The Good, The Bad, The Plays:
Ok everyone. We’ve done a jungle video before, but this time we are going to take a step back and talk about jungle tactics involving a high tier jungler, Petrus. We are going to take this opportunity to talk about some basics of jungling including routes, knowing when to gank, map awareness, and the match up of Petrus vs. Freia. This may prove to be a long write up as we are going to try to cover a lot, so let’s get started.
First order of business is the loadout. With playing as a Petrus, we get a percent based damage from your Q and we have a high amount of base damage as well (at least in my opinion). Also, being that Petrus is a melee that will need to get into peoples’ faces in fights, I always try to make him a tanky bruiser. Enter the loadout. Much health and armor. Aside from lifesteal, these are the two most essential stats for a jungler. They provide damage reduction from camps and higher overall leading to the chance to gank more frequently and with higher success of not dying during the gank. While a passive probably would be good here, we simply take some stats in this game.
The second part of jungling, the match ups. Notice that while we are a tanky bruiser jungler, the enemy jungler is an assassin type jungler meant to pop enemy shapers. Taking that into consideration, we may not want to duel early on as Freia has high 1v1 duel potential. Matchups are crucial to understanding whether or not you can invade by yourself and fight 1v1 or not. Of course the shapers are only half the match up as there is a person behind the scenes controlling them. Even the best of shaper can lose in a 1v1 fight if not handled properly.
Let’s get into the game now. There are six buff camps and two money pig camps you want to control. You can’t just waltz into the enemy jungle and control their three buffs though. You can invade and take a buff and maybe hold four of the six buffs as well as a money pig but that can be dangerous as you are in enemy territory. Whenever these buffs and pigs are available, we want to get them so we can get the maximum amount of vim and experience going our way. If there is a gank available we should take that over a buff, but those camps are crucial, we can’t stress that enough.
Map awareness is the one of the greatest tools of the jungler. After clearing the first rotation of buffs, we notice that the enemy Desecrator is giving chase to some low teammates in the top lane. Instead of going to farm, we come in to engage in a fight and end up getting a kill for our King of Masks which is very beneficial as we get an assist with a bit of extra vim.
The final item to touch on is when to gank. During this game, there wasn’t much of a chance to gank for us as the enemy team warded pretty well or played defensively enough that it wasn’t worth sitting around for extended periods of time to wait to see if something would develop. Ideally, we don’t want to wait for longer than four to five seconds before we move on and forget trying to gank at that moment. Again though, we didn’t do that much this game as we wanted to farm up a bit.
So final thoughts on this game? It highlights jungling in a sense that we pretty much farmed. We got both money pig camps a couple times and which meant more vim for us, but overall it was pretty passive. Look for a future video where we will be playing a Freia (my main) and hopefully gank and invade a bit more.