Well, part of the problem here is that Morello can't even identify exactly what makes a top jungler.  Its not all about early ganking.  Junglers have to be good gankers eventually, and early ganking might help, but its not all that necessary.  After all, WW has high playrate and winrate (usually an indicator of a good champion), but he notoriously sucks at early ganking.

No, the key to being a good jungler, ESPECIALLY in competitive play, is to have a good combination of ganking at some point in the game and to be able to build offensive items well.  There are like one or two exceptions to this in solo (Rammus basically, who doesn't build offensive items), but the key is that the big time junglers like offensive items because defensive items have just been destroyed primarily by Morello.  Historical junglers have liked defensive items primarily, but that doesn't work well right now.

Now you are right that you can try and play the couple of junglers that actually can be dominant like assassin Rengar and Kha.  But while they give you the opportunity to dominate, they actually lose a lot of games.  They don't work in team comps unless your whole team plays at a really high level.  You are likely going to be playing an all squishy team comp if you play those junglers, which usually doesn't work at our skill level.  This is why those junglers don't have very high win rates despite being pretty strong.

Morello can talk about opening things up to more options all he wants, but because he doesn't recognize the primary problems - mobility creep murdering a lot of junglers, defensive item nerfs murdering a lot of junglers, etc - it doesn't matter.  People are still going to gravitate to the junglers who build most efficiently, which means mobility and damage right now.  Oh, I suppose that Riot could try and fix the problem by making the defensive jungle items incredibly OP compared to the rest, but I doubt we will see that.

The other big question is whether or not Riot has ever really done a good job accomplishing their jungle goals.  Well, lets look at them.

1) One goal they have had pretty much every season is to work on carry/farm junglers.  Other than about 1 month of silliness with FF, that has never happened, so thats a big fail.

I remember a classic post where Morello/Jatt basically said something along the lines of "well, we can't have a jungler just sit in the jungle for 20 minutes and emerge as strong as a solo laner!  After all, there is less risk in jungler".  At that point, everybody pointed out that no reasonable team would sacrifice the presence of a ganking jungler for champion that emerges at 20 minutes much weaker than a solo laner.  Morello/Jatt had no response to this.  This was 2+ years ago.

Well, it looks like they are trying to solve this by making farming jungle riskier (counterjungling!), which might allow them to include farming junglers for real.  But I honestly don't see this happening because counter jungling just requires too much of a burden on the players.  You have to take the right champion with the right build and you have to know what you are doing.  And your team usually has to help.  Yeah, it will work at Plat+.  But most players are in Bronze/Silver.  Do you really think that counterjunglers will keep farming junglers under proper control at Bronze V?  Hell no.  So, they will have to balance around that since thats where most people are.

2) Open up the jungle to more champions.  Well, despite there being a lot more champions in the game, I'm not really sure that the jungle is more diverse.  Its certainly far less diverse in competitive play.

Sure more champions "can" jungle.  I mean, you can choose jungle Nautilus.  But the pool of good junglers is as limited as ever because you have to choose a jungler who is good at ganking at some point and can (usually) make use of good offensive items and doesn't have a problem with mobility creep.  I suppose a lot of those problems aren't really a problem with the jungle itself, but larger issues that just happen to hurt junglers the most, but whatever.

So I have a real hard time seeing Riot successfully make a change to the jungle that actually stuck.  Thats why there are major changes to the jungle every single season - Morello admits that the jungle is messed up at the end of every...single...season.

Yeah, he's actually only a Silver level player. But when it's, you know, his job, and has access to hundreds of competitive-level games a year, i doubt he is balancing off of his own player experiences. He is almost certainly using a mixture of skill-based player aggregation and deep analysis of competitive play. 

And that's an extremely difficult problem. You yourself just said that what is good in competitive level play (Rengar and ) isn't always good in soloqueue. It's also important to note that many damage junglers (Wukong, Panthenon, Kha'zix) have all had dramatically high overall win rates at some point during their peak, so they aren't always "actuallly losing a lot of games".

