As first announced last month, Season 3 will be bringing along a series of changes, a revamp of the jungle included. Today, Riot's Statikk discusses what said revamp would entail.
Just like going into season two from season one, Riot's goal is to foster a greater variety of viable champions, both in the jungle and in lane. How is this done in season three?
Higher damage of jungle monsters - this is done to balance down the strength of early-game gankers that exited the jungle with enough health to be a considerable threat, pushing laners into selecting champions with innate escape mechanisms or indirectly leading into more passive playstyle.
Riot are hoping that with that spike in difficulty, high sustain junglers like Warwick and Fiddlesticks that are currently overlooked due to their limited to none early gank potential will get back into rotation. As mentioned, this should also make laners consider more champions as a viable option, now knowing that early game ganks will not be nearly as potent due to the lower health of the jungler.
Increasing jungle diversity - this change comes in two parts. Firstly, health and damage of the larger camp posters will be readjusted to dwarf the huge advantage that AoE junglers like Skarner, Shyvana, Mundo, Maokai, etc have over single-target junglers like Warwick and Gangplank.
Secondly, the camp difficulty (in terms of health and damage) and camp rewards (in terms of XP and gold) will scale over time in such way as to make junglers that rely heavily on farming for the late game more attractive.
Wraith's camp gets special attention - this camp will both have its gold rewards reduced and its big wraith repositioned to battle camp's easy accessibility by mid-laners and counter junglers.
Golem and wolves camps gold rewards increased - to reflect camps' harder accessibility. Golems will also move faster becoming harder to kite, a change that will mostly affect the ease with which level one blue bot lanes can clear them and get early advantage.
Jungle monsters attack nearest target rather than original attacker which is likely to affect how buff camps are pulled.
New items will be introduced to combat those changes and provide more build openings for junglers.
Source: League of Legends
