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League Patch 4.20 Shakes Up Jungle and Objectives
In an effort to improve diversity in League strategy, Riot has revamped the jungle and turrets.
A terrifying new Dragon
© Riot Games
Patch 4.20 is a monster, certainly one of the largest in League history. Addressing myriad areas including everything from skins to a new Baron buff, we earlier discussed two important elements of the update – champion and item changes.
Two other noticeable adjustments came to objectives and the jungle; Riot went as far as to state in the patch notes that junglers would benefit most from the update. Objectives have been tweaked to reflect Riot’s commitment to diversifying strategy – now each objective grants a truly unique advantage from other objectives.
Altering Objectives
The idea of creating truly incomparable items has made for incredibly interesting changes around the map.
Turrets are no longer interchangeable set pieces – now they grow noticeably more powerful the closer they are to a team’s nexus. This represents an effort from Riot to prevent both snowballing and overaggressive split pushing. In the current game, turrets offer less of a threat as a game progresses and in late game they often become superfluous.
These new turrets toss off that mantle with lasers and shields.
While outside turrets remain much the same, inner turrets now offer a shield for themselves and nearby allied champions. This shield stacks the longer you spend under a tower, but stops regenerating if the turret takes damage.
Inner turret shield
© Riot Games
If teams push past these inner turrets, they’ll face inhibitor and nexus turrets that are surprisingly even more improved. Now both types of turrets shoot laser beams that do increasing damage the longer they target an enemy. Along with increased damage, the laser also progressively reduces its target’s movement speed and damage. Put simply – the closer teams get to a nexus, the more punishing the turrets get.
Although the notes didn’t give specific numbers, Riot estimates the new turrets are anywhere from 1.5 to 2x stronger than their predecessors. The intention of this is to limit strong split pushers and lane bullies from rolling too early on opponents.
To adjust for much stronger turrets, inhibitors now take five minutes to respawn as opposed to the previous four.
Minions also received visual clarity upgrades, and to increase lane pressure, cannon minions will spawn earlier and more often – spawning every wave after the 35-minute mark.
While champion kills are often the most important objective in the game, Riot only tweaked kills that happen in the opening minutes of the game. Kills in the first two minutes of the game previously rewarded 75 percent of normal gold; now kills offer the same amount throughout the game. However, assists in the first few minutes of the game only offer 25 percent of total gold, eventually returning to their normal 50 percent after a game’s five-minute mark.
To prevent this from increasing snowballing, death times have been adjusted to prevent losing teams from falling farther behind.
Jungle Fever
Despite changes to towers, champions, and minions, all three objectives still only offer gold when killed; as Riot has committed to offering a plethora of objectives with unique payoffs, the jungle is where those all lie.
Starting with Dragon, the largest change is that the new and improved beast no longer grants team gold when slain. Instead, killing Dragon now offers a permanent stacking buff, up to five. Each stack offers a different buff, including increased ability power, movement speed, and damage to turrets. This encourages teams to seek out Dragon early and often in order to secure an advantage. At five stacks, all other Dragon bonuses are tripled and players get additional burn damage for three minutes.
A worth Baron Nashor
© Riot Games
As Dragon has become a more important objective, Baron Nashor has become the objective. Slaying the terrifying blue monster now grants a buff called Hand of Baron, which grants massive minion buffs, gives bonus AP/AD that scales with game time, and even reduces recall time by four seconds. The list of minion buffs is exhausting; overall, if a champ with Hand of Baron is nearby, all minions become unstoppable little killing machines.
Jungle changes didn’t stop with Baron and Dragon, however. Riot’s changes to the jungle are an effort to fix jungle issues without needed to adjust individual jungle champs. As such, a number of additions have made to mix up play in between lanes.
We discussed some of the new jungle monsters in our Summoner’s Rift preview, but 4.20 adds yet another with the Rift Scuttler. Traversing back and forth in the rivers in front of Baron and Dragon, the Scuttler actively avoids conflict and can soak up a decent amount of damage. Slaying this shy crab grants vision for a time in the river. The Scuttler will take an investment in time to kill, and presents one of countless new tactical decisions in the jungle.
Each jungle camp from blue buff to wolves now offers a unique advantage when slain, from vision to stun abilities. Riot stated that there are now far more decisions to be made in jungle than can be made in a single game.
These decisions expand to one of the main aspects of jungling – the summoner’s spell Smite.
The innocent Scuttler
© League of Legends
Although the main jungling item—Hunter’s Machete—remains the same, it now builds into four different items that all augment Smite in a unique way. These include an area-of-effect ability, bonus for Smiting in an enemy jungle, and even the ability to use Smite on enemy champions.
On the whole, jungling is more difficult, and small camps are harder to kill and take twice as long to re-spawn. Once nice adjustment is that for both red and blue buffs, the smaller creeps offer more gold and experience so junglers aren’t punished for sharing their buffs with teammates.
Due to the sheer size of the Patch 4.20 notes, there are countless details we weren’t able to cover here. For all of the juicy details, the full patch notes can be found here; the pre-season micro site is also a wealth of information.
Overall, League of Legends looks to be an entirely different game entering Season 5. A commitment to diversified strategy has resulted in what looks to be some of the most dynamic and interesting changes Riot has ever made.
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