Yes, that's true, but that's also what they are changing. They are reworking a bunch of the defensive items for next season. They are probably going to miss the mark for the first few months (again, League of Cleavers and League of Warmogs). i think the best way to look at it is compare it to midlane. In the past few months, there has been a lot of equally viable archetypes:

- assassins are coming back again. Espiecally safe assassins like Zed and Ahri. But they aren't overwhelming, either

- you have your utility mages, especially Orianna and previously Lulu.

- AD mids are still good, although not as big as they were before with Riven/Lee Sin/J4 mid. Yasuo and Talon were huge right before nerfs.

- ranged burst mages are still good. Syndra and Ziggs being the big two.

These guys all exist organically, and they all feel pretty balanced when you compare role-to-role. i believe that is what Riot is trying to accomplish this season rather than "make carry jungler viable". They did that.

I'm sure Morello didn't phrase his words perfectly as often happens during an AMA.  I'm not sure what he said is that true anymore but not so long ago at a skill level higher than all of ours?  I've watched a little Nightblue3 streaming here and there.  If he wants to kill you, you're dead.  Spam wards?  Still dead.  Play safe? Still dead.  Be winning your lane?  Still dead.  Hide under your tower?  Dead.  Nerf his champs?  He shows his viewers how to completely rule a game with other junglers.

At least Morello realizes he fucked up and how.  I don't have a direct quote, but I remember him saying something like "Yeah, we tried to make sure more champs could jungle but we only succeeded in making it so only a few champs should jungle."

Their plan is to have levers now so they don't have the endless nerf cycle on all the champs within the current dominant archetype of jungler.  Now if one type of jungler is dominant they can at least try and get that under control by nerfing the item and enchantment that type of jungler likes, instead of just having Lee, Elise, Kha, Ren, The New Way To Play Kha That's Even Better Than Before, Panth, Then Same Lee Whose Fans Thought He Was Nerfed To Oblivion, Wu, all just take turns being the soup de jour.

I see your point Karl but don't actually agree.  It's actually a bit unintuitive what works better and worse in low level games since you're relying on what can be horribly selfish and unskilled teammates.  And I honestly don't think Riot does much balancing around those games.  More often mid skilled players favorite champs who are perfectly balanced in Gold-Plat games suffer for the skills of Challenger players I think.  Somewhere in Bronze V there are a thousand voices crying out to BAN AMUMU!  And I don't think Riot gives a shit.

Well, Morello has had to apologize for the state of jungle after literally every season.  So I don't really give him credit for it after like the 4th time.  And the thing is that hes actually getting worse at doing these things.  He wants to increase diversity, and diversity becomes worse than ever.  He has an explicit goal of farming junglers, and its probably worse than ever at many levels.  At some point you have to just say that whoever is in charge of this at Riot is just not competent at balancing jungle.

Anyway, I'm not against the itemization changes.  The current jungle itemization is hardly good, so it will probably be an improvement.  I don't have real confidence that the supposed additional levers will help them with balance though.  I mean, Cassiopeia was redesigned with the explicit goal that her new kit would give them more levels to better balance her.  How's that going?  Same with other champs that got dumpstered worse than ever like Skarner.

But the problem is the early game nerfs to junglers that are incoming.  The old deal with jungle is that junglers don't get a lot of gold, but they get a lot of control over the early flow of the game.  That sounds like a fair trade.  But, if they "knee cap" their early game control, what is the point any more?  Oh, now junglers can screw each other over with counter jungling?  Yeah, its still a gold starved role that can't do anything other than screw over the other gold starved person on the other team.

But I don't think that Morello really gets this.  If you take away the one thing that junglers get, you have to give them something HUGE in return.  But I really doubt junglers are going to see big gold increases this season (junglers rarely do).  So junglers might very well just end up as gimped carries.  So why no just play a carry in lane?

What needs to happen if they actually want to fix things is they need to identify the real problems and actually address them.  More items are fine, because they do give more levers, but more levers don't mean anything if you haven't spotted the real problems.  For example, lets talk about diversity.  Why don't you have diversity:

The biggest problem right now for most junglers is defensive itemization.  You simply can't play a lot of junglers because building the items that they want is dumb. Those defensive items suck compared to the offensive items.  A damage dealer with Zhonya's will survive almost as long in a teamfight due to the active AND deal a lot of damage.  People ask me why I build damage on Amumu.  BECAUSE BUILDING TANK IS STUPID.  Its really bad because you just don't survive for long anyway - but toss+ult+Zhonya's is really strong.  I mean, Sejuani has become kind of popular in higher levels of play.  You know why?  Because people stopped building her tank and went AP assassin.

