Mid-season update: Big changes to the jungle

Even the jungle is getting some love in the upcoming mid-season update.

The news from the mid-season update has been coming out like crazy today.

We are getting an entirely new Dragon system and Rift Herald has been reworked to a game-changing buff, but that’s not where it ends for jungle changes.

Riot GMang – League’s Senior Game Analyst – posted on the League of Legends boards that Red and Blue buff will be changed during the mid-season update as well.

The burn from Red now applies a damage tick immediately on apply or reapply, but the damage-per-tick has been reduced to compensate. Also, the health regeneration from Red now scales greatly with champions (triples at level six and again at level 11) but turns off when in combat with champions or epic monsters.

The ability power per level from Blue has been replaced with +15 percent total ability power, and the buff’s mana regeneration is now based on the champions max mana doubled.

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The duration of both Blue and Red will also be changed. The buffs will still last for 120 seconds on the first clear, but after that, the duration is decreased to only 90 seconds.

GMang’s reasoning for these changes was, “Late-game, Red and Blue buff have been somewhat ignorable these days. We’re buffing and compressing their power in the mid-late game to make them more appreciable objectives to leverage or steal, especially in games that are in a standstill and need things to fight over and create power windows.”

The main standout from the buff changes is the one to Blue. It was already difficult for a mid-laner without Blue to go against a mid-laner who had the buff, but now that matchup becomes crippling for the person without it. This essentially forces all junglers to give Blue to their mid-laner (even though they already do, for the most part) or they will doom that lane by not doing so.

The health regeneration from Red sounds like it could be crazy, but it’s something we’ll have to actually see in action before coming to any conclusions.

Those changes are nice and all, but the biggest change to the buffs is that they will have global timers. Yes, that’s right. When Red, Blue, Dragon, Baron and Rift Herald have less than a minute to spawn, a timer will be revealed to both teams and an “about to spawn” icon will appear in the minimap.

Riot clearly wants more fights to happen, but is this the right way to make it happen? Having global timers on your team’s buffs seems…not right. This is going to make life much harder for junglers as their buffs will constantly be contested and the enemy team will be able to track their pathing better than ever before. Who needs wards and actual communication?

Finally, as far as jungle changes go, Devourer has been removed from the game completely. Devourer has been a very polarizing item since it was introduced to the game, and unfortunately, Riot was never able to balance it properly. To replace it, Riot has come up with Bloodrazor.

bloodrazor /

As you can see, Bloodrazor has the same amount of attack speed as Devourer, but it no longer has on-hit damage and has an entirely new passive. Riot seemed to do a good job with this one, because attack speed champions who are all about on-hit damage still need some love – and this gives them that. Bloodrazor’s passive is like a mini Blade of the Ruined King passive, and it seems like the two items would mesh very well. This item should be a lot healthier for the game than Devourer ever was.

We thought the mid-season was only going to be an exciting time for mages, but it’s actually going to be special for everyone – even junglers!

Visit our Patch Updates section to stay up-to-date on all the mid-season changes.

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