I believe Rangers Trailblazer is the item choice to be building for most of the junglers. Stalkers Blade is the obvious alternative, but I would only recommend this item on a few junglers who has good sustain/good clear/doesn't necessarily have to rely on Rangers Trailblazer to stay even or ahead in the game. These junglers are primarily, but not limited to: Rek'sai, J4, Lee Sin. Skirmishers is okay on a few junglers that mainly rely on auto attacking for damage (Xin, Yi) DO NOT BUILD THE POACHERS KNIFE.

-4. Knowing when to gank and when not to.

This is more complicated of a subject to explain; it really falls down to experience of playing jungle and getting the sense of what's a good gank and what's not. I can, however, give a small list of good ganks and bad ganks.

Good Ganks:

• Enemy is low health/low mana.
• Enemy is overextended to ally tower with no wards .
• Enemy's Defensive summoner(s) are down (Flash, Heal) (NOTE: This DOES mean if you gank a lane and burn their flash, you should be looking to go for another gank in that lane later on before their summoner spell is back up, even if that means immediately going back to the lane after ganking and ganking it again.)
• Burning a summoner spell DOES mean that it was a successful gank!!
• If you're confident enough and it looks guaranteed, you can also go for tower dives with your ally laner when their lane is pushed up. ONLY do this on certain circumstances, such as enemy flash is down.
• When enemy least suspects a gank. (For example, no one expects to be ganked before 4 minutes. Use this knowledge to your advantages in some of your games and try to gank someone before then.)

Bad Ganks:

• Enemy's minion wave is piled up (2-3 waves)
• Ally's health/mana is too low. They won't follow up if you gank, so if you're going to do this then only do it if you can solo kill the enemy that you are ganking.
• Wasting time sitting in a brush waiting to gank a lane. Time is a VERY valuable tool for a jungler, so make sure you're using it wisely. Wasting time results in getting far behind the enemy team and becoming an easy target to kill.
• Ganking with half your health. This is a really common mistake that lower elo junglers do. You should almost NEVER gank when you're too chunked from clearing your jungle. You're really vulnerable to dying to the enemy laner especially if he/she has ignite if you do this.

-5. Know your jungle timers.

• Blue/Red Buff spawns at 1:55 and has a 5 minute respawn time. (Press Tab and you can see your own jungle timers in the top area)
• Scuttle vision lasts for 90 seconds. Do this when it's relevant to. Relevant times are when your team is setting up for dragon/dragon is going to spawn soon (45 seconds is around the good time to clear scuttle)
• Dragon spawns at 2:30 (I think?) And has a 6 minute respawn time. You are able to tell if the enemy has done dragon or not if you do not have vision onto it. If you press tab and look at the dragon icon, if part of the dragon icon is colored in, that means that they did the dragon. This means if that you do not have a timer on it, you want to add 6 minutes to the approximate time that they did it and inform your team about the timer in chat.
• Baron spawns at 20 minutes and has a 7 minute cooldown. You don't want to be doing this unless you have a fed ADC that can burst it down quick on your team, or if you have allies with percantage health damage that can also work well. Do not try to force baron unless your team is really far ahead or if you manage to win a teamfight with most of your team being almost full health, because the biggest throws happen there. Keep in mind that Baron CAN be a game winner with the buff that it gives to minions, so you want to make sure that you're grouped with your team or have someone who can splitpush and being able to 1v1 anyone split and push down towers.

As a small bonus, I'll mention a little tip about the camps, your smite, and what you should be smiting and why.

• Wraith camp (or razor beaks dunno what they are). Smiting this camp gives you a buff that will give you an oracle for a limited time when you walk nearby an enemy ward. Try to spot this ward and clear it if possible. Be aware of missing enemies on the map.
• Enemy wolf camp. If you're in the enemy jungle trying to counter jungle (which I DON'T recommend to do since the camp spawns take longer to spawn now), you usually want to counter jungler and smite the wolf camp. This will give you a little spirit that grants vision of the enemy blue side and alerts your team when an enemy walks near it. Very useful in circumstances to set up counter-ganks, invades, etc.
• Krugs/Gromp. You always want to be starting either one of these and smiting them right when they spawn. This will give you the ability from each of the respective camps and allows you to clear your jungle more effectively early on. Smiting Gromp later on is good to have for when looking to teamfight, since it gives you something extra in your kit (the enemy takes poison damage if they hit you with the gromp buff). Smiting Krugs is also good when you're going to take a tower, because the first hit will do bonus damage to the tower, but will consume the ability afterwards.
• Your smite. Be smart about your smite. It's on a 60 second cooldown when you use it and can be a punishing mistake when used at the wrong time. You'll need it for when dragon and baron is up and being contested, so make sure that you're not using your smite when dragon spawns in 50- seconds. For stalker blade users, try to avoid using your smite so you have it up for when you gank. It's the main point of having that smite, because otherwise it will put you behind if you're not using it to your advantage.

Thanks for reading, I know this was a bit long but I tried to help as much as I could to my knowledge. If you have any questions, concerns, or criticism on what I wrote feel free to reply and/or message me about it.