I haven't seen any major announcements that this is going to be fixed, and I don't see any way that its going to be fixed just by having a defensive jungle item.  If that defensive item is strong enough to try and make up the difference, everybody will just buy that item (like in League of Warmogs days), so it can't happen.

The second problem is mobility creep, which is just death to so many champions.  Immobile champions can work in other locations sometimes because they might have range +damage.  For example, Syndra has extreme range, utility, and damage.  So that makes up for her lack of mobility.  But junglers don't get those things typically, so they just have been screwed by mobility creep.  But Riot is just making mobility creep a million times worse by introducing champions with kite kits (this new adc), slow kits (Braum), or kite+slow kits (Gnar).  So not only is Riot not fixing this problem, but they are willfully making it worse because they want to release cool new champions that don't suck, but can't figure out what to do about mobility creep.

(Of course, professional play is a whole other can of worms with respect to diversity since they have very different requirements for successful junglers).

Anyway, these issues have to be fixed first.  You can't just give junglers more gold.  Otherwise, they will just use them to build more offensive items on champs that don't have problems with mobility.

Skarner was pretty OP for about 2 weeks after the rework, then they demolished his numbers again. But the rework was a success in that he's a lot more fun than he used to be, that is for sure, and his kit is enjoyable.

My understanding is that the new jungle items are significantly more slot efficient than the current versions. And laners can't buy them (unless laners start using Smite - which means the items are way OP). That should go a long way since gold-starved roles care a lot more about slot efficiency than gold efficiency.

The thing is, when gold is very consistent in the jungle the question actually becomes "why not just play a carry in the jungle?". We already saw that with Feral Flare on its original release. Gold in the jungle is much safer than gold in the lane. For a long time, the only reason to "leave" the jungle has been because the gold from permanently farming has been mediocre ever since Season 1. So you leave the jungle to get kills. The new stuff like the the Iron Buff, the River Crab buff and the Dragonslayer buff should give junglers more reason to leave their jungles, which can allow them to give junglers additional income while still farming (opportunity cost and all).

Junglers are much more free to offensively flash. Offensively flashing as a laner can put a huge target on your head if it doesn't work out. Hell, defensively flashing puts a target on your head for the next 4 minutes.

Junglers, in general, benefit from mobility much less than other champions for the first ~15 minutes of the game, because a lot of that is spent walking around in the jungle. MS buffs and wall jumps are much better than things like a Yasuo E in the long term.

Junglers that function as initiations (that don't have mobility on QWE)  have some sort of mobility/AoE initiation on their R. Even then, burning flash on initiators is done more often offensively than defensively. A jungler will much more often flash to "win" a teamfight, than flash to "not lose" a teamfight.

i would say that Lee Sin and Elise are the two junglers that have significant early game mobility. And they pay for it by falling off really hard. (Khazix's E is really short ranged early game and Jungle Kha focuses a lot on farming early game - i agree that Khazix is one of the end-game mobile junglers who doesn't really suffer for his mobility).

Um, Skarner is incredibly non fun to play.  Have you played him recently?  He might have been ok for a while, but right now he can't get to enemies well (mobility creep issues), his passive is pretty hard to be use well(mobility creep issues), and his itemization has been nerfed to hell repeatedly.  Its not fun to run at somebody at somebody, not make it because they are too mobile, and die pretty fast because your items are really inefficient.  But hey, you have one move that works every once in a long while (flash+ult).

Skarner is kind of fun against the rare team that is immobile, but you don't get those very often.

And why do junglers care about slot efficiency more than gold efficiency again?  Junglers usually can't come anywhere near to using all their slots (gold poor), and usually are counted on to do some combination of damage and initiation, which requires decent items.  So thats gold efficient items (which is why Riot designers make such a big deal out of creating gold efficient jungle items).

