When you think of League of Legends junglers, Morgana, Darius, and Zed certainly aren’t three champions that come to mind. However, in a League patch 11.8 overhaul, the three champions — and a few others — could become the new meta junglers with huge buffs.
Riot has been experimenting with League’s jungle, and the champions that take up the role, for quite some time.
In Season 10, they worked to try and make the jungle more “appealing” by widening champion diversity. However, the changes ended up falling flat, or not making it to live servers.
Now in Season 11, they’re trying again to make it stick. Five champions are on Riot’s radar in League patch 11.8 to take them out of the lane and put them in the jungle: Darius, Diana, Mordekaiser, Morgana, and Zed.
The changes, which are currently live on the PBE, have buffed the champions’ damage to monsters significantly.
Darius, Diana, Mordekaiser, and Zed have had their passive damage caps to monsters practically removed, and bonus damage numbers shot up to as high as 500%.
Morgana has had the same changes applied to her W, upping the monster damage from 150% to 300%. This in turn also amps the healing from her Soul Siphon passive.
The changes have already divided players while being tested on League’s PBE. Players have reported jungle clears as fast as 2:55 — faster than most junglers on live servers right now — using the new off-meta junglers.
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Riot are keeping an eye on the numbers, but are looking at pushing these changes to live to test it out with a wider population.
“None of these numbers are permanent and are all still subject to tuning as this is decently early in the PBE cycle,” developer ‘Phlox’ said on Reddit.
“The goal of these changes is to broaden the jungle pool by giving champions that are more broadly popular in all elos (especially lower elos) the ability to exist as junglers,” added ‘GalaxySmash’.
“Expect these numbers to be tuned as necessary. We want these champions to be playable in the jungle, but won’t force them to be S tier.”
League of Legends patch 11.8 is penned in for April 14. Those aren’t the only changes to the jungle coming either, with the Rammus mini-rework also dropping in the next update.