Lee Sin Nerf Needed to Calm the God-Tier Junglers

As you may have seen in the recent Patch Preview, our favorite Blind Monk; Lee Sin will be getting a nerf.  This has been a pattern with the God-Tier junglers as of late, even the pseudo God-Tier jungler asshole Shaco.  So what's this going to do to the new jungling meta? I'd like to say that it'll introduce some new top dogs in the jungle, but to be real it'll probably just mesh some together.

Skarner got nerfed, but it wasn't a nerf to how good he was.  It literally just made it so you couldn't spam your skills anymore.  Simply change play style a little bit and you almost don't notice the change. Skarner is still Tier 1.


Shaco got his boxes nerfed, making them last 60 seconds instead of 90.  From what I know you can no longer do the assy camp boxes at Red and then go gank a lane before they hit level 2.  However, Shaco is still a good jungler, but the counters to him still stand.  Since he can't just be a huge asshole anymore, he should be able to be outplayed.

Udyr got sort of an indirect nerf.  However in my mind I think people don't see him as much of a threat as Lee Sin and Skarner, which is a mistake in my opinion.  Not many champions have a similiar "I can kite 5 enemy champions for days" status that late-game Udyr does.  The removal of dodge and thus the removal of dodge on his Monkey Stance was a small nerf, but noticable.  It will make you come out of the jungle with less health, and give you less of an advantage against auto attack champions.  I still see Udyr as an easy Tier 1 jungler. 

So that leaves us with Lee Sin.  Similar to Udyr and Skarner where their damage may fall off late game, their ability to constantly disrupt the fight, tank incredible amounts of damage, and provide amazing ganks early game is what makes them tier 1 junglers.  I think Lee Sin's nerfs will make his jungling a little slower and his damage a little lower.  Because of this I don't think he'll really lose that much favor. Why?  Lee Sin is about his kit.  He has a great kit.  It is very hard to have a bad kit when you have 4+ usable good skills.  Lee Sin also has a huge skill gap that allows great players to really shine and poor players not to be carried by him being a good champion.  His kit allows you to be a good player, not necessarily his stats. Yes if he got his numbers nerfed to the ground he would suck, but that won't happen.

Who do I think will been seen more in the top junglers? I think Rammus and Nocturne will be getting a lot of love soon.  Rammus has been good for a long time and people just seem to forget that he has some of the easiest ganks.  Nocturne post-6 has a few combinations with champions that make his ganks almost unavoidable and basically impossible to ward.  More situational junglers that I think will succeed are Malphite (good counter to the 3 AD meta), Shyvanna (M5 M5 M5), and Trundle.

That's all for this post, I hope you guys learned some! If you have any questions or comments, please comment here or contact me through Facebook or Twitter! If you want to see some full gameplays be sure to check out my Youtube.  I'll be posting a lot of full game plays pretty soon, so be sure to subscribe! In an unrelated note though, click here to see an Anivia save my ass from a Rammus!

- Stay Classy and Keep Winning!

Nick "DoubleWinning" Gustafson
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