And yes, I agree that if there is too much gold in jungle, you just play the carry in the jungle.  Thats the whole point - there is the trade that you don't have so much gold in the jungle, so junglers get something in return - early game control.  Replacing that with "you can choose to be more of a dick to your opposing jungler if you want" doesn't seem like a good deal to me.  Its a massive nerf to the effect that the role has on the outcome of the game (which is already at historical lows since its all about ADC/mid right now).  I'm not buying the thing about an extra objective because they are also increasing camp spawn times.

Karl's got some good points.

#LeagueOfBigPlays.  "FUCK YEAH NOW WITH MORE PENTA PENTAKILL GAMES!  Spirit Visage stopping big plays?!  NERF IT!!!  People are hard to kill when they get ahead in lane and build Sunfire?!  NERF THE FUCK OUTTA THAT ONE TOO!  We forgot about Randuin's?!  NERF IT!  Why are hypercarry marksman taking over bot lane?  WHO THE FUCK KNOWS?!"  And so on and so forth.  I actually watched a Diamond Rene game to see how they're building him now that all his favorite tank items got nerfed.  In the game I watched it was Hydra into Brut into LW into... yeah.  I think Karl is right, they really have something against building tanky.

#LeagueOfMobility.  I'm pretty sure you're allowed to rebind another player with that new Marksman after laning phase end, since her spear is purchasable in the shop.  So get ready to throw your Yasuo at the enemy for some knockup fun!  Even if I'm wrong about the rebind... SUPPORT YASUO PENTAKILLS INCOMING!!! FUCK YEAH!

but...

Cassiopea is poopy right now, that's true but she sucked before the rework and people are up in arms about the direction they took her in.  With literally no one liking the 'feel' of the new Cass it's not really a matter of getting the power levels and numbers right.  Old Cass fans hate her and people like me who like (or used to) her style and were hoping to have a new mid to play also hate her, so unless she becomes OP no one is ever going to play her.  That's why they're taking it in a new direction which is going to take time and they're in no rush with the season coming to a close because it's not a good time to accidentally dump a must ban hypercarry into live.

#Skarner:

i mean we might have a difference of opinion but... Way back in Season 1, early Season 2 i played Skarner a ton (at least 100 games, nearly as much as Anivia). The only reason i stopped was because of a personal fight with a friend; not because of the nerfs. When the rework happened, i was pretty excited, and honestly it is a lot better when you're playing him. Before he was a one-button champion, with a long ramp-up. His newer kit has a lot more interaction with abilities and while he doesn't have the Philo > HoG > Sheen > Randuins build path that was so effective in S2, he has a lot more build diversity than other junglers, which is fun.

Perhaps "slot efficiency" isn't the best term for it, but when you are 1-2 full items behind you care about slots that are efficient right away, rather than being highly efficient 2-3 items later. Slots that are highly efficient right away are not always gold efficient (Brutalizer and SotEL fall far behind a 6 item ADC). Similarily, items that are gold efficient right away might not be super efficient when immediately completed (pure resistance items like Frozen Heart require a big health item like Warmogs).

My suspicion is that it feels like a local minimum because only 6 months ago, Jungle was at an extreme maximum (except, perhaps the days of the 3:30 double buff toplane level 4 v level 2 ganks in preseason 2, or the Black Cleaver days. But both of those events happened during the preseason). Again, it's not really so bad if you are playing the "top 3" jungle champs. Not everyone wants to that, and that's 100% okay, i'm not saying that you should only play Khazix, etc. But they are trying to reduce the "top 3" playstyle. Not everyone else's. It really sounds like they are trying to shift junglers into a "mid game" character, similar to, again, the 4 mage archetypes who all tend to peak at midgame anyway. But do it in very different ways.

i 100% agree that defensive items are overall underwhelming and they need to fix it, and i think that a lot of what you say about that issue is accurate and provides a lot of insight. Spirit Visage and Perseverance were some of my favorite things, just because it made team fights much longer and they felt more strategic because of it.

"i mean we might have a difference of opinion but... Way back in Season 1, early Season 2 i played Skarner a ton (at least 100 games, nearly as much as Anivia). The only reason i stopped was because of a personal fight with a friend; not because of the nerfs."

Out of everything that I just read (and it was quite a bit as you kids are chatty about s5), the only thing I really am super curious about is what sort of fight one has with a pal that gets you to swear off playing a champ. 

But the thing is that it really is that bad if you play top 3 junglers.  At least if you want to win.

If you look at high playrate/banrate champions, the top 3 are Kha, Lee, and Rengar.  2 of those 3 are at 45% winrate, which is strikingly low even for flavor of the month champions (Lee is more of flavor of the last 3 years, but you get the point).  Kha actually makes it up to 50% winrate!  With a lot of these champions you get to feel good because you dominate the ganking phase, but you don't actually get a good shot at winning the game because you give up too much else (usually in team comp and team fighting).

Now professional level teams can overcome the team phase deficiencies of these champions, which is why they still heavily use them.  But solo queue is not LCS.

Am I the only one that plays on PBE here from time to time?  Just curious.  From what I've played so far of the season 5 changes for jungle, I honestly can't tell how things are going to shake out.  Also, it seems like a waste to put a bunch of effort into figuring things out atm as things are still very likely to change.  Guessing they might be close to what's going to hit us in pre season, though.  Maybe I'll do some test runs tonight. 

note to me... make list of my impressions on what I've seen so far...

I've won 11 of 14(yeah, I play a lot...) games as Rammus.  I think more of the problem with jungle right now is that the top 3 aren't even that bright an idea to begin with and the meta isn't thinking things through as everyone picks popular, but not particularly effective, champs.

I don't play much, and when I do half my games are as support.  It's rare that I even jungle at all and I'm a dominant force.  I can guarantee one fed lane unless they're completely incompetent, and usually destroy two.  I see Fiddles that smoke lanes frequently, and the rare Sejuani usually means the team won.

The best junglers are high CC champs in my experience.  The most often picked junglers are, on the other hand, the ones that are best at racking up kills while their team loses.

Man - I really need to work some on not getting salty after some games.  We played a few last night and it was kind of obvious that we were going to have a bad time at champ select.  Doesn't make sense for me to get pissed when I kind of knew what I was in for.  A bit stupid, eh...

Also, playing with a new madcast candidate fellow.  Not sure if I'm going to get along with him.  He's playing on a lower level account - not sure if he's new - I think he is... but he talks like he knows what he's doing... but he doesn't.  hurm.

Almost done leveling my alt account.  Sitting on level 29 now - so just a bit more to grind out and then I think I'm going to just play ranked on it.

Side note - the whole point of my alt account has kind of been ruined.  Now, the main reason I'm playing on alt accounts is that I like to work on mechanics and champs I suck with against lower levels of competition.  I'm not talking idiot level competition.... I'd just not like to work on rumble top lane vs a diamond top laner.  Predictable things will happen.  I'd rather learn against someone that is likely a smidge better than me or even with me in skill level.  So, alt account bound.  I play maybe 10 games against weaker people and then the difficulty ramps up over time (eg what I want).

Well, rito made a change that seems to put smurf accts against other smurf accts.  This means that a game in team builder takes about 12 minutes just to find 5 people.... been like that since I hit level 25 or so.  So, now I'm up against somewhat more skilled people, which is fine, but with a substantial delay if I want to do team builder... which I do... I'm playing on this account to practice top lane with specific champs.  So, kind of makes the account blow.

It gets worse, though - even outside of teambuilder, I'm getting tossed up against diamond players... with my level 29 acct.  Kind of jacked up.  I'm obviously complaining about something few will care about or sympathize with, but it definitely seems like something has changed where the smurf accts are all tossed into that prisoner's island.  While its good to keep me from getting matched up with new players (I don't want that either), it just blows that I have to wait a MINIMUM of 12 minutes to get another going on team builder.  Maybe that will get nicer when the new map comes out.... but I really don't like waiting as long as challenger players have to get a game in... for an fing level 29 alt account game where I get to play the role I want...

I believe the 'Smurf Detection' has been active for a while and is one of the reasons my attempts to help my friends get out of Bronze V hit so many snags.  I believe crazy good KDA's will flag the system whether you win or lose, which was pretty frustrating.

Oh, and are you still playing Rumble?  You're on Reddit more than me so you've probably seen it, but I'll post just in case.  This guide/Reddit post helped me out with some things:

http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2kdnm4/freelo_only_999_wasnt_a_joke_results/

http://www.lolking.net/guides